Intel launched its 4th Generation Core Processors in the country on the 26th of June at a press event in Delhi. I went there, had some nice food and came back. No, seriously, the food was good. Oh wait, the article.
Haswell’s focus has mainly been on mobility. Performance wise, it’s barely faster than Ivy Bridge (the 3rd Generation) or Sandy Bridge (the 2nd). Thermally, it’s lower performing than its predecessors due to a few factors. One, being that on desktop chips, there’s an integrated heat spreader (IHS) attached to the CPU chip (aka ‘die’), on top of which you install a CPU cooler (that fan you see running on the motherboard). Till the Sandy Bridge days, Intel used to solder the IHS to the CPU.
Ivy Bridge onwards, they started using thermal paste. Which in itself is not a problem, but for some reason there’s a small air gap that remains between the die and IHS. That didn’t cause too much trouble for Ivy Bridge, but Haswell has an integrated voltage regulator that produces quite a bit of heat. Combine everything and you have higher temperatures, lower overclocking margins and in some cases the processor has to throttle back its speed to avoid triggering a thermal meltdown. Laptops are less susceptible to this because they generally don’t have an IHS.
So mobile it is for Haswell. Intel has a number of targets for the micro-architecture. Primarily, these include Ultrabooks, all-in-ones and larger tablet PCs, convertibles and efficient gaming laptops.
Intel talked about 2-in-1 hybrid devices, which can be used both as notebooks and tablets. Unfortunately, my favourite of the lot, the Asus Transformer Book Trio, was not present. Asus demonstrated it during Computex, and is a brilliant concept in my opinion.
Anyway, the push towards tablets and other thin form factors for Intel means they’re now thinking about things like device skin temperature. Which is great, maybe they can tell Dell to stop blowing hot exhaust air into people’s laps.
Intel’s also thinking about things like “perceptual” computing, basically interacting more “naturally” with a computer. While I’d argue that the mouse and keyboard are far superior to most other forms of interaction, some of the new ideas do have merit. Yes, touch has its place, but it’s annoying on a desktop or a laptop. Voice is cool and certainly has its applications; however I’m not going to be talking to my computer in public, especially since these devices struggle to recognise a non-British, non-American accent. Gestures are powerful, but can get annoying if they’re not done right.
Thankfully, Intel’s trying to make sure they’re done right. I believe they’re partnering and investing in companies like Truetech Webs and their “Fluid Motion” (two Indian dudes created this stuff, check it out) technology (similar to the Leap controller, but this uses cameras, allowing it to be more readily integrated into devices) so it’s something I hope becomes more common. AMD was talking along similar lines half a month ago, so we should see a major push in this direction.
Like the Ultrabook fund, Intel’s set aside $100M (in total) for developers looking to develop perceptual computing applications, so maybe give them a call?