When you think about what constitutes a "mobile workstation," several things come to mind. Things like ISV certification, long battery life, professional graphics (NVIDIA Quadro or AMD FirePro), and sometimes a rugged design. But what about the processor? Intel's Xeon chips have been powering workstations for a long time, and for the first time, Intel will offer Xeon processor options for laptops.
These CPUs will be part of the Xeon E3-1500M v5 family based on Intel's recently launched 14nm Skylake architecture. They'll deliver high precision computing horsepower in notebook form factors and sport features such as error-correcting code (ECC) memory that automatically detects and repairs errors on-the-fly. While ECC memory isn't common in home desktops, it's an important feature in the type of mission critical applications that workstations are tasked with.
Intel's Xeon E3-1500M v5 family will be based on Skylake (shown above)
As for clockspeeds, cache, core counts, and other details, Intel isn't ready to get into the specifics just yet. However, the Santa Clara chip maker did say that mobile workstations built around its Xeon line will enjoy Intel vPro technology and Thunderbolt 3, which is a USB Type-C port capable of transferring data at up to 10Gbps, just like USB 3.1 Gen 2.
"And if that’s not enough, Intel will also provide certifications for applications in computer-aided design and engineering, and digital content creation. This is just scratching the surface of what to expect from the Intel Xeon Processor E3-1500M v5 Product Family for mobile workstations," Intel said. "We’re not quite ready to unveil all the details, but as you can see there is a lot for content creators, designers and engineers to get excited about."
No release date has been given, though it's a safe bet that Intel will talk more about its mobile Xeon line at IDF15 in San Francisco next week.
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