The 2013 Intel Developer Forum is taking place in Beijing, China, where company executives announced new technologies and partnerships that will transform the technology experience from the device to the cloud. The announcements included details on new data center product lines based on the 22 nm process technology and the new Intel rack scale architecture, as well as the upcoming 4th generation Intel Core processor family.
Diane Bryant, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the data center was important in enabling personal computing systems to deliver real-time information and services. She also outlined the steps that Intel is taking to provide both the hardware and the software needed for data analytics to improve the capabilities of intelligent devices as well as data center infrastructure. “People are increasingly demanding more from their devices through applications and services whether at home, at work or wherever they may be,” Bryant said. “Intel is delivering a powerful portfolio of hardware and software computing technologies from the device to the data center that can improve experiences and enable new services.”
Bryant also outlined the plans to accelerate the expansion of Intel’s offerings in the data center processor product lines, which are also based on the 22 nm manufacturing technology before the end of the year. These offerings will help cut costs and raise the efficiency of data centers. One of these offerings is the Intel Atom S12x9, which will follow the Intel Atom S1200 processor for microservers. Intel will also bring two more Intel Atom processors to market which will improve performance per watt, deliver new architectures and have an expanded feature set by the end of this year.
Intel also demonstrated for the first time the next-generation Intel Atom processor family for microservers (Avoton). Intel is shipping samples to customers for evaluation. Avoton will have an integrated Ethernet controller and is also expected to deliver industry-leading energy efficiency and performance-per-watt for microservers and scale out workloads, allowing microservers and data centers to operate more efficiently than before.
Kirk Skaugen, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, touched more on the 4th generation Intel Core processor family, which will launch later this quarter. “Ultrabooks based on the 4th generation Intel Core processor family will enable exciting, new computing experiences and all-day battery life delivering the most significant battery life capability improvement in Intel’s history,” said Skaugen. “It will also bring to consumers a new wave of ‘two-for-one’ convertible and detachable systems that combine the best of a full PC experience with the best of a tablet in amazing new form factors.”
The new Intel Core microarchitecture will allow the company to deliver up to double the graphics performance over the previous generation. The new graphics solution will also have high levels of integration to enable new form factors and designs with excellent built-in visual quality. Skaugen demonstrated these graphics improvements on the 4th generation Intel Core processor-based ultrabook reference design (Harris Beach). The demo featured popular game Dirt 3 and showed the same visual experience and gameplay as a discrete graphics card that would otherwise have to be added separately. He also featured the 4th generation Intel Core processor-based concept (Niagara), a premium notebook with the ability to play another graphics intensive game, Grid 2, without a discrete graphics card.
Along with touch capability, Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) will be enabled on all 4th generation Intel Core processor-based ultrabooks to allow people to quickly and securely stream content and apps from devices to the big screen without using cables. “The China ecosystem is taking the lead on integrating Intel WiDi into systems,” Skaugen said. He also announced that the leading television manufacturer in China, TCL, has a new model with the Intel WiDi technology built in. Skaugen announced new receivers certified for Intel WiDi from QVOD and Lenovo and a set-top box from Gehua. Skaugen also announced new market variants of the 22 nm (Bay Trail) system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed for convertible devices, laptops, desktops, and all-in-one computers.
Tan Weng Kuan, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Communications Group, Intel China, announced how the company will work with ecosystem partners to bring Intel processors to smartphones and tablets. Tan talked about the new Intel Atom Z2580 processor (Clover Trail+) for smartphones and the Intel Atom Z2760 processor (Clover Trail) for tablets. Intel processors will support multiple mobile operating systems, including Windows 8 and Android. Intel also announced that their quad-core Atom SoC (Bay Trail) will be their most powerful Atom processor, and will have double the computing power of the current-generation tablet offering, along with all-day battery life and weeks of standby power. Bay Trail will be released in holiday of 2013. Tan also announced another SoC (Merrifield) which will ship at the end of this year and deliver increased smartphone performance, power efficiency and battery life. Tan also called on Chinese developers to help advance the mobile market, and announced a China-specific expansion of the company’s platform and ecosystem enabling efforts, particularly focusing on the Atom processor-based tablets running Android.
For more information on the Intel Developer Forum, you can visit www.intel.com/idf.