Intel Corp (INTC)

[Redwood1205]

Also for Skylake, the most optimistic projection is from the rumor in AT forums, where one user claims Chinese testing of Skylake Y shows 20-30% improvement over Core M in Yoga 3 Pro. Quite disappointing since Y3P's performance is rather horrendous. You are really talking about 10-15% gains here. 2.3 points in Cinebench R11.5 for the yet to be unreleased 14nm Intel chip. That's a chip that's basically 12 months away.

1. Skylake is less than 6 months away from volume availability. Volume production starting very soon.

2. 30% performance improvement and Intel official claim of 60% less power, exceed the improvement from Samsung process improvement going from 20nm to 16nm Finfet.

3. Intel's costs for 16nm are declining pretty rapidly. By all accounts Samsung 16nm will be higher cost per transistor than Samsung 20nm even at mature production which is not the case for either at this point.

In a nut shell, the Sky Lake design, which is likely before any Apple A9, provides more than the benefit of Apple moving to Samsung 16nm and at declining rather than rising costs. Of course Apple may provide improvements over the A8 but at the cost of even higher cost transistors.