Iris pro might die, I've seen rumors along those lines. But the high end iris offers little and doubles the price.

Compare the NUC with iris 580 is $600-$700 ish. The NUC with the iris 540 is $340 and often they throw in 8GB ram for free. 580 is hardly a gaming GPU, it doesn't really run much that you can't run on the 540. Sure it's faster, but far from an AMD/Nvidia killer.

So the iris pro might die, but I expect the iris line to continue.

Certainly the popularity of the iris based mac pro will help. Hell I wish more of the skylake iris's were easy to get. I've been hoping for an Iris 550 based NUC or similar system for a quiet desktop. I've yet to find one.

> But the high end iris offers little and doubles the price.

The MSRP difference between the 6820HQ (2.7/3.6, HD 530) and 6870HQ (2.7/3.6, Pro 580) is 12%: http://ark.intel.com/compare/88970,93340

The former is $378, the latter is $434.

I as comparing the NUC systems. Kinda weird to compare CPU prices when you can't buy the CPU as an individual, and those that can buy them typically get better pricing.

What an end user can buy is a NUC, the iris 580 is something like $650 list, $575 street. The Iris 540 version is $400 list, and around $340 (but often with a "free" 8GB ram.

Iris seems generally a failure on the desktop, but seems fairly popular in mini pc's and laptops. Apparently the NUC was one of the few success stories in pc desktops for the last year or two.

I hope AMD prodcues something like Skull Canyon when they release their Zen based APU's. If Zen is competitive this should be really nice since the GPU's from AMD are better.

Ideally with a higher tier version that uses HBM so the GPU is not held back by the memory bandwith.

Sadly the rumors claim the first gen zen will not be APUs.