It’s Saturday night and US-based PR and marketing teams are working hard which can only mean one thing – CES is about to kick off. Acer is in the ring and have already delivered a one-two punch by announcing the Chromebook 15 (CB5-571) with, you guessed it, a 15.6-inch screen. It’s also the first Chromebook to run on 5th-generation Intel Core architecture. With a Full HD screen option and upward-facing speakers this could at least be one for the Netflix fans.

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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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