Intel’s spiffy new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors for notebooks are officially available and should start surfacing in new systems this fall. The processors offer longer battery life, improved performance and built-in Gigabit WiFi support, and could be optimal for Apple’s upcoming MacBook and MacBook Air lineup.
Both processors stick with the 14nm process Intel is using for the Kaby Lake processors we’re seeing in Macs now. That means no 10nm chips from Intel for a while longer, and not in any Mac this year and maybe even next year.
Intel has stated that the new chips are twice as fast compared to a five-year-old PC, albeit the company has yet to offer comparisons to the current Kaby Lake processors.
Intel’s Whiskey Lake processors are classified as U-Series Core i7 processors with up to four cores, and eight threads. The base clock speed comes in at 1.8 GHz with turbo boost up to 4.6 GHz.
The Whiskey Lake processors are best suited for larger notebooks and draw more power. Think MacBook and MacBook Pro where multitasking is important.
The Amber Lake processors are classified as Y-series Core i7 processors with up to two cores, and four threads. The base clock speed for this processor is 1.5 GHz and turbo boost speed comes in at 4.2 GHz.
These chips are better suited for a 12-inch MacBook or an updated MacBook Air because of their lower power requirements.
Both the Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors feature updates such as built-in Gigabit Ethernet, support for USB 3.1 10 Gbps transfer speeds, Thunderbolt 3, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0, and voice assistant services.
The voice assistant services feature lets the computer “listen” for voice commands even when in low power mode. Intel mentions Alexa and Cortana as examples, so it’ll be interesting to see if Siri can take advantage of that, too.
Intel has stated that the new processors offer up to 16 hours of battery lift, which will be interesting to see once released into the wild.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The Mac Observer