Seems like skylake is BGA

[QWERTY Andreas]

According to the charts in this link all the new skylake processors are BGA = soldered. Also the Xeon and QuadCore versions.

Not much to say.. A big step back

[600X]

This is old news. However, Clevo is offering Barebones with Desktop CPU's, for those who want to have swappable CPU's. Skylake is also supported. You can get them with a TDP as low as 35W.

[bhtooefr]

Here's specs on the Skylake mobile SKUs, by the way:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/ ... ith-edram/

Relevant to ThinkPads are the 15 and 28 W SKUs of the Skylake-U, and the Skylake-H SKUs.

Possibly most interesting are the 28 W Skylake-U SKUs. 64 MiB of eDRAM, GT3-level integrated graphics, and a 2.7 GHz hyperthreaded dual core i3-6167U, to a 3.3-3.6 GHz hyperthreaded dual core i7-6567U. Sweet spot is probably going to be the 3.1-3.5 GHz i5-6287U, with the same GPU boost clock as the i7.

Honestly, I'd be fine with that in the Retro machine, even though I voted for a quad. (The quads all have HD Graphics 530 anyway, which doesn't have the eDRAM.) Sadly, though, I don't think we'll see those parts in a ThinkPad, as none of them have vPro, so they'd design towards the 15 W parts, which aren't nearly as interesting.

[ajkula66]

However, Clevo is offering Barebones with Desktop CPU's, for those who want to have swappable CPU's.

Very likely to be my next system if I end up buying one anytime soon...

[i2000s]

I guess thinkpad will have both fanless and powerful CPUs empowered models released soon.

On the high-performance end, there has been the world's first Xeon equipped mobile workstation released: http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/pc- ... 484/review

[laowai]

yes, it's BGA, but it's basically all overkill at this point anyways. by the time you have maxed out ram and the bottleneck is actually the CPU, it's typically well beyond time to upgrade.

[jdrou]

yes, it's BGA, but it's basically all overkill at this point anyways. by the time you have maxed out ram and the bottleneck is actually the CPU, it's typically well beyond time to upgrade.

That depends on what tier you buy though. If upgrading is easy then you might buy whatever CPU works right now while if you know you can't upgrade you're more likely to buy close to the top of the line CPU. And if you can't upgrade and you don't happen to like the other changes that were made in the product line later then you're forced to go to some other line. Obviously this is relevant because of the history of Thinkpads over the last few years; you can't trust that buying a new system when you need more CPU will be a simple matter.

[brchan]

CPU upgradeability is nice, but processors have become so fast now that even an entry or entry-mid level processor can probably handle 10+ years easily. Even a T2500 can still handle most web and media content well. This definitely was not the case with the old pentiums over a decade ago. Now for ram, storage, network, and so on, that should be easy to upgrade.

[laowai]

CPU upgradeability is nice, but processors have become so fast now that even an entry or entry-mid level processor can probably handle 10+ years easily. Even a T2500 can still handle most web and media content well. This definitely was not the case with the old pentiums over a decade ago. Now for ram, storage, network, and so on, that should be easy to upgrade.

exactly. CPUs are simply not generally a major bottleneck anymore. if you are doing something that intensive that CPU is going to be a major bottleneck, you are better off with a desktop anyways, and it will be cheaper than a laptop trying to be something it's not.

[Temetka]

Man, I would love to have a 14.1" retro Thinkpad with the Skylake i5 CPU and eDRAM GPU. Finally integrated graphics that are rather speedy without having to rely on a crap AMD or Nvidia NVS chip.

But since that would be terribly awesome, it won't happen. I am very content using my T410 until such a machine exists or this machine up and dies.