Intel building Xeon into lapwarmers as designers, content creators call the shots

Intel is putting its Xeon processors into laptops for the first time, ushering in what it hopes will be a significant performance boost and marketing opportunity.

This is not only because the CPU is faster but also because they will feature the faster Thunderbolt 3 system, with palindromic USB Type-C ports that support the full 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 transfer speed.

Xeons were originally designed for workstations, but Intel explains that its seeing increasing demand from “designers, content creators, engineers and architects”, in particular the need to support 4k video.

It’s a vibrant part of the moribund laptop market as people move from sylphlike laptops to either tablets or to notebooks with more power. With desktop sales also tanking, it’s the logical move for Intel.

The Chipzilla quotes IDC’s most recent report on mobile workstation usage which showed that the quarter ending in June 2015 was the sixth straight quarter of year-over-year mobile workstation unit growth.

The new chips are the Intel Xeon Processor E3-1500M v5 Product Family, based on the next gen Skylake architecture.

The Mobile Xeon has error-correcting code memory that automatically detects and repairs errors on-the-fly, hardware-assisted security, manageability, and productivity using Intel vPro.

Intel is spreading the Skylake love quite wide, with plans for tablets and a recent gaming announcement.

Intel isn’t giving details quite yet of just what flavour of Xeon is going into the E3-1500M family, and Xeons will run all the way up to 18 cores, but given that the recently announced Core i7-6700K kicks out 95W of heat we can’t expect anything quite as toasty in laptops. ®