The PC industry is going to be heating up in the next few weeks and months. There are a few Broadwell chips available at various levels, and some OEM systems are even using them now, but most of the action is now going to be focused on Skylake, with some possibility that we'll see some OEMs using the Broadwell desktop chips.
The release of Broadwell and Skylake feels very compressed, after over two years of Haswell. Haswell lasted so long, Intel refreshed the Haswell CPUs when it released the new 9-series chipsets for the Broadwell CPUs.
Core M, the first Broadwell part, was pretty interesting (and should continue to be, presuming anybody uses it) because it creates the opportunity to build either new machines, or the same machines, but with some different performance properties.
I think as more Skylake parts become available, we're going to see that manufacturers are going to take this opportunity to start revamping their product lines. This will mean different things for different manufacturers, and some of them have even released updated Haswell systems, but since they're one of the ones I'm paying most attention to, I can already tell you that
Some good examples of "new things" that have come out recently or are going to come out is the 2015/Retina MacBook and the Panasonic Let's Note RZ4. Lenovo is doing some interesting things in the near future. I'm aware of Lenovo's stuff primarily because of the OEMs, they're the one I watch.
The Broadwell ThinkPads we've seen so far, such as the T450 and X250 have done a lot to resolve my personal issues, but a lot of people are waiting for a T450p or T460p to really resolve the TrackPoint issue and provide an update to what I imagine is an appealing system to many people who want as much power as they can get in the smallest form factor, and don't necessarily need GL or gamer graphics. These machines do a lot to correct the TrackPoint crimes of 2013, but don't' represent the full ThinkPad product stack. Skylake should bring the rest of that onboard.
In addition to standard revisions and updates, Lenovo is doing two really interesting things. The first is a "Retro ThinkPad" about which they're collecting feedback and running surveys. They haven't fully committed to building it, but it's getting a lot of talk online. The other, a machine that they've already designed and build, is essentially a ThinkStation P-series branded ThinkPad landtank.
The retro system is looking like it'll end up being a successor to the old ThinkPad X300. It'll have a 13-inch 16:10 display, a relatively high resolution, a good keyboard and some-but-not-much expandability.
The mobile workstation, which we know to be a ThinkStation P-Series product, looks like it's going to be an utter monster. There's some speculation that it may involve the new Skylake desktop parts, but it would have to be a Clevo style land-tank at that point. It'll be interesting to see, but Lenovo is really pushing this machine as a total powerhouse, beyond what a normal 15 or 17-inch mobile workstation typically is. They've got a quote from an extreme overclocker saying that it could replace his "entire setup", which either means that overclocking is a sham and a good quad-core i7 CPU is perfectly capable of everything anybody would want to do, or that this machine is utterly insane.
The Retro ThinkPad has been interesting to watch. It seems like everybody has an idea of what the One True ThinkPad is, to the point where if they're been using ThinkPads for a while, they are often completely unaware that any other products existed. For some people, it's the A31p, R50p and W700, W701ds, with their insane performance, barely mobile form factors. For some, it's a return to regular-voltage 35-watt CPUs and really high RAM ceilings in the X series. For others, it's the 1600x1200 15-inch FlexView IPS, above all other things.
It will be interesting to see what the finished product looks like. I suspect this is partly a legitimate effort to appease ThinkPad enthusiasts, and partly an exercise in futility, so that Lenovo can thusly say "Well, look, here's what actually sells" and point to the L, Edge, and Yoga series.
So, I worry that if the Retro ThinkPad goes on sale and is actually appealing and potentially useful to me, it'll be gone before I can buy one. I almost worry more, though, that it won't be appealing at all to me.
It makes me wonder what people need this kind of performance in mobile computers these days. Are the ThinkPad T440p and Latitude E6440 only being bought by people with egos to feed, or are these people doing relatively heavy rendering, virtualization, or compiling work on them?
On the desktop side of things, what I'm thinking about is the existing of the IRIS Pro desktop parts for Broadwell. These chips might make sense in high end home computers or in business desktops, where there are definitely users who want a powerful CPU for certain tasks, and want to drive a large display, but aren't going to be playing games and aren't using applications that benefit a lot from having a lot of spare graphics firepower for acceleration. The only "desktop" systems with the Haswell/Crystalwell parts in them are the Gigabyte Brix Pro systems, and one particular configuration of the iMac.
My hope back in 2013 was that you'd be able to get a system with a Crystalwell chip in it that you could later upgrade with a discrete graphics card, which would ultimately offer the best of i7 performance today, with a pretty good GPU, that you can later replace with a discrete card. When you do put in a discrete card, the Crystalwell still gets used as a really impressive 128-megabyte L4 cache. Today, this is a little closer to being possible, but the i5-5675C and i7-5775C are socketed and you should be able to put them on any 9-series board.
For me, personally, the problem is that I don't necessarily want a "laptop" as big as the one I bought in 2009 at this point. For portable computers, I'm leaning a lot more toward capable tablets and very small laptops, such as the Surface 3 and Dell XPS 13. Nevertheless, the new systems are all intriguing and it'll be really interesting to see what comes out.
Even though I have the Surface 3, I frequently think about laptops because I think that I would get a lot of use out of one. The biggest problem is that I'm still using my venerable old ThinkPad T400 from 2009 as my "main" computer. In part, because there's such a high mental value in choosing a replacement for it, so I use for specific tasks and as something I can move but not necessarily take with me to the café. I suppose one of my problems there is whether or not that should be something done by a laptop or if I should start moving in the direction of using the Surface in my secondary workspaces at home, get more desktops, or simply improve my primary workspace.
That's a problem for future-Cory, though.