Intel Corp (INTC)

[mas]

Nevertheless, Intel needs to speed up its Core line significantly. They were too concentrated on bringing power down, which was important, but performance needs to increase more than 10% per generation.

It's a question of priorities. Basically from 65nm Core 2 to 14nm Broadwell Intel has increased performance/clock by a factor of 2-3 while reducing power by a factor of 4-5. It would not have been possible to reduce power by a greater factor than performance increased if the performance increase had not been limited by maintaining a constant quad-issue pipeline all through those generations.

This limited the performance gain but will eventually allow the Broadwell-Y to play in the same fanless sockets as traditional ARM chips which is quite an achievement for a traditional high-performance PC processor. The turbo ones will be able to maintain the traditional Intel high performance advantage but in a new fanless environment thereby increasing the TAM for expensive Intel high performance chips. I suspect having reached this important market positioning benchmark Skylake will change the development priority and concentrate more on performance going forward especially as Atom is supporting it well now in mobile performance.