Intel announces a beefed up Core M Compute Stick with Skylake

As part of Intel's big Skylake info dump today, the company quietly announced a follow up to its Compute Stick HDMI dongle. While the last generation of the mini PC included a slower Intel Atom processor, this time around the Compute Stick is getting fully fledged Skylake processors in the form of the Core m3 and Core m5 with vPro.

While Core M's low power usage is one reason why full Skylake chips can fit in something the size of the Compute Stick, it also helps that Intel has drastically reduced the amount of surface area that the Core M chips use relative to the first-generation Broadwell versions. The less surface area the CPU package uses, the more is available for things like memory, storage, and other components. We should hopefully see some Skylake laptop designs that take advantage of the space savings, if only to squeeze in a bit more battery—with a handful of exceptions, most of the Broadwell Core M laptops we've tested have had middling battery life at best.

Core M Broadwell (left) vs. Core M Skylake (right).

Andrew Cunningham

The Core m3 and M5 CPUs have a TDP of 4.5W, so performance should be reasonably good—Intel says the Skylake Core Ms should provide graphics performance that's as much as 40 percent better than the Broadwell Core Ms. OEMs can ratchet the TDP of these chips up to 7W for more performance or they can turn it down to 3.5W or 3.8W (for the m5 and m3, respectively) to reduce heat output, but that's not the case for the versions in the Compute Stick. In any case, their CPU and GPU performance should be a respectable step up from the old Bay Trail Atoms in the first models.