Intel promises longer battery life with Broadwell CPUs for laptops

The next phase of Intel's Broadwell release is about to kick off, with the company today announcing the availability of the 5th Generation Core Processor Family for mobile products. The new 15W and 28W parts slot into Intel's 2015 line-up above the already available 4.5W Core M parts, offering better performance with respectable efficiency figures.

All in all, Intel has launched 14 new mobile processors into the wild, some of which can be found in notebooks announced at CES 2015. Ten SKUs are 15W parts (four Core i7s, four Core i5s and two Core i3s), and another four are 28W (one i7, two i5s and one i3). An additional three 15W SKUs have been released into Intel's Pentium and Celeron lines for low-cost options.

Intel's main claims for Broadwell at these TDPs are better performance and better battery life, in a 37% smaller die with 35% more transistors. New 5th Gen Core CPUs are built on a 14nm process node, and contain up to 1.9 billion transistors on some of the higher-performance parts.

Specifically, Intel boasts up to 50% faster video conversion and up to 22% better 3D graphics performance going from a Haswell-based Core i7-4600U to the Broadwell Core i7-5600U. Both of these chips are rated as having a 15W TDP, but Intel claims the 5600U will deliver up to 1.5 hours more battery life.

In general productivity tasks, Intel expects 4% better performance. Although the company didn't specifically state this, it's reasonable to expect this refers to a modest 4% increase in single-threaded performance at similar clock speeds. Without a significant change in architecture - Broadwell is simply a 14nm 'tick' (or die shrink) of the Haswell microarchitecture - we're typically seeing around 5% better performance each generation.

One of the main new features of the 5th Gen Core processors is a new selection of graphics cores: Intel HD Graphics 6000 in 15W Core ix-5x50 parts, HD Graphics 5500 in the remaining 15W products, and Iris Graphics 6100 in all 28W parts.

These new GPUs support the latest technologies, including DirectX 12 and OpenCL 2.0, and support display outputs up to 4K Ultra HD. The also enable a bunch of Intel-specific technologies such as Quick Sync video and Clear Video HD, and come with native support for VP8, VP9 and HEVC decoding.

On top of this, all Broadwell Core processors support Intel RealSense, WiDi (wireless display), and Wireless Gigabit Docking.

According to Intel, the main target audience for Broadwell chips are those upgrading from a laptop several generations old. With their new power-efficient CPUs, Intel boasts impressive figures such as 2.5x better performance, 2x longer battery life, and 12x better graphics than a 4- or 5-year-old system powered by a Nehalem-era Core i5-520UM.

Products using Intel's 15W and 28W Broadwell processors will be available starting this month. For those eagerly awaiting >45W performance mobile and desktop parts, Intel says these will be released mid 2015.

The full complement of U-series Broadwell mobile parts can be found below.