Thread: Anandtech News

If you didn't follow our live blog you can check out the first Haswell architecture disclosure slides in the gallery below.
Gallery: Haswell Architecture Slides - IDF 2012

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Intel tasked its engineers with building the absolute smallest fully featured compute unit possible. The result is something Intel markets as the Next Unit of Computing. This isn't a standard form factor (yet), but it's fully featured. The 4" x 4" motherboard features an integrated Core i3 with 7-series chipset, mini-PCIe slot, mSATA slot, two SO-DIMM slots and three USB ports. Power is supplied by an external AC/DC adapter, but there's also a small 2-pin header for an optional internal power supply. There's also an ethernet jack and two HDMI outputs.
Since the NUC isn't yet a standard form factor, Intel had to work with a chassis vendor in putting together a reference platform. The result is this:
Later this year you'll be able to buy this chassis, power supply and Core i3 equipped motherboard for around $399. That price won't include an OS but it will include a smallish mSATA SSD. 
Gallery: Intel's Next Unit of Computing Hands On

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Although material on Haswell has been fairly light thus far, we have gotten a few gems. During this morning's keynote Dadi Perlmutter showed off Haswell GT3 (the highest end GPU config) running Unigen, and in the video below we have the same SoC running Skyrim.

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This October Intel will be providing a driver update for Ivy Bridge that will enable 4K x 2K resolution support as well as hardware accelerated 4K video decode. You'll need to use two DP outputs to drive a 4K panel from an Ivy Bridge system, which unfortunately makes it so most existing Ivy Bridge systems won't be able to drive the higher resolution panels. 
 

Haswell will support driving a 4K display off of a single DP output or HDMI.

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Intel had Acer W510 (Clover Trail/Atom based) and a W700 (Ivy Bridge based) Windows 8 tablets in its private press demo room at IDF. Both devices are featured in the video below. There have been some changes to what we reported on at Computex however, the big one is that the W700 no longer has a Thunderbolt port. This is a seriously disappointing change, but I do believe it was Microsoft influenced.
Both the Atom and Ivy Bridge based systems felt really fast. You can get a feel for yourself in the video below:

Gallery: Acer W510 Hands On

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Intel worked very closely with Acer on its upcoming lineup of Windows 8 tablets and Ultrabooks. As a result, Acer is featured front and center in many of Intel's Windows 8 mobile demos.

First up is the new Acer S7 Ultrabook. The chassis features a smartphone-like plastic underside and an alloy top cover. The trackpad and keyboard both felt great, and the entire system is just under 1kg in weight. 

There is an internal fan, however according to Intel it remains spun down most of the time. Storage is SSD driven of course, although Acer hasn't told us exactly what's inside. The entire system looks awesome and feels great to carry around. Windows 8 is going to be an exciting launch and it looks like we're finally going to get some great ultraportable options to go along with it. 

Gallery: Acer S7 Ultrabook Hands On

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I just saw the outcome of a year long effort from both the Indilinx and the PLX teams at OCZ: the Vector SSD (pictured above). Unlike the Octane and Vertex 4 drives, the Barefoot 3 controller here uses OCZ's own IP and isn't licensed from Marvell. 
Although the NAND packages are screened with the OCZ logo, you're looking at Micron MLC NAND on this particular board.

The Vector will be shipping in Q4 of this year.

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Intel announced the Xeon Phi ("Knights Corner") a few months ago and bought the Qlogic infiniband team and Cray fabric team to bolster its HPC efforts. A clear signal that Intel will not stand idly while GPU vendors try to conquer the HPC market. 
Dell, Intel and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) build the first Supercomputer based upon the Xeon Phi, called Stampede. Stamped can spit out 10 Petaflops. If it was released right now, it would occupy the third place in the top 500 list of supercomputers. Stampede will go live on January the 7th, 2013.
The Xeon Phi consists of 64 x86 cores (256 threads), each with a 512-bit vector unit. The vector unit  can dispatch 8 double precision SIMD operations. The Xeon Phi runs at 2 GHz (more or less, probably more soon) and thus delivers (2 GHz x 64 cores x 8 FLOPs) 1 TFlops. For comparison, a quadcore Haswell at 4 GHz will deliver about one fourth of that in 2013.  NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can deliver similar FLOPs, programming the Xeon Phi should be a lot easier to use than CUDA- or OpenCL. The same development tools as for the regular Xeons are available: OpenMP, Intel's Threading Building Blocks, MPI, the Math Kernel Library (MKL)...
Gallery: Supermicro's Xeon Phi Server


Anyway, the Xeon Phi is definitly not limited to ultra expensive supercomputers. Supermicro showed us the Superserver 2027GR-TRF which contain 4 Xeon Phi cards thanks to two redundant 1800W (Platinum) PSUs. The rest of the server consists of two Xeon E5 and 16 DIMM slots in total, supporting up to 256 GB. So it seems that the Xeon Phi cards consume about 300W.
 
 
 

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Remember the 5mm hybrid HDD announcement from yesterday? I just spent some time with the drive itself at the IDF Tech Showcase. 
The 5mm drive will be OEM-only at this point as a result of its fairly unique SATA/power connector. WD implemented the SFF-8038 connector, which is standardized but very rare in the industry at this point. The new connector seems necessary to hit the ultra thin 5mm form factor.

The drive will be available in both Blue (HDD only) and Black (HDD + NAND) varieties. The NAND on the Black drive is hidden by the bottom cover so you unfortunately can't see it in the photos below. WD gave us time with a 500GB model at 5mm as well as a 1TB model at 7mm. The NAND capacity varies from 8GB - 32GB depending on the OEM needs. Both reads and writes are cached in the NAND.
There's no word on OEM pricing or availability.
Gallery: Hands On With Western Digital's New 5mm Hybrid Hard Drive

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With IDF day 1 under our belts and the live blogging engine tested in our

keynote

and

Haswell architecture coverage

, it's time to set our sights on the next big event this week: Apple's iPhone 5 launch. Starting tomorrow at 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT both Brian Klug and I will be at the event covering it live. Check back at this URL to follow the announcements live as they happen.

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