News Intel reveals eight-core laptop CPU with 5GHz boost and overclocking

So what's the catch, 5Ghz in a 8 core unlocked mobile CPU seems to good to be true, there must be a catch.

 

Probably either going to be silly money or run hotter than the sun. Possibly both.

 

Or run at 5 Ghz for 1.2 nanoseconds before thermal throttling to essentially the same speed as previous gen.

 

Or, the cooling system will sound like a cordless Dyson on full power.

Silly money can probably be taken as read.

 

It is possible to have an 8 core 5ghz Turbo 45W TDP premium price notebook part, we "just" have to stretch the definition of some words to their limit:

Turbo: Single core, no requirement to be capable of maintaining that clock long term.
Available: As long as a handful chips pass the extra tight binning process and escape the Fab then it counts as available.
TDP: Avg under an Intel defined workload that may not be representative of the actual average, much less peak values.
Premium price: With zero competition in the notebook market they can charge whatever they want.
Notebook: Includes 5 kilogram 17" bricks and disregards things like user discomfort from loud fans.

 

The image in the article doesn't show what the little number 1 caveat is, would be handy to see the footnotes.

 

'Turbo Boost' operates like it always has done: clock up when thermal headroom available, clock back down when unavailable. For normal laptop workloads (idling, then do stuff right now, then idle) that works great. If you're using a laptop as a desktop replacement and want to push renders or whatever other sustained loads, then you already know you're going to need a laptop with a beefier cooling system.
No need to feign ignorance of how every CPU and SoC (including mobile devices) have operated for he last decade.

 

It's not feigning ignorance, non tech literate people wouldn't have a clue about the caveats you've just described, they'd see a laptop with a label that says 5Ghz and automatically assume that's better and while it maybe slightly better it's rather misleading to say 5Ghz if that's only available 5-10% of the time or not at all.

It's a bit like the classic "up to" advertising for broadband or MPG figures that nobody in the real world could ever achieve.

 

With 504563 models out in the wild no one (beyond a handful of nerds in places like bit-tech) is going to see through the Intel mobile CPU lineup any way