You could hear the collective sigh of relief from computer manufacturers around the globe this morning when Intel announced at CES that shipping had begun on the Broadwell-U family of processors.

Intel has had to suffer through a long series of delays with the new Broadwell processor family, starting in late spring of last year, when the new 14 nm processor technology hit a bump, and pre-production yields of the processors fell far below expected results.

Many computer manufacturers, including Apple, were believed to have new models in development that made use of the Broadwell family. The sudden production problems experienced by Intel forced many to rethink product introductions, forcing some to make speed bump updates to existing products, just to keep their computer platforms from becoming stale.

Apple certainly found itself in the lurch last year, updating many Macs with speed-bumped versions of the Haswell processor family, instead of moving to the new Broadwell lineup that promised, but did not deliver on, improved performance, faster graphics, and reduced power consumption.

Broadwell Offerings

The Broadwell-U lineup that Intel has started shipping is limited to CPUs geared towards the mobile market, with 10 of the new CPUs targeting a mere 15 watts of power consumption, and four beefed-up versions consuming 28 watts. All are dual-core processors in the i3, i5, and i7 family. There are also entry-level Pentium and Celeron models targeted at PC notebooks.

The Broadwell-U processors are pin compatible with the slightly older Haswell-U line, allowing manufacturers to quickly produce updates, although some changes will be needed in the motherboard's firmware to make use of the Broadwell architecture.

Broadwell also sees new graphics, with the low-power 15-watt versions of the Broadwell processors containing HD 5500 graphics or HD 6000 graphics, while the 28-watt processors will include Iris 6100 graphics.

All of the new graphics support DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and OpenCL 2.0.

Of interest to Mac users are the new Broadwell i5s and i7s, which may find their way into future MacBook offerings, as well as base versions of Mac minis or iMacs. Historically, recent iMacs and minis have offered quad-core configurations, but the current Broadwell-U lineup is missing any quad-core options. Because of the lack of quad-core options, any Mac updates may be limited to the MacBook product line.

Intel Broadwell-U Likely to Be Seen in Portable Macs

CPU	Cores	Frequency	Turbo	L3 Cache	Graphics
Core i7-5557U	2 / 4	3.1 GHz	3.4 GHz	4 MB	Iris 6100
Core i7-5550U	2 / 4	2.0 GHz	3.0 GHz	4 MB	HD 6000
Core i7-5500U	2 / 4	2.4 GHz	3.0 GHz	4 MB	HD 5500
Core i5-5287U	2 / 4	2.9 GHz	3.3 GHz	3 MB	Iris 6100
Core i5-5257U	2 / 4	2.7 GHz	3.1 GHz	3 MB	Iris 6100
Core i5-5250U	2 / 4	1.6 GHz	2.7 GHz	3 MB	HD 6000
Core i5-5200U	2 / 4	2.2 GHz	2.7 GHz	3 MB	HD 5500

 

So, how will the availability of Broadwell-U processors impact Apple? If you've taken a look at my Mac Predictions for 2015, you'll have noticed that the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air is expected in 2015, with my guess of a second-quarter ship date. With Broadwell-U processors now available in quantity, Apple may well begin ramping up production soon, and that second-quarter date seems like a good target.

We may also see some of these processors in other MacBook offerings, and an update to the Mac mini, although I think the time line is for much later in the year.

That leaves the iMac, where the dual-core processor could work in the inexpensive 21-inch iMac. The 27-inch is usually configured with quad-core, so we may wait for the next Intel Broadwell announcement before we speculate on the larger iMac.