So Apple couldn't wait two weeks to update their 15" Macbook Pro? Intel having delays in quantity shipments or/and the performance delta to Haswell is negligible?
Apple got big discounts on old intel chips just like they got huge discounts on very old AMD chips, the profit margin should be much better now and most of the userbase don't care about these things, Apple shareholders will be happy too. The so called "enthusiasts" are in minority and can do their own due diligence before purchasing the tools for their usage.
First, Broadwell is short lived as skylake is coming, there is no point in waiting for the more power hungry as the difference is tiny. The difference would be very small and most people won't notice the difference at all. They gain more profit by selling with larger margin and everybody is happy.
Heck, I won't even be surprised if somehow Apple skip Skylake altogether or go with Skylake when Cannonlake is announced.
I wouldn't hold my breath for skylake, I imagine the CPU's will be slower but they will save more power, as has been happening for the past 2 generations, except for the iGPU.
Has been their sourcing strategy for ages. This is how they can rake in record profits due to high margins at the expense of non premium parts put in a so-called premium machine. Lies and half truths sells all the time in this world as most users are ignorant about what they got!. Very few are of the anandtech readership types out there unfortunately.
How do you explain them being the only manufacturer with premium Haswell-chips with the most powerful Iris graphics in their laptops? Everyone else was using cut-down gpu's.
Doesn't fit at all with the "sourcing strategy" that you are implying.
These are 47W chips: too power hungry for the Apple's Retina line up.
I'm not sure we'll be seeing 25W and 35W chips. Now would be the appropriate time to launch them, even if you have to delay availability by a month. Since we haven't heard much, I suspect that Intel is going all in with Sky Lake.
Claims about how Apple is only interested in screwing their customers are not helpful in understanding this situation. Something important has been signaled by this behavior; only problem is we don't know what yet.
Is it a pricing issue? Perhaps. But Ark lists i7-4770HQ at $434. Obviously no sane person understands a damn thing about Intel pricing, especially when you start bringing in volume discounts. BUT this pricing does not seem to indicate that Intel is trying to dump Haswell inventory to make way for Broadwell.
So next possibility. Broadwell actually offers nothing of value over Haswell at these power levels --- no extra hour of battery life, no higher quality graphics. That also seems a stretch. The performance is about the usual 2 or 3% faster, but there SHOULD be noticeable battery life improvements, working TSX should be worth something, and the GPU improvements are real.
So why would Apple not wait for a slightly superior chip which is apparently at the same price? First possibility is that announcement is not availability. Intel has been playing this dance of the seven veils crap since Broadwell-M was announced nine months ago --- claim that the thing is shipping (so that their investor statements about ship dates weren't lies) but ship such tiny volumes that it's utterly irrelevant to any serious manufacturer. That is MY guess as to what's going on. Intel STILL has fab issues (either with 14nm or with Broadwell) and STILL won't 'fess up.
Second possibility is that they didn't tell Apple these were coming until too late for Apple's plans. My guess is that didn't happen because it would be a cock-up of monumental proportions. Apple is not a customer that will forgive something like that lightly.
Third possibility is that Apple is quietly signaling that they no longer want to be on the x86 upgrade train, with its endless delays, 3% peak single-threaded performance increase each year, and Intel's utterly insane market segmentation attempts with all that means for constantly changing ISA and feature set. Which means they're getting close to their desktop CPU replacement. I know we all want that to be true; but if I had to bet, my bet would be on Broadwell 4-core shipping late in volume (ie on-going Intel screwup) NOT on Apple's x86 replacement shipping next year.
maybe you know more than me, but i have the feeling your phantasizing about "apple's x86 replacement" isn't any more sound than other people claiming apple only wants to screw its customers.
and regarding intel ARK: as i see it the listed prices are more like MSRP (for patches of 1000 units), i doubt apple will pay the same price for an EOL chip now as it payed for them when they were new. i don't think ARK pricing changes to reflect that.
I'd say it was actual ship date. Apple announced 15" update and was available next day, Broadwell chips like these will take a few weeks to come out. 13" MBP shipped sooner since those chips have been shipping in laptops since January. rMB was using a new chip and took a month to be released.
There's quite a bit of GPU benefit to the 6200 over the 5200, so I don't see why they'd willingly skip it. My guess is they didn't want a super stale product that was over a year old and didn't want to wait for Intel's Broadwell-H ramp up.
However Apple often gets its chips earlier than other companies, in a few cases they were even shipped in new products before being publicly announced. I'm very sure if they had been available in time for the latest Apple upgrade *and* were a fit Apple would have used them. Maybe there're technical reasons not to integrate them or they wanted to have a very minor incremental update compatible with current processes because they didn't want to have larger assembly changes before the next large upgrade.
I think Apple is pretty good at getting value-for-money out of their hardware suppliers. That seems to be the reason why they are buying outmoded and stale CPU's at bargain prices and manufacturing their own ARM64 A7, A8, and A9 CPU's for mobile (because Intel and Qualcomm are resting on their laurels, that's why.)
I agree with a lot of the other ideas listed here (pricing, margins, availability, timing, etc), but have an additional comment to add:
There's a decent chance that the i7-5950HQ might underperform the existing top of the line i7-4980HQ due to the latter having higher single-core and 4-core turbo clockspeeds. The 4980HQ has a 3.8GHz 4-core turbo, whereas the 5950HQ has a 3.7GHz single-core turbo.
Even with IPC gains I wouldn't expect the top Broadwell SKU to outperform the top Haswell SKU unless the former has improved thermal characteristics under load.
could someone tell me what those "pins"/contacts at the top of the package are meant for? specifically check this image of haswell based cyrstall wall: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/6993/DSC_0343.jpg that has way too many such contacts.
They are indeed. If you have the need for it, you can buy a devkit (I found the subsite with them, and various motherboard power delivery testing devices) that plugs onto it and allows much more advanced instrumentation. Thankfully, unless you're doing very serious OS or driver work, you shouldn't need that level of access ever.
You pair it with one of these: https://designintools.intel.com/product_p/itptopsi... (CPU pads to weird connector adapter). Not just OEMs/ODMs either: Some kernel developers need it - the guys working on core bringup/init/memory management code by and large.
I highly doubt there are any. These interfaces are similar to what you'd use JTAG on an embedded SoC for: getting access to each cycle of the processor and tracing that (and all the related memory and cache access), instruction by instruction. Also stopping the CPU, and stepping, line by line through the assembly. Very useful when you have a bug in your kernel, debuggers don't work (because you've got a bug in the kernel) and it doesn't show up in the emulator.
Oh, and these interfaces can only be access physically, which is useless for the NSA, who want remote, invisible access. Also, If you have physical access, you don't really need a backdoor in the CPU to begin with.
When it comes to laptops BGA is the norm. There are fewer and fewer chassis that can house a socket due to the added height. So as long as a part is for laptops I don's really see a good upgrade opportunity.
ok.. no socketed mobile variants.. so i'll have fewer options when buying a new mainstream gaming laptop. unfortunately for quite a while gpu are soldered (not mxm) in mainstream gaming laptops
in clevo mainstream gaming "barebones", for example, i can choose hi-end gpu and low-end cpu: there are 3 variants of mb (igpu, low-gpu, mid-gpu) and socketed cpu. in apple custom mbp (in fact it's mainstream gaming nb in alu case) i can choose hi-end gpu with hi-end cpu only
Given that Apple usually gets first dibs on Intel's chips, why didn't they get Broadwell into their 15 inch MBP? This would have been a simply drop-in!
lololol more soldered BGA crap, mobile section is DONE. when MSI decided to have their 18" laptop giant go with a soldered CPU is when it doesn't fit top end category. time to go for clevo that went with 5775c in their laptop.
So the 5850 is the same price as the 5750, but has higher base, turbo, and GPU clocks at the same TDP. Why is the 5750 a thing then? The only difference I can see is that it has cTDP down (37W) which the 5850 isn't listed as supporting...
Nice little upgrade, though it continues to be incredibly lame they don't offer a part that dumps the GPU and adds more cores. At this point there's zero reason they couldn't do a 6-core part...probably even charge more for it even though it wouldn't cost more to produce.
Yeah, some of these have better GPUs than the previous ones, but who cares? It's getting to the point where full quad core, 47 watt parts are only used in high end notebooks, and for those you want a real GPU, not Intel graphics, so the Intel GPU is either wasting space, or worse, being used for Optimus (which doesn't work...try actually running a wide variety of programs for a length of time on it, not just launching a couple of games and going "hey, it works!")
Good point, if they can do a 2-CPU / 4-core i5 processor for the macbook air @15W per core, they certainly could make a 6-CPU / 12-core i9 processor for the macbook air^2 @ 45W.
Sometimes the L4 cache is broken and also the eDRAM for the Iris Pro 6200. We call those chips "i7-5700HQ" and disable half the EU's as punishment. Sometimes one or two CPU's is broken by a crappy manufacturing run. We reconfigure those chips to give each CPU 2MB of the L2 cache and call those chips "i5-5350HQ". 'Nuff said!
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Taneli - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
So Apple couldn't wait two weeks to update their 15" Macbook Pro? Intel having delays in quantity shipments or/and the performance delta to Haswell is negligible?BMNify - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Apple got big discounts on old intel chips just like they got huge discounts on very old AMD chips, the profit margin should be much better now and most of the userbase don't care about these things, Apple shareholders will be happy too. The so called "enthusiasts" are in minority and can do their own due diligence before purchasing the tools for their usage.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Mmmm, I was wondering why they did that. That makes sense.WorldWithoutMadness - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
First, Broadwell is short lived as skylake is coming, there is no point in waiting for the more power hungry as the difference is tiny. The difference would be very small and most people won't notice the difference at all. They gain more profit by selling with larger margin and everybody is happy.Heck, I won't even be surprised if somehow Apple skip Skylake altogether or go with Skylake when Cannonlake is announced.
systemBuilder - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
I wouldn't hold my breath for skylake, I imagine the CPU's will be slower but they will save more power, as has been happening for the past 2 generations, except for the iGPU.fteoath64 - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Has been their sourcing strategy for ages. This is how they can rake in record profits due to high margins at the expense of non premium parts put in a so-called premium machine. Lies and half truths sells all the time in this world as most users are ignorant about what they got!. Very few are of the anandtech readership types out there unfortunately.zepi - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
How do you explain them being the only manufacturer with premium Haswell-chips with the most powerful Iris graphics in their laptops? Everyone else was using cut-down gpu's.Doesn't fit at all with the "sourcing strategy" that you are implying.
nils_ - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Yeah there was a time when they even got the newest Xeon CPUs before they went out in general circulation.Kevin G - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
These are 47W chips: too power hungry for the Apple's Retina line up.I'm not sure we'll be seeing 25W and 35W chips. Now would be the appropriate time to launch them, even if you have to delay availability by a month. Since we haven't heard much, I suspect that Intel is going all in with Sky Lake.
dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
~47W TDP is quite common for the 15" Macbook Pro.name99 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Claims about how Apple is only interested in screwing their customers are not helpful in understanding this situation. Something important has been signaled by this behavior; only problem is we don't know what yet.Is it a pricing issue? Perhaps. But Ark lists i7-4770HQ at $434. Obviously no sane person understands a damn thing about Intel pricing, especially when you start bringing in volume discounts. BUT this pricing does not seem to indicate that Intel is trying to dump Haswell inventory to make way for Broadwell.
So next possibility. Broadwell actually offers nothing of value over Haswell at these power levels --- no extra hour of battery life, no higher quality graphics. That also seems a stretch. The performance is about the usual 2 or 3% faster, but there SHOULD be noticeable battery life improvements, working TSX should be worth something, and the GPU improvements are real.
So why would Apple not wait for a slightly superior chip which is apparently at the same price?
First possibility is that announcement is not availability. Intel has been playing this dance of the seven veils crap since Broadwell-M was announced nine months ago --- claim that the thing is shipping (so that their investor statements about ship dates weren't lies) but ship such tiny volumes that it's utterly irrelevant to any serious manufacturer. That is MY guess as to what's going on. Intel STILL has fab issues (either with 14nm or with Broadwell) and STILL won't 'fess up.
Second possibility is that they didn't tell Apple these were coming until too late for Apple's plans. My guess is that didn't happen because it would be a cock-up of monumental proportions. Apple is not a customer that will forgive something like that lightly.
Third possibility is that Apple is quietly signaling that they no longer want to be on the x86 upgrade train, with its endless delays, 3% peak single-threaded performance increase each year, and Intel's utterly insane market segmentation attempts with all that means for constantly changing ISA and feature set. Which means they're getting close to their desktop CPU replacement.
I know we all want that to be true; but if I had to bet, my bet would be on Broadwell 4-core shipping late in volume (ie on-going Intel screwup) NOT on Apple's x86 replacement shipping next year.
fokka - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
maybe you know more than me, but i have the feeling your phantasizing about "apple's x86 replacement" isn't any more sound than other people claiming apple only wants to screw its customers.and regarding intel ARK: as i see it the listed prices are more like MSRP (for patches of 1000 units), i doubt apple will pay the same price for an EOL chip now as it payed for them when they were new. i don't think ARK pricing changes to reflect that.
jeffkibuule - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I'd say it was actual ship date. Apple announced 15" update and was available next day, Broadwell chips like these will take a few weeks to come out. 13" MBP shipped sooner since those chips have been shipping in laptops since January. rMB was using a new chip and took a month to be released.There's quite a bit of GPU benefit to the 6200 over the 5200, so I don't see why they'd willingly skip it. My guess is they didn't want a super stale product that was over a year old and didn't want to wait for Intel's Broadwell-H ramp up.
Daniel Egger - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
However Apple often gets its chips earlier than other companies, in a few cases they were even shipped in new products before being publicly announced. I'm very sure if they had been available in time for the latest Apple upgrade *and* were a fit Apple would have used them. Maybe there're technical reasons not to integrate them or they wanted to have a very minor incremental update compatible with current processes because they didn't want to have larger assembly changes before the next large upgrade.systemBuilder - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
I think Apple is pretty good at getting value-for-money out of their hardware suppliers. That seems to be the reason why they are buying outmoded and stale CPU's at bargain prices and manufacturing their own ARM64 A7, A8, and A9 CPU's for mobile (because Intel and Qualcomm are resting on their laurels, that's why.)MrCommunistGen - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
I agree with a lot of the other ideas listed here (pricing, margins, availability, timing, etc), but have an additional comment to add:There's a decent chance that the i7-5950HQ might underperform the existing top of the line i7-4980HQ due to the latter having higher single-core and 4-core turbo clockspeeds. The 4980HQ has a 3.8GHz 4-core turbo, whereas the 5950HQ has a 3.7GHz single-core turbo.
Even with IPC gains I wouldn't expect the top Broadwell SKU to outperform the top Haswell SKU unless the former has improved thermal characteristics under load.
XZerg - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
could someone tell me what those "pins"/contacts at the top of the package are meant for? specifically check this image of haswell based cyrstall wall: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/6993/DSC_0343.jpg that has way too many such contacts.willis936 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I'll take a WAG and say they're for diagnostics/testing/QC and testing after the chip has been integrated before the laptop is sent out.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
They are indeed. If you have the need for it, you can buy a devkit (I found the subsite with them, and various motherboard power delivery testing devices) that plugs onto it and allows much more advanced instrumentation. Thankfully, unless you're doing very serious OS or driver work, you shouldn't need that level of access ever.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I'm talking about the round contacts, not the square ones. Square ones are for the tiny SMT components.chubbypanda - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Intel ITP (see https://designintools.intel.com/product_p/itpxdp3b... ), usually used by tier 1 OEM/ODM only.ZeDestructor - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
You pair it with one of these: https://designintools.intel.com/product_p/itptopsi... (CPU pads to weird connector adapter). Not just OEMs/ODMs either: Some kernel developers need it - the guys working on core bringup/init/memory management code by and large.MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
... not to forget access to the NSA backdoors ;)ZeDestructor - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
I highly doubt there are any. These interfaces are similar to what you'd use JTAG on an embedded SoC for: getting access to each cycle of the processor and tracing that (and all the related memory and cache access), instruction by instruction. Also stopping the CPU, and stepping, line by line through the assembly. Very useful when you have a bug in your kernel, debuggers don't work (because you've got a bug in the kernel) and it doesn't show up in the emulator.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Oh, and these interfaces can only be access physically, which is useless for the NSA, who want remote, invisible access. Also, If you have physical access, you don't really need a backdoor in the CPU to begin with.En1gma - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
ppfffff... no socket variants..ExarKun333 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Wrong. Read the other review...close - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
When it comes to laptops BGA is the norm. There are fewer and fewer chassis that can house a socket due to the added height. So as long as a part is for laptops I don's really see a good upgrade opportunity.En1gma - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
ok..no socketed mobile variants.. so i'll have fewer options when buying a new mainstream gaming laptop. unfortunately for quite a while gpu are soldered (not mxm) in mainstream gaming laptops
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I think we're past the point where it makes sense to upgrade a laptop cpu. At least there are socketed desktop options.En1gma - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
in clevo mainstream gaming "barebones", for example, i can choose hi-end gpu and low-end cpu: there are 3 variants of mb (igpu, low-gpu, mid-gpu) and socketed cpu.in apple custom mbp (in fact it's mainstream gaming nb in alu case) i can choose hi-end gpu with hi-end cpu only
r3loaded - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Given that Apple usually gets first dibs on Intel's chips, why didn't they get Broadwell into their 15 inch MBP? This would have been a simply drop-in!jeffkibuule - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
You assume Intel would have enough stock to fulfill all of Apple's likely orders on day one.TallestJon96 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
It seems to me that someone should make a laptop that supports desktop i3s, as it is essentially a mobile i5 for much less. Am I missing something?unityole - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
lololol more soldered BGA crap, mobile section is DONE. when MSI decided to have their 18" laptop giant go with a soldered CPU is when it doesn't fit top end category. time to go for clevo that went with 5775c in their laptop.neo_1221 - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
So the 5850 is the same price as the 5750, but has higher base, turbo, and GPU clocks at the same TDP. Why is the 5750 a thing then? The only difference I can see is that it has cTDP down (37W) which the 5850 isn't listed as supporting...Wolfpup - Thursday, June 11, 2015 - link
Nice little upgrade, though it continues to be incredibly lame they don't offer a part that dumps the GPU and adds more cores. At this point there's zero reason they couldn't do a 6-core part...probably even charge more for it even though it wouldn't cost more to produce.Yeah, some of these have better GPUs than the previous ones, but who cares? It's getting to the point where full quad core, 47 watt parts are only used in high end notebooks, and for those you want a real GPU, not Intel graphics, so the Intel GPU is either wasting space, or worse, being used for Optimus (which doesn't work...try actually running a wide variety of programs for a length of time on it, not just launching a couple of games and going "hey, it works!")
systemBuilder - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
Good point, if they can do a 2-CPU / 4-core i5 processor for the macbook air @15W per core, they certainly could make a 6-CPU / 12-core i9 processor for the macbook air^2 @ 45W.systemBuilder - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
Sometimes the L4 cache is broken and also the eDRAM for the Iris Pro 6200. We call those chips "i7-5700HQ" and disable half the EU's as punishment. Sometimes one or two CPU's is broken by a crappy manufacturing run. We reconfigure those chips to give each CPU 2MB of the L2 cache and call those chips "i5-5350HQ". 'Nuff said!