Intel has unveiled its latest generation of processors, codenamed Broadwell, which offer better graphics and extended battery life compared to the previous Haswell generation.
Today’s unveiling came without any major surprises, as everyone expected the chip maker to unveil this fifth-generation of its Core processors. Broadwell has been a long-time in the making, and has suffered a number of delays thanks to the new 14nm printing process.
Intel unveiled 14 different models and configurations with the new chips starting from the low-end mobile processors and going to the high-end i7 models. However all of these models have one thing in common: they’re all dual-core versions, with quad-core flavors only expected later in the year.
Also not very encouraging is the fact that Broadwell only brings very modest improvements in terms of performance – barely a few percent compared to Haswell – and battery life which isn’t improved by more than an hour and half in the best case scenario.
However, Broadwell does bring significant improvements in the graphics department with the new generation of chips boasting 22% better performance in 3D-graphics tasks.
What this translates to is better games and graphics on mobile devices with the launch of the Cherry Trail Atom processors – a second announcement from the company. The new chips have the same basic architecture as Broadwell Core chips, which means tablets and other devices using the latest chips will fare much better than the previous generation.
The first Broadwell chips have already started to ship in new laptops and devices, while the Cherry Trail Atoms are expected to show up in the first half of the year.