Skylake for laptops: Faster Core M and Ultrabook GPUs with eDRAM

Intel's Skylake rollout hasn't been nearly as halting as the Broadwell rollout, but the company is still doling out information (and processors) bit by bit rather than all at once. We got our hands on the high-end, overclockable desktop version a few weeks ago, and Intel told us more about the CPU and GPU architectures at IDF. Today at IFA in Berlin, the company is finally taking the wraps off of specific CPUs for laptops, Ultrabooks, and mainstream desktops.

Intel is updating its full range of socketed desktop chips for the first time since Haswell was released in 2013—our coverage of those chips, which span from Core i7 all the way down to the Pentium, is here. As usual, though, Intel is devoting most of its attention to its mobile lineup. The new Core m3, m5, and m7 chips promise big CPU and GPU performance improvements for fanless designs like the Retina MacBook and the Asus Zenbook UX305. And some of the U-series Ultrabook chips should get a nice GPU performance bump—they'll ship with embedded eDRAM for the first time, something that had previously been limited to high-end quad-core CPUs.

Core M: Meet m3, m5, and m7

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Intel's first Broadwell chips last year arrived in the form of Core M, a new name meant to differentiate Y-series Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs from their faster laptop and desktop cousins. Those numbers didn't disappear, but they were only visible in the products' model numbers rather than their official, consumer-facing names.