The integrated Broadwell CPUs in small desktops are fine. This is not to say
all small systems that have integrated Broadwell CPUs are OK. There are I'm
sure systems with problems out there unrelated to the CPU with many of
them...
That said I'd stay away from Skylake and Broadwell socketed desktop CPUs for
now. There are problems with both. Broadwell has stability issues and bugs in
the CPUs. Skylake isn't supported yet at least without patches, etc.
Hopefully Intel figures out the issues with the Broadwell socketed desktop
CPUs sooner than later. It might be better to skip Broadwell and go straight
to Skylake here although as it's not yet supported its hard to tell.
There might be some issues with Skylake from a libre stand point. I think we
concluded it's not as bad as we anticipated though. Either there wasn't any
non-free blobs or they weren't critical or something like that. Though I
don't remember if it resulted in the loss of power management support or not.
I think power management still worked. Part of this might be the result of
the blobs being loaded by the BIOS and the blobs that are loaded by the OS
are basically optional updates (they could be critical too in theory).
