IDF: 10-Watt Ivy Bridge and Other Surprises

 

I've written a lot of posts on this year's Intel Developer Forum and will have a bit more to say about some of the other companies' hardware solutions later. There were a few things from Intel, though, that were a bit surprising and that I thought were worth mentioning in more detail.

Intel is touting 2013 as the year the PC is re-invented with the fourth-generation Core microprocessor, known as Haswell. During his keynote, Intel Chief Product Officer David (Dadi) Perlmutter showed off the upcoming Haswell processor, saying that Haswell would consume 20 times less power in connected standby mode.

 

He said a Haswell system running at 10 watts or less (the specific system running at about 7.5 watts) delivers similar performance to today's third-generation Core Processors (Ivy Bridge) running at 17 watts. This will enable extremely thin, extremely mobile form factors.

 

But we may not have to wait until Haswell to see Core-based systems running at 10 watts. A new roadmap for Ultrabook systems shown by Intel Fellow Ajay Bhatt indicates that we'll see some Ultrabooks with sub-10-watt Ivy Bridge based parts early next year.

When I asked Client Group General Manager Kirk Skaugen about this, he confirmed that there will be a limited number of such 10-watt designs early next year, based on Ivy Bridge. The number will be limited, though, because it was only late in the Ivy Bridge cycle that Intel realized the 22nm process was working so well it could enable 10-watt parts. There will be much more of a push for such designs, particularly for convertible Ultrabooks with Haswell. Intel is considering a new brand name for such processors, but Skaugen said it might still be called "Core."

Skaugen also  Ivy Bridge confirmed that the first Haswell designs will be out in the first half of 2013, but he wouldn't say which form factors those first parts would be for.

I shouldn't have been so surprised to see better graphics in the fourth-generation Core, as Intel has been ramping graphics capabilities with each generation for the past few years. (Note that AMD's current Trinity-based A-series has generally been a better graphics performer than Intel's Ivy Bridge.) Intel has said Haswell will provide twice the graphics ability of Ivy Bridge, and there will be at least three levels of graphics available for Haswell. I saw one demo of a system with a Haswell with GT2 graphics playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 at a very high level. Another compared an Ivy Bridge system with a Haswell with GT3 graphics by playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the latter system showed much more detail.

There's always going to be a market for high-end graphics. My guess is hard-core gamers and workstation users will be using discrete graphics for years to come, but this means that more mainstream users will be able to play more games, even in smaller systems.

 

There always was a lot of talk getting Haswell to work in very thin and light Ultrabooks, with some as small as 15mm thick. This requires improvements in many parts of the design, from the screen to the keyboard.

But there will also be Atom-based tablets and convertibles, and casually playing with such systems from Acer and Asus showed these to be surprisingly responsive. These were based on Intel's Clover Trail platform, with a 1.8GHz Atom Z2760 and just 2GB of memory, running a 32-bit version of Windows 8. I won't say it was as fast as the Core systems I tried, but it looked like this could surprise many people.