Event, IDF 2014

Wireless Connectivity Means We’re In For a Buggy, Laggy And Insecure Future

On Wednesday at the Intel Developers’ Forum, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) unveiled its plan to remove wires from the PC workplace. During a keynote on Wednesday, Intel executives announced that Skylake — the Desktop and notebook-focused successor to Broadwell — would be “fully wireless”. That means that the future, according to Intel, is one where the daily activities for devices of docking, connecting one’s computer to a display, as well as charging will all be done without the use of wires for devices that use the company’s next-generation CPU platform. This wireless experience will be done via a suite of technologies. For charging, Intel will jump

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Event, IDF 2014, VR World

G. Skill Demos High-End DDR 4 RAM at IDF 2014

With the introduction of the next-generation of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) platforms, DDR 4 is finally getting its time to shine. At IDF 2014, memory maker G.Skill turned up to show off its high-end DDR 4 RAM that came complete with a clockspeed of 3333 MHz in a 4GB x 8 modules configuration. G.Skill also brought with it to the show 8GB modules running at 3200 MHz in a 32 GB configuration. The RAM was running on a Intel i7-5960X CPU along with Rampage V Extreme X99 and X99-Deluxe motherboards from Asus (TPE: 2357). The 3333 MHz chips have a 1.35V and latency of 16-16-16-36, which

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Event, IDF 2014, Interviews

Lisa Graff on 'The State of The Desktop Union'

For all Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) wants to hype new unproven markets such as wearables and mobile, desktop along with servers, are still the company’s cash cow. Intel didn’t share much in the line of desktops at IDF, as the company already made its big desktop related announcements earlier this year at the Game Developer Conference in San Fransisco as well as in June at Computex. The company did hint at Skylake, the successor to Broadwell, but didn’t reveal any important technical information (Skylake, however, was old news as its existence had been long leaked already). But as desktop is one of the two main pillars of

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Event, IDF 2014

Broadwell Found To Be More Than Twice As Fast As Snapdragon 800

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is betting big on Broadwell-based processors that will be used in low-power devices like tablets, and more mainstream devices like notebooks. At the IDF, Intel showed off a 12.5-inch reference design tablet running a Core M 5Y70, which features a 2 GHz dual-core 64-bit CPU, 4 MB L3 cache, dual-channel LPDDR3 memory controller and a GPU with 24 execution units and 192 stream engines. The tablet was put through Cinebench’s R11.5 multi-threaded benchmark and managed a score of 2.7, which is around 70% of that of a Core i3 4330, and significantly more than anything in the Atom line, or AMD’s Beema and Mullins

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Analysis, Event, IDF 2014

Intel’s Seeming New Focus: Low Margins But High Growth

After the close of the first day of Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, long term shareholders of Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) may be left with mixed feelings. After all, the company put equal, but not equally prominent time, into its traditional high-margin market — servers — and also to the unproven, currently unprofitable, market of wearables and mobile. Granted, the much awaited and much needed refresh of Intel’s Xeon CPU was Intel’s first announcement of the show — but that occurred at a day zero event before IDF kicked off which lacked the prominence or importance of the forum’s opening keynote. The reason for this is

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Event, Exclusive, Hardware, IDF 2014

Intel: No Answer Yet on Asus’ Extra Pin Situation

On Monday VR World reported on some irregularities with the “extra pin” found on Asus’ (TPE: 2357) X99 motherboards. Asus claims that the additional undocumented pins found on Haswell-E and the sockets of Asus’ compatible boards are used to give users extra stability during overclocking. As documented by VR World’s Nebojsa Novakovic, in its own documentation Asus claims that these pins, better known as “socket 2084,” have numerous advantages when used including better monitoring of voltage, more strapping ability, higher frequency, and maximum Vcore. However, sources that have spoken to VR World say these pins aren’t as special as Asus says they are and are

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Event, IDF 2014, Mobile Computing, VR World

Mobile Takes Center Stage at IDF 2014

Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) second developer forum of the year — the first taking place during April in Shenzhen — officially kicked off in San Francisco Tuesday with a mobile theme as the event’s keynote was anchored around Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and other Intel executives taking the stage to announce the availability of Intel’s XMM 7260 LTE baseband in its first hardware win, as well as a series of developer tools for Android developers, as well as other mobile themed announcements. On stage Intel’s Kirk Skaugen, Vice President of the PC Client Group,  said that the first hardware win for Intel’s XMM 7260 baseband will be in Samsung’s Galaxy Alpha

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Analysis, Event, IDF 2014, VR World

Haswell-E Controversy: What Should Intel Do About Asus And Socket 2084?

IDF is busy, even before it starts – so it was this time in San Francisco with Gigabyte Overclocking competition just a day before the keynote. The OC results from Cookie, Charles Wirth and others were good, with 5.8 to 6 GHz achieved LN2 cooling results on the Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte boards seen here. The RAM on trial also performed well, hovering above 3 GHz for the G.Skill and Kingston part, with Crucial reference DIMMs just below that. However, something far more interesting was found on the overclocking floor (together with our friend Koen from Hardware.info). Remember Asus’ claims about additional pins on its LGA 2011-3 socket,

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Analysis, Event, Exclusive, IDF 2014

Haswell-E Controversy: What Should Intel Do About Asus And Socket 2084?

IDF is busy, even before it starts – so it was this time in San Francisco with Gigabyte (TPE: 2376)  Overclocking competition just a day before the keynote. The OC results from Cookie, Charles Wirth and others were good, with 5.8 to 6 GHz achieved LN2 cooling results on the Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte boards seen here. The RAM on trial also performed well, hovering above 3 GHz for the G.Skill and Kingston part, with Crucial reference DIMMs just below that. However, something far more interesting was found on the overclocking floor (together with our friend Koen from Hardware.info). Remember Asus’ (TPE: 2357) claims about additional pins on its

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Event, IDF 2014, Reviews

Haswell-EP Workstation Preview: Xeon E5 v3 Rocks, But Still More To Go

Today, as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launches the third generation of its Xeon E5 dual-CPU platform, many eyes are on the improvements it brings to the servers in the datacenter. However, the benefits are just as high – if not higher – on the high-end workstation front. First of all, Haswell core means sped-up AVX floating point, by inclusion of fused multiply-add (FMA) ops for theoretical FP rate doubling in benchmarks like Linpack, for instance. Haswell’s AVX2 also, just as importantly, moves integer processing to the wide parallel AVX engines, essentially offloading anything aside the address calculations to the RISC-like, three-address AVX instruction format and wide

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Analysis, Event, Hardware, IDF 2014, Reviews

Haswell-EP Workstation Preview: Xeon E5 v3 Rocks, But Still More To Go

Intel Logo

Today, as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launches the third generation of its Xeon E5 dual-CPU platform, many eyes are on the improvements it brings to the servers in the datacenter. However, the benefits are just as high – if not higher – on the high-end workstation front. First of all, Haswell core means sped-up AVX floating point, by inclusion of fused multiply-add (FMA) ops for theoretical FP rate doubling in benchmarks like Linpack, for instance. Haswell’s AVX2 also, just as importantly, moves integer processing to the wide parallel AVX engines, essentially offloading anything aside the address calculations to the RISC-like, three-address AVX instruction format and wide

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Analysis, Event, IDF 2014

IDF 2014 Murmurings: A True Windows Phablet for Content Creationists?

While flying from Taipei to San Francisco for the usual September round of tech events, one story in this month’s MacWorld caught my attention: one of the editors was speculating how nice it would be to have a true full Mac in an iPhone size. Of course, Apple may be a little farther from merging the OS X and iOS than we thought earlier, but, what about looking at the same thing on the Wintel platform? It could be argued that one big mistake Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)  did with Windows Phone is to compete with Android and Apple (NASDAQ: APPL). Windows OS, as imperfect as it is,

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