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Portables Intel

Intel Core M Notebooks Arrive, Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Tested 78

Posted by Soulskill from the confluence-of-awful-product-names dept.
MojoKid writes: Intel's 14nm Core M Broadwell architecture was announced a few months ago but to date, 2-in-1 hybrid devices and laptops have only trickled out to the market. Lenovo recently took the wraps off their Yoga 3 Pro 13-inch ultralight notebook and it's one of the few devices on the market right now that offers a glimpse of what Intel's Core M processor is capable of in performance and battery life testing. The 4.5 Watt TDP Core M 5Y70 actually keeps pace with 15-Watt previous generation Core i5 mobile chips in testing, but with significantly better battery life. It also enables very thin and light designs like the 2.6 pound Yoga 3 Pro, which is an interesting machine. Its watchband hinge allows it to contort into various positions for tablet, tent, stand and standard modes. The hinge is a "you love it or hate it" kind of thing, but does come with a 3200x1800 IPS display.
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Intel Core M Notebooks Arrive, Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Tested More

Intel Core M Notebooks Arrive, Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Tested

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  • The Helix 2 is a more reasonably priced convertible 2-in-1 from Lenovo. The screen resolution isn't quite as high, but it's still a very reasonable 1920x1080 on an 11.6" display. I've run the thing on batttery for 8 solid hours doing standard office type work with wifi enabled and it performs very well.. and unlike the Yoga 3 it is truly a fanless design.

    You might want to hold off until the "pro" keyboards that include the addtional battery become more widely available. Those should boost the battery life

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sephr ( 1356341 )

      and unlike the Yoga 3 it is truly a fanless design

      The Yoga 3 Pro doesn't have any fans. What are you talking about?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Sephr ( 1356341 )
        Sorry, apparently I was wrong. Apparently they do have a fan (though I'm not sure if it's actually used), according to the disassembly linked below.

    • The Helix 2 is more expensive

  • Having this week bought a new 13" MacBook Pro (tiny and light) and deciding to pass on the iPhone Galaxy 6 because it's form factor is so huge that it borders on being a mini-tablet -- I have been thinking if Apple could come out with a 10" Air and a standalone iWatch, I'd be completely fulfilled. So when I read about this Lenovo product yesterday, I was a bit jealous. If they can come out with a smaller display sized version and get some Linux drivers for the hardware and offer an Ubuntu version, I would

    • the iPhone Galaxy 6

      Uh, what? Samsung makes the Galaxy line, not Apple.

      If they can [...] get some Linux drivers for the hardware and offer an Ubuntu version, I would totally leave Apple in a heart beat.

      I would leave anything else in a heartbeat if they offered that.

      • Samsung makes the Galaxy line, not Apple.

        I think it was joke vis-a-vis Apple making "phablet" phones after spending years insisting that people wouldn't like them because they can't use them with only one hand. Add to the fact that the iPhone 6 Plus looks kind of like a Galaxy S5 with less-rounded corners and there you go.

        Or, to put it another way, "woosh."

        • Thanks, point taken.

          Actually, I think the iPhone 6 Plus was meant to be compared to the Galaxy Note 4, and the iPhone 6 to the Galaxy S5.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          I think it was joke vis-a-vis Apple making "phablet" phones after spending years insisting that people wouldn't like them because they can't use them with only one hand. Add to the fact that the iPhone 6 Plus looks kind of like a Galaxy S5 with less-rounded corners and there you go.

          According to sales data, in North America Apple is correct - people are eschewing the iPhone 6+ in favor of the iPhone 6 (about 1:4 6+:6 sales ratio, or 20% 6+, 80% 6). In Asia, though, apparently bigger is better because the 6+ [applovin.com]

          • Perhaps what is "sensible" or not depends on usage patterns. It could very well be that Asians want a bigger phone because they use their device more and hence want something closer to a tablet. During train and public transit. As opposed to Americans who are mostly driving to work and are thus not using their phone as much every day.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by brm ( 100455 )

            There's a radio ad in Beijing for one of the big phones in which a woman boasts that she hasn't lost any weight but her friends all think she has because her face looks so thin next to her giant new phone.

            The phone isn't just for use, it's a fashion statement.

            Perhaps that attitude extends to other Asian countries?

  • clickpad (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I do not care about latest intel core whatever. What I care about is a usable keyboard and trackpad/point, redundant components and the ability to fix things up when something breaks.

    This thing, by the looks of it, has a clickpad. Ergo, its garbage. Lets move on.

    • The one nice thing about the crap that Lenovo sells is that it (only sometimes, not always, alas) provides them with space to express their bad ideas without fucking up the Thinkpad line.

      They can make all the freakjobs and plastic toys they want; but if the day comes when I can't get a decent thinkpad it's going to be very, very, bad.

      • Au Contraire!

        At work the lease on my T410 was up and replaced with a Thinkpad T440. It's alright, but it has a clickpad (that I hate), and it only has 2 USB ports (my old Thinkpad had 4).

        The vertical screen resolution also shrank from 1280x800 to 1366x768. The RAM is the same 4GB as my 3 year old thinkpad, and the CPU isn't appreciably faster.

        On a positive note the battery life is good. I was at an 8 hour session running entirely on battery, and still had 33% left at the end of the day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        But the clickpad has been in the Thinkpad line for years now. And it sucks there too. I don't mind the clickpad on OS X, but under Windows and Linux it's horrible.

        Running Mint on my X220, and I cannot get the clickpad to work worth a darn It's jumpy, and the clicking part always moves the mouse cursor when I hit it. Also I can't rest my thumb on the pad while moving my index finger. The cursor just won't go anywhere. It's extremely annoying. I'm not sure whether this is Linux at fault or the pad itself.

  • Are there any such hybrid notebook/tablets that use AMD's CPUs? Or is AMD completely dead & out of the game?

    At any rate, I don't think these are such great buys until Windows 10 is out - where we have the ability to make the interface Windows 7 like or 8 like as we please.

    • AMD is completely out of the game and the thrust of their current design work seems to have entirely ceded low power x86 to Intel in favor of better performing hybrid CPU/GPU products.

    • AMD theoretically has parts that target reasonably similar power envelopes (lower-powered 'Kabini' APUs, 'Temash' APUs, and 'Mullins' APUs, go here [amd.com] and play with the wattage filter if you want the actual model-number-soup); but design wins appear to be..sparse...at best.

      Zotac put an A6-1450 into a little fanless desktop/HTPC thing [anandtech.com]; but AMD parts seem to be damn rare outside cheap desktops and the churn of big-n'-awful 15ish inch Best Buy shelfwarmer laptops.

      I'm not familiar enough with the benchmarks,

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by edxwelch ( 600979 )

      AMD will probabably leave the tablet market:
      http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]

      The tablet market is in a price battle and profit margins for chip makers are minuscule, said Kevin Lensing, senior director for mobility solutions at AMD.

      âoeWeâ(TM)re evaluating [tablets] closely. Itâ(TM)s not our priority,â Lensing said.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        AMD has spend a lot of time and money building low power SoCs. Tablets use low-power SoCs. That they can't make money in that market is a pretty clear admission they've bet on the wrong horse. High end desktops and servers died with the FX line and you know their laptop line is in trouble when they have to advertise this: Introducing mobile systems with AMD's highest performing APUs, exclusively at Best Buy [amd.com]. It can't be long until they're waving the white flag and pulling out of mainstream x86 processors al

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guises ( 2423402 )
      There isn't anything this thin and light, there aren't any AMD CPUs that can run at a decent speed at such low power, but on larger notebooks they're competitive at the low end if you factor in the GPU. An A10 is both faster and cheaper than Iris Pro.

      Trouble is, most people who care about that want something discrete. But for a cheap notebook which is actually gaming-capable an A10 is a good choice.

    • AMD chips need a lot of juice for a given level of performance. Their Vishera chips that competes with Intel's high end desktop i5s in price and in some cases performance (depends on the benchmark, it is as fast in some, woefully slower in others) needs 220 watts to get that level of performance.

      If you desire a power economical processor, Intel are your guys. AMD's architecture and lithography are just not up to Intel's level at the moment.

      You also have to remember, with regards to lithography, Intel is WAY

      • That 220W CPU beats most of Intel's high-end consumer grade offerings in everything but finding prime numbers and pi digits once you start dividing the real-world performance numbers by the cost of the chip. If you absolutely need to get maximum performance from a single die (in which case you're probably looking at server processors anyway), the massive price premium of Intel chips may be worth it, but the 220W AMD chip is a much better deal. I constantly read arguments stating that Intel is better than AM

        • No, it doesn't. HardOCP did a test with the new Haswell E series, as well as normal Haswell and Ivy Bridge chips, and then the AMD FX-9590. In every case, the AMD chip lost. Sandra Drystone, Sandra memory bandwidth, Hyper PI, Cinebench, POV Ray, Handbrake, LAME, WinRAR, and games, in call cases it scored below the Haswell chip. In most cases it scored below the Ivy Bridge chip, sometimes substantially. For example in Cinebench the Haswell-E 8 core scored 19.31, the normal Haswell 4 core scored 9.93, the AMD

          • The article uses a bone stock FX-9590 against very heavily overclocked (around 150% of factory maximum specs) and water-cooled Intel setups, plus saddles the AMD chip with high RAM latencies even compared to the Intel chips using the same frequency of DDR3 RAM. I'm aware that the 9590 is essentially an FX-8370 that binned very well and got a clock boost from the factory because of it, but AMD has had these chips up to 8.7 GHz [amd.com] and HardOCP tested it at bone stock with poorly configured RAM. They could have at

    • I want a ARM hybrid. Put android on it and make it easy to put Linux on it.

      • Google could do a Chrome hybrid that has Chromium OS in laptop mode, and Android in tablet mode. Just like Microsoft plans to do w/ Windows 10
  • If you buy a Lenova you also get to do #Yoga for free. #Winning.

  • Intels continued tick-tock development is at this time only a play to the gallery. The 14nm core actually only has 1 component per 321 '14nm tiles'. This is 1% the density from 10 years ago. The performance has not improved very much over the last generations either.
    Maybe it is time for Intel to use their enormous resources to go in a new direction and become competitive in a new world. Otherwise they will tick-tock themselves into fighting a sub 10nm battle with no enemies except Moore's law.

    • The intel Pentium M from 2004 with 130nm had a die size of 87mm2, and 140 million gates, or 35 per '130nm tile' so this make the current 14nm 10% the density relative the the technology size, not 1%

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