Just a few days ago I was tempted to wrap up this site. The Intel Ultrabook project was finished a long time ago and new products using the trademark had tailed-off. The segment got a bit fuzzy and when Samsung announced that the Ativ Book 9 would relaunch with a Core M processor I was ready to continue the story of ultra mobile laptops at UMPCPortal. Today this site’s near-future has been secured thanks to activities at CES in Las Vegas. The Lenovo X1 Carbon got a refresh with the newly announced 5th-Generation Core i7 and Intel have just referenced the Ultrabook in their press release on the launch of the new range of Core CPUs. Broadwell-U is here!

10 new 5th-Generation Core Mobile CPUs with 15W TDP were launched today and we’re expecting real-world performance benchmark figures to follow.

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Haswell-U series processors were the ultimate generation for Ultrabooks. The goal was to have an SoC with usable integrated graphics in a 15W TDP and it delivered. It delivered great battery life through the new power control architecture, fast video conversion and optimisation hardware and ‘always-on’ through the Microsoft InstantGo feature on Windows 8. The next generation of that CPU, based on much the same architecture as the Haswell-U generation, is just about to reach the market and in just a few days we’re expecting the first real hands-on with products and prototypes based on Broadwell-U. But just how much better is it going to be? A recent test of a new HP envy 15 with the Core i7-5500U processor gives us some clues.

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