Thread: Anandtech News

Intel just announced, unsurprisingly, Haswell's design is complete and already in the testing phase. Intel just demonstrated the very first Haswell system powered entirely by a solar cell. While it has no plans to productize a solar powered computer, the demonstration clearly demonstrates Haswell's new 1 0 - 20W power target.



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Intel just announced that Haswell (due out in 2013) was designed to reduce connected standby power by 30% compared to Sandy Bridge. The Haswell platform as a whole will deliver a 20x decrease in connected standby power, which Intel believes will enable connected standby battery life to last up to 10 days. The idea here is to be able to put your notebook to sleep and have it continually fetch cloud updates (email, IMs, tweets) for up to 10 days on a single charge.

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Paul Otellini just showed off a Medfield based Android phone (running the "latest" version of Android) and immediately announced a development partnership with Google. Andy Rubin from Google just joined him on stage to announce that all future releases of Android will be optimized for Intel x86 architecture. This ultimately means we'll see x86 in addition to ARM ports of future versions of Google. We already know that Intel isn't the launch partner for Ice Cream sandwich, but it looks like Intel may be in the running for whatever comes after it.

The first Medfield based phones are expected in the first half of 2012. It looks like MeeGo is old news and Intel is throwing its weight behind Android.



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IDF is well underway and we've just gone through the Ultrabook section of the convention center. Everyone from Foxconn to Lenovo had Sandy Bridge based Ultrabook designs at the show. Remember the Ultrabook roadmap is a three year plan, these first solutions will simply bring thinner and lighter designs. There are some common trends exhibited by all Ultrabooks: primarily the chiclet keyboard and many of them make liberal use of aluminum.
Check out the gallery below for shots of all the systems at the show.
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We've been asking for more Thunderbolt devices and it looks like we're seeing the first examples of that today at IDF. Check out the gallery below for a bunch of new storage and expansion devices that use Thunderbolt.
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OCZ just issued a press release revealing that LG is using OCZ's brand new 7.5mm 2.5" SSD in their P220 laptop. Note that regular 2.5" drives have height of 9.5mm, so OCZ's new SSD is 2mm (21%) thinner. LG is utilizing a 128GB model but we don't know if other capacities are available too. This SSD is based on an Indilinx controller, which supports SATA 6Gb/s, but no other specs are known as of now. This is Indilinx's (well, OCZ's since they are one and the same nowadays) first SATA 6Gb/s controller, meaning that we have absolutely no idea of what to expect. We don't know whether this SSD will be publicly available or not, as OCZ doesn't have anything else but the press release about this.
As a whole, thinner 2.5" form factor is nothing new because 7mm hard drives have existed for awhile, for example Seagate Momentus Thin. Intel also offers its X25-M G2 with 7mm height. There are even mSATA SSDs with height of less than 5mm, but the connector is also different.
2.5" SSDs with height of 7-7.5mm might have a market in some ultraportables but most OEMs will most likely settle for mSATA SSDs due to their even smaller form factor. OCZ also joined the mSATA club very recently with their Nocti mSATA SSD.
Source: OCZ


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At BUILD today Microsoft just announced that the same version of Windows 8 Developer Preview we've been using on Samsung tablets for the past day will be available at 8 PM PST this evening for anyone with a Live ID to download and try out.

The platform preview will recieve updates as development progresses, and has no mandatory activation.


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Intel's upcoming 6-core, quad-channel high end Sandy Bridge E platform is due out in Q4 of this year. Intel has demos of the platform around IDF, many of which are using its optional closed-loop water cooling solution.
I'm curious to see how the LGA-2011 platform is adopted by end users. Personally I'm not expecting a lot as I believe Sandy Bridge on LGA-1155 is likely the better value as it'll deliver very similar performance in most areas. It'll ultimately be the platform for folks doing ton of offline 3D rendering, video transcoding or other very thread heavy applications.
Intel split the enthusiast platform into two segments back with Nehalem and Lynnfield. It'll be interesting to see if that high-end split continues beyond Ivy Bridge.
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Intel has been quietly working on its plans for smartphones and tablets. This is a significant departure from the waves it was making just a couple of years ago. Failure to get any smartphone design wins with Atom and the failed MeeGo partnership with Nokia have pushed Intel back into a contemplative corner. Progress is still being made as you can see by this morning's announcement with Google, it's just not front and center until Intel finds itself in a device.
One area Intel has been working on is performance characterization. The setup above is what Intel calls Oculus. It's a high speed RED camera mounted above a platform that can accommodate a smartphone or tablet. Intel uses the camera in combination with a robotic arm to measure things like UI response time and animation smoothness. These types of characterizations have been very difficult to make based on currently available benchmarks (e.g. there are very few UI smoothness benchmarks) but are very important to quantifying the user experience of a platform.
Intel is feeding the data from Oculus into hardware and software development. The goal is to deliver iOS-like smoothness (if not better) across all Intel based products in these new markets it enters.


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Intel has had a bit of a reorg. The photo above depicts how Intel used to work. Core and Atom architecture development happened via independent design teams. Core was optimized for performance, Atom for low power. This is what Intel looks like now:

Core and Atom are developed under one unified design infrastructure. There are still independent design teams but there's going to be much more sharing of design, resources and execution. Core will get more power efficient (really starting with Haswell) while Atom will leverage the performance learnings from the Core side. Everything becomes an SoC, it sort of has already.
Intel reaffirmed its commitment to a doubling of Moore's Law with regards to Atom. Each year from now through 2014 we'll see a new Atom part on a new process node. We'll get 32nm this year, 22nm next year and 14nm in 2014. The goal is to deploy Atom and Core architectures on the same process node with as little lag time between the releases as possible.

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