Although on paper it seems like there is not much difference, the 15w 540 will never reach maximum clocks as they throttle like crazy. On my surface pro 4 i7 within a minute of cpu and gpu the core clocks drop to about 1.3ghz and gpu drops to about 600-700mhz
For the first minute the performance is amazing when the clocks are at max. The iris 550 with 25w thermal budget will retain is stated clocks so the performance will be much better
So is there a big difference between the 2 the non touch bar has the 540 and the touchbar has the 550
I played CIV VI for several hours at 1440x900 while swiping out of the game to do other things browse message in between turns. Wattage stayed at 22-23 the whole time. Temps were around 80 Celsius. I wasn't monitoring clocks on the CPU only wattage. The gpu was using roughly 13 watts that whole time the rest was the CPU it looked to Be using about 50-60% of CPU.
LGIR627, did you decide on which model to get? I am in the same boat right now.so, do we know for sure that the TB 550 is/will be significantly faster in real life than the non-TB 540? I have no interest in the actual touchbar but this issue is important to me