Mini in size, but not quite mighty enough in power
According to some industry observers,
the PC has a problem. It’s being squeezed into obscurity by smartphones and
tablets running ghastly things called ARM processors and alternative operating
systems, ‘Android’ and ‘iOS’.
In reality, that’s just not true. The
PCs we care about – such as gaming and performance-focused PCs – are in a state
of rude health. High-end GPUs, which make for a very handy metric, are
practically flying off virtual shelves.
The
PCs we care about – such as gaming and performance-focused PCs – are in a state
of rude health.
However, there’s no denying
poverty-spec commodity PC sales are on the slide. The once plausible notion of
the PC as the central hub for home entertainment looks like a goner, too. More
generally, PCs as a mainstream consumer appliance feel a bit like they’ve had
their moment, which begs the question, if you’re Intel at least, of how can the
PC regain its living room mojo.
Actually, there are quite a few people
working on that problem right now. Valve’s Steam Machine, for instance, is very
much in that ball park, but there’s also this, the latest NUC (Next Unit of
Computing) system from Intel.
More
generally, PCs as a mainstream consumer appliance feel a bit like they’ve had
their moment, which begs the question, if you’re Intel at least, of how can the
PC regain its living room mojo.
Broadly speaking, we’ve been pretty
pro-NUC since the first-generation effort appeared a year ago. It’s basically
an ultra-small-form-factor PC built by the biggest name in the industry, and so
in design and engineering terms benefits from Intel technical prowess and deep
pockets. Of course, Intel’s x86 processor architecture keeps on iterating. So where
there’s a new Intel chip, you would expect a new NUC to appear. And that’s
exactly what’s happened. Intel’s Haswell processors landed a few months ago and
we now have a nice little NUC to go with them.
Almost his
As before, various models of Haswell
NUC will be available, but the D54250WYK reviewed here is the one that most
interests us. That’s because it sports a Core i5-4250U CPU. It’s a dual-core
chip with four threads, a base clock of 1.3GHz and a top Turbo clock of 2.6GHz.
None of which is actually terribly intriguing. What’s much more interesting is
the graphics core. It’s branded Intel HD Graphics, which might have you
assuming it’s the boring old tech from Intel’s previous Ivy Bridge processors.
But actually, it’s the full-on 40-unit job that’s new for Haswell CPUs. Well,
some of them, anyway.
Why it doesn’t get the new Iris
moniker in this format is hard to fathom. Instead, it’s the numerical suffix
that gives the game away. This is Intel HD Graphics 5000, and its other 40-unit
siblings are Iris 5100 and Iris Pro 5200. Anyway, what this 5000 graphics core
doesn’t get is Iris Pro’s 128MB of embedded EDRAM.
It’s
a dual-core chip with four threads, a base clock of 1.3GHz and a top Turbo
clock of 2.6GHz.
That said, with a peak graphics clock
of 1GHz, it’s within a few hundred MHz of the two Iris chips, so in raw
performance terms it ought to be in the same ballpark. In reality, it’s a bit
more complicated than that due to the way Intel is now sharing overall CPU and
GPU TDP, but that subject deserves a story in its own right.
