Intel has quietly launched its first 14nm Braswell cores this week. These new 14nm chips are the successor to Intel’s 22nm Bay Trail-D (meaning the Celeron / Pentium flavor of Bay Trail) and will target ultra-mobile systems and low-end desktop PCs. Just as Broadwell is a die-shrink of Haswell, Braswell is Bay Trail’s die shrink — which means the 14nm “Airmont” CPU core inside the SoC isn’t expected to offer dramatically new features or other capabilities compared with its predecessor. Increased efficiency, lower TDPs, and better thermals are the order of the day. Intel’s Cherry Trail, which will debut later this year, will offer the same silicon in a tablet power envelope.
According to CPU-World, the new chips will ship in 2-4 core configurations. The big change to Braswell is the inclusion of Generation 8 graphics support. Its Bay Trail predecessor’s GPU technology was derived from Ivy Bridge at a time when Haswell was already shipping. This means that Braswell skipped the Haswell graphics generation altogether — Intel has effectively standardized its graphics capabilities between its Atom and Core product families.
The image above is for a full implementation of Generation 8 graphics, like what the Core M family carries. We know that one difference between Braswell and the Core family is that Braswell has a maximum of 16 EUs — not 24. It’s logical to assume that the overall implementation is smaller and less powerful, possibly with less cache resources compared with its bigger cousin. The gain over older, Bay Trail-based Atoms, however, should still be significant.
So how does this compare against Intel’s current line-up? Let’s use the Bay Trail-based Celeron N2940 as a point of comparison. That chip is a quad-core CPU with a base clock at 1.83GHz with a burst frequency of 2.25GHz, support for DDR3L-1333, Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail had 4 Ivy Bridge-class EUs), and a maximum graphics clock speed of 854MHz. TDP is 7.5W.
The new Braswell-based N3150 is a touch slower on the CPU side, at 1.6GHz / 2.08GHz, but offers faster RAM, significantly improved graphics hardware (ameliorated somewhat by lower base and turbo clocks on the GPU side) and a 6W TDP. That’s a 20% reduction on Bay Trail’s previous — we picked chips at the top of Intel’s TDP range because the high-end cores are the most likely to hit those figures. 1.5W may not sound like much, but in a 30Whr battery that’s the difference between four and five hours of runtime.
Right now, Braswell looks like a credible Bay Trail follow-up that maintains the same sort of power-consumption progression in budget markets that Core M and the mobile Core i5/i7 processors offer to higher-end customers. The consumer laptop market is generally split into three categories: Low-cost thin-and-light systems (the successors to original netbooks, like the Asus T100 Bay Trail-based TransformerBook); inexpensive full-sized laptops that weigh 4-5 pounds with lower resolution screens, but a fair amount of processing power; and high-end ultrabooks with mediocre CPU performance, but high-resolution displays and a target weight of 2-3.5 pounds. Braswell will anchor this first segment, mobile Broadwell hits the seconds, and the already-launched Core M (alongside higher-end mobile Broadwell cores) will take care of the third.
Intel has told us that it expects Braswell will be available in systems by the back-to-school time this year, which means netbooks and notebooks in that time frame should get a nice battery-life bump.
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