Wait for Skylake or just buy now?

[HopelessNoob]

Hey everyone,

I was wondering what everyone's thoughts were on buying a laptop now (considering T450s) or waiting for Skylake to be released for laptops seeing that Computex has just passed? I'm really looking for a boost in both battery life and performance. However I've read that the boost in performance probably won't be any greater than 10% and battery life will hardly improve if any?

Thanks!

 

[MarkW]

Virually no real info on Skylake has been released. Intel just released the Broadwell desktop chips and does not want to kill their back to school season.

Skylake chips will begin coming out in a few months. We will know more then. But the rumors I am hearing is that Skylake is going to be a big surprise for people for some reason.

So if you can hang on for another few months, at the very least, you will be able to make an informed decision by then.

 

[Mitrovah]

A lot of new mini pc's NUCs are coming with broadwell chips running at 9 TDP, the forerunners of Skylake. If Broadwell chips are any guide, Skylake will be impressive. It is always better and cheaper to purchase behind the power curve though. If by chance Broadwells show up in laptops that would be the best and cheapest alternative to Skylake.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

A lot of new mini pc's NUCs are coming with broadwell chips running at 9 TDP, the forerunners of Skylake. If Broadwell chips are any guide, Skylake will be impressive. It is always better and cheaper to purchase behind the power curve though. If by chance Broadwells show up in laptops that would be the best and cheapest alternative to Skylake.

Broadwells are in laptops and have been in them long before the desktop ones just came out.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Virually no real info on Skylake has been released. Intel just released the Broadwell desktop chips and does not want to kill their back to school season.

Skylake chips will begin coming out in a few months. We will know more then. But the rumors I am hearing is that Skylake is going to be a big surprise for people for some reason.

So if you can hang on for another few months, at the very least, you will be able to make an informed decision by then.

There is actually quite a bit of information on Skylake already as it is supposed to come out later this year. I mean look at Computex. It was filled with 100 series chipset boards, Skylake chipset.

I personally would wait till Skylake comes out. It will be much more of a performance improvement over Haswell than Broadwell.

 

[MarkW]

Chipsets and motherboards do not tell you how a CPU will perform.

 

[insatiableOne]

"Chipsets and motherboards do not tell you how a CPU will perform."

My custom rig I bought in '04 is running faster than that with DDR2. it is overclocked @ 3.7
I was going to upgrade to 64 bit but waiting for the DDR4 to do so as it appears to be exponentially greater this turn around.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Chipsets and motherboards do not tell you how a CPU will perform.

I didn't say that. Rather I said there is a lot of information about Skylake out, and there is a lot on the CPU as well. We can estimate performance but most likely we wont know true performance until maybe a month before launch and even then that might not be 100%.

It is set to launch later this year so there is no point to upgrade unless you have to, such as your board died.

And the chipset does tell us some things as it shows us the speed of the interconnecting bus (DMI 3.0), what it will support peripheral wise (M.2, SATAe, Thunderbolt 3.0 etc). We just have to wait to see the raw performance of the chip and I am estimating it will probably be 10% per watt.

Plus the OP is looing at laptops and Skylake is supposed to include a lot of power efficiency improvements which matter more in the laptop market.