In what may be a sign that Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is set to move on from the Broadwell platform and focus on Skylake, it is being reported that the chip vendor will launch just two Broadwell SKUs for desktop, with the parts set to be announced at this year’s Computex.

The processors will be the Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C, and the 65W TDP offerings will be fully compatible with current Z97 motherboards following a BIOS update. The “C’ in the nomenclature is to denote the fact that the processors are unlocked, with Intel said to be moving away from the “K” naming convention.

The Core i7-5775C will feature a base clock of 3.3GHz along with a turbo clock of 3.7GHz. With four cores, eight threads and 6MB cache along with Iris Pro Graphics 6200, the i7-5775C will be the higher-end offering in this series.

The Core i5-5675C, on the other hand, will feature a slightly lower clock speed of 3.1GHz, with a turbo frequency of 3.6GHz. The CPU has 4MB cache and will also feature Iris Pro Graphics 6200. The LGA1150 Broadwell offerings are essentially a 14nm shrink of the Haswell die, and unlike previous years, Intel will not be offering a full gamut of CPUs across pricing tiers.

Instead, the vendor will focus its efforts on the Skylake architecture, the tock in Intel’s tick-tock release cadence cycle. Skylake will also be fabricated on a 14nm process, but will usher in significant CPU and GPU improvements along with lesser power consumption. To expedite the launch of Skylake, Intel is rumored to move up its annual Intel Developers Forum to mid-August, where it is officially set to unveil the new CPUs.

Skylake for the desktop will be offered as fully unlocked versions with TDPs of 65W and 95W, with a 35W SKU also planned for low-power devices. The chip vendor is set to begin producing the hardware in June or July, with retail availability set to commence from October.

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A day before Intel’s Developer Forum kicked off in San Francisco, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) officially unveiled the Xeon E5-2600 v3 known previously by its code name of Grantley.

On stage, Intel’s Diane Bryant, the company’s general manager of its Data Center Group, said that the “big data” economy was driving demand for a new series of Xeon Chips.

“The digital services economy imposes new requirements on the data center, requirements for automated, dynamic and scalable service delivery,” Bryant said on stage. “Our new Intel processors deliver unmatched performance, energy efficiency and security, as well as provide visibility into the hardware resources required to enable software defined infrastructure.

“We are continuing to be the most energy efficient processor on the planet,” she continued,” promising 27 world records in performance across the product line.”

“[Intel is] excited about the role this platform is going to play as we all collectively re-architect the datacentre from static to dynamic and from proprietary to open standards,” she later said on stage.

While the previous generation of Intel Xeon chips had a core count that went as high as 12, the third generation of Xeons offers up to 18 cores with clock speeds of up to 3.7 GHz . The Xeon E5-2600 v3 will also be the first in the series to support DDR4 RAM, which offers substantial clock speeds above DDR3’s JEDEC speeds as well as power savings due to lower operating voltages.

Another new feature of the Xeon E5-2600 v3 is the update of Intel’s Quickpath Interconnect (QPI) that’s capable of transferring data at 9.6 GTps, much faster than existing front side bus (FSB) technology.

To aid in the inquiry of fault detection, Intel is including a new range of telemetry sensors to give administrators more information and metrics on CPU usage, memory and I/O.

The new Xeon is available in 22 different versions that vary wildly depending on required clock speed and cores. Pricing begins at $213 and tops out at $2,072. For the workstation, the chip is available as the Xeon E5-1600 with pricing ranging from $295 to $1,723.

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As more and more X99 motherboards leak, it only made sense to release a portion of the trove of boards that haven’t already been announced or leaked.

The Asus X99-E WS, a Bright Side of News* exclusive, is a particularly interesting one because it is Asus’ (TPE:2357) latest high performance motherboard for workstation users. Because X99 is an entirely new platform there are very likely going to be a lot of people searching for new workstation boards like the X99-E WS to upgrade their workstations.

In terms of features, you get all the expected things like Haswell-E support, a plethora of PCIe 3.0 slots, which includes support for 4-way CrossFireX and SLI with X16 links. This board is specifically designed to support both Core i7 and Xeon E5 class chips (including the E5-1600, thanks to retailer leaks) thanks to being only a single socket workstation board. Because this is a workstation board, ASUS also talks about the boards overall power efficiency focusing on their Dr. MOS, 12k hour capacitors, ProCool power connector and beat thermal choke.

The Asus X99-E WS also has a Q-code logger and Dr. Power, even though it also has a plethora of connectivity which make it all the more attractive. That includes dual Gigabit NICs, a whopping 10 USB 3.0 connectors on the rear IO alone, not to mention the standard audio connectors, eSATA and the expected IO. You will get the full 8-slot DDR4 configuration, which is to be expected even though you very likely won’t get much memory overclocking support like the Rampage series of boards.

Asus X99-E WS IO

In addition to all of this, you will be getting backed by an Asus 3 year warranty which brings the MSRP price of this board to a whopping $519. Yes, this is a fairly high price for a single socketed board that isn’t an overclocking board, but X99 is a performance platform and this is a workstation board which should mean you are paying for higher quality components and reliability.

In fact, some retailers already have it available for pre-order but don’t really have any details or pictures of the board. So, you can already get it for $499 via some retailers, already lower than the $519 MSRP.

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The guys over at VR-Zone have scored what appears to be a roadmap document that details the changeover from Broadwell and Haswell over to Skylake. In the document, there is a vast amount of information, including the disclosure of the fact that there will be one chipset for consumer and server. This may ultimately mean that consumers will no longer have to suffer with inferior chipsets and enterprise won’t lose certain features that aren’t deemed ‘enterprise’. Not to mention, by having one chipset for both consumer and server, Intel can drive better volumes of that single chip and improve inefficiencies and profitability.

Intel’s Roadmap for Skylake

If you look at the roadmap above you can see that Intel is drastically simplifying their chipsets and CPU offerings, they are offering fewer variants of their CPUs with Skylake and consolidating the 100 series chipset as mentioned above. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t appear to be any mention of high-performance parts, which means that this is likely more of a mainstream chipset roadmap and excludes enthusiast and enterprise since most of the parts mentioned above are BGA like their Haswell and Broadwell predecessors. All of Intel’s truly high performance parts are still LGA-based, which means this clearly isn’t a full roadmap for all of Intel’s products, but even so we get a pretty good idea of what kind of capabilities Intel is aiming for with their newest chipsets and what codenames we’re looking at. That includes Alpine Ridge, which is going to the the latest version of Thunderbolt, delivering 40 Gbps of bandwidth, however it isn’t quite clear if that’ll be accomplished with a single cable or with dual cables like Intel is doing now (even though it looks to be a single cable). It will deliver up to 100W of charging capability, which means that most external hard drives wouldn’t really require a power connector anymore and a Thunderbolt cable should be enough to power the entire device. The same should go for monitors, even those with 4K support, as Thunderbolt claims true dual 4K display support.

Alpine Ridge

Skylake looks to be pretty promising, considering that it’ll be coming in 2015 and will be the first consumer parts to be using DDR4 and PCI-Express 4.0, which hasn’t even been ratified yet as a standard. Skylake will surely resolve any sort of bandwidth issues that might exist virtually anywhere on the system considering the sheer amounts of bandwidth coming from the use of DDR4, PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 3.0.

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It isn’t often that Apple will update a piece of hardware without doing some kind of major launch or making a big deal about it. But with the new Macbook Air, they did just that. With the new Macbook Air (2014), Apple has made some minute improvements over the previous generation. Namely, Apple has kept the same Haswell chips in the Macbook Air from 2013, but has bumped the CPU clock to 1.4 GHz base from 1.3 GHz. This is probably due to a bin improvement on the chips themselves, which means faster chips at the same or lower power with almost no changes at all.

Macbook Air Productivity

Apple has still opted for 11″ and 13″ models, but has dropped their prices down to $899 and $999 respectively, making them MUCH more competitive with some of their competitors’ solutions like Lenovo’s 13″ Yoga 2 Pro, which delivers a retina display and similar specs for a mere $1200, which was a solid $100 less than the original Macbook Air 13″ price. This is probably the biggest deal of the new Macbook Air release, because they still have the same fairly low-res displays and two USB 3.0 ports accompanied by a Thunderbolt port.

Macbook Air Apps

This explains why Apple hasn’t really announced it or anything, they just did it. Because, frankly, its really pretty much the same laptop, just cheaper. Yeah, it’ll probably hurt the resale value that Apple’s Macbooks and other products are famous for, but in this case, this is a good move on Apple’s part to give consumers more while charging less for it. Something they don’t usually do, so its nice to see them doing it. Plus, it will help Intel offload more chips since there’s no doubt more people will be looking at a Macbook Air with these newer prices and with a student discount the 11″ and 13″ look a lot more attractive than some PC laptops from Apple competitors that cost about the same.

There will likely be a Broadwell version of the Macbook air early in 2015, so expect that to be the real ‘overhaul’ of the Macbook Air, as opposed to this version, which is merely more affordable and configurable.

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AMD has been working on enabling their customers and partners to be able to create new and exciting products that utilize their technology, and with the final launch of Beema and Mullins we finally see what all the hubub is all about. These are going to be AMD’s latest offerings for the mainstream APUs and for low-power with Beema being the mainstream APU and Mullins being the low-power APU, even though both of them are fairly low power as it is already. With the introduction of these new chips we will be seeing AMD increasing the CPU and GPU performance while simultaneously reducing power consumption and improving overall performance per watt to levels that AMD has never seen before. AMD claims that their new APUs are capable of compute performance per watt levels that their competition can’t even touch, even though there are realistically very few scenarios today where you can easily compare compute performance in applications. Compute performance is going to be important, it is just a matter of time until it happens and it seems to be taking longer than everyone had thought.

With the introduction of both of these new APUs you are getting new Puma+ cores, updated GCN cores, system-aware power management (and battery boost), the Cortex A5-based hardware security platform, DDR3-1866 support and some pretty decent overall frequency improvements at lower TDPs.

Below, you can see that there are going to be four Beema series APUs, with two being A-Series and two being E-Series with varying GPU and CPU clocks but fairly similar TDP. Meanwhile, Mullins will be shipping in three different SKUs with two being A-Series APUs and one being an E-Series. All of Mullins’ TDPs are sub 5w and their SDP (I don’t like that they’re going along with this) is sub 3w.

In addition to the bumps to CPU and GPU clocks and performance, they have included the AMD Platform Security Processor, which is a dedicated hardware security ARM Cortex A5 chip designed along with ARM’s TrustZone in order to follow industry standards and to enable better usability in the enterprise. This is the 1st and only x86 processor to integrate an ARM core on-die.

In Futuremark’s PCMark 8 and 3DMark, AMD’s Beema APU takes some competition to Intel’s lower-end parts, which bodes well for AMD’s ability to sell cheap chips, but the lack of a real high-performance low-power part is still a bit concerning. And yes, we know AMD crushes in OpenCL they always have against Intel and Nvidia.

Here you can see how Beema compares against Kabini in terms of power consumption and battery life, delivering a reduction of upto 20% power reduction.

AMD also introduced some really interesting power management and power reductions with Beema and Mullins, especially with Mullins in the tablet formfactors. The creaction of the STAPM or Skin Temperature Aware Power management is definitely something that a lot of companies should take into consideration and shows some real creativity on the part of AMD to utilize as much available TDP comfortable to the user as they can.

Here you can also see the CPU and GPU core architecture enhancements that AMD made in order to reduce power consumption while simultaneously increasing clocks and performance. AMD reduced the leakage of their Puma+ cores by 19% and their GCN GPU cores by more than 38% which attributes to a lot of lower level power consumption savings.

AMD also says that Beema and Mullins APUs are merely the beginning of the company’s strategy towards reducing power, increasing overall performance and making things smaller, but for us, the most interesting thing to see will be how they get HSA to work in lower power parts and when we can really see some real HSA applications across AMD’s entire product stack.

I personally can’t wait to see what kinds of products come out of AMD’s partners as a result of these developments and what interesting formfactors they’ll come in. Because at CES, AMD had some really impressive prototypes for gaming, TV and much more. Hopefully some of their partners are encouraged by these prototypes to think of something even better.

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Intel’s first quarter earnings for 2014 were for the most part fairly tepid. Sure, they were able to post an earnings of $0.38 per share on $12.8 billion in revenue, however this only beat analyst’s fairly conservative expectations of $0.37 per share by $0.01. On $12.8 billion in revenue, Intel showed operating income of $2.5 billion and net income of $1.9 billion. Intel’s net income for Q1 2014 was down 5% over the same period a year ago, nothing to cheer about but still much better than previous declines. They also saw an increase in revenue of about $200 million, even though there was a slight decrease in profitability of about the same amount.

The truth is that Intel’s performance this past quarter was not anything especially exciting write about. The most exciting thing for most, however, was the fact that Intel was essentially flat. To many, that came as an indication of their stemming the tide of PC declines and growth in enterprise and server. Also, remember, that before this earnings report, Intel changed how they report their revenue for certain divisions based on new product groups. So now things are categorized under the following 5 categories:

• PC Client Group revenue of $7.9 billion, down 8 percent sequentially and down 1 percent year-over-year.
• Data Center Group revenue of $3.1 billion, down 5 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $482 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 32 percent year-over-year.
• Mobile and Communications Group revenue of $156 million, down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.
• Software and services operating segments revenue of $553 million, down 6 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year-over-year.

If you look at their new break down of revenue (and profitability) per division, you can see that their PC Client Group is still the bulk of the company’s revenue followed closely by the Data Center Group. All of the others are still relatively at around $500 million or less in terms of revenue, and even less in terms of profitability towards Intel’s bottom line.

But if Intel wants to become a truly competitive company in the mobile space their Mobile and Communications Group is going to need to grow much faster rather than shrinking 52% sequentially and 61% year over year. Not just that, but at $156 million this is actually their smallest business segment which is a bit concerning when you think about how important Mobile and Communications are to Intel’s future.

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said about their earnings, “In the first quarter we saw solid growth in the data center, signs of improvement in the PC business, and we shipped 5 million tablet processors, making strong progress on our goal of 40 million tablets for 2014. Additionally, we demonstrated our further commitment to grow in the enterprise with a strategic technology and business collaboration with Cloudera, we introduced our second-generation LTE platform with CAT6 and other advanced features, and we shipped our first Quark products for the Internet of Things.”

The truth is that Intel is buying their tablet share and it remains to be seen if that 40 million tablets for 2014 goal is really going to be worth it for Intel to effectively eat the profitability for the sake of penetration. Their lack of communications penetration is their biggest weakness and I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea for Intel to commit an entire division to IoT solutions without a solid definition for IoT even existing yet. There is no doubt that Intel is gungho on growth and expanding their product lines, but the real question is whether or not they can help reinvent the PC in ways that make it relevant while also making sure they are a serious player in the mobile computing AND communications front. Sure, they’ve landed themselves inside some of the Samsung Galaxy S5 phones, but their lack of consistent design wins is concerning to say the least. Qualcomm needs a serious and stable competitor and I’m not entirely convinced that Intel is there yet.

Since their earnings announcement, Intel is basically flat (was up 0.60% yesterday and gave up 0.40% over night).

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