At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2013 event held in Beijing last week, the company ran two separate seminars related to "Haswell," one related to the micro-architecture itself, and the other overclocking it. The company detailed improvements to the ways in which you can overclock these chips, without necessarily having to shell out dough for the base clock multiplier unlocked "-K" parts.

To begin with, tweaking Core "Haswell" processors will be similar to tweaking Core "Sandy Bridge-E" high-end desktop (HEDT) platform. Naturally then, overclocking "non-K" parts will be similar to overclocking the Core i7-3820. The chips ship with a base clock speed of 100 MHz. As with "Ivy Bridge," not just CPU cores, but also certain uncore components rely on this frequency. Also, as with "Ivy Bridge," overclockers will be given 5 to 7 percent headroom for tweaking this frequency, but it doesn't end there.

At the ongoing Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2013 event in Beijing, Intel announced second-generation Thunderbolt specification. Pin and plug-compatible with existing Thunderbolt devices, the second-generation Thunderbolt doubles bandwidth over its predecessor, offering devices an enormous 20 Gb/s of bandwidth, four times that of USB 3.0 SuperSpeed. The bandwidth enables users the ability to transfer uncompressed 4K Ultra-HD video without causing display to lag.

To back the specification, Intel announced the "Falcon Ridge" line of Thunderbolt host controllers, mass production of which will commence by late-2013, going into 2014. In addition, the company launched two "Redwood Ridge" host controllers, DSL4510 and DSL4410. The two add DisplayPort 1.2 capability when connecting to native DP displays, improve power management, and reduce platform BOM cost.

During her keynote at the Intel Developer Forum today in Beijing, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, discussed how her company is helping users harness powerful new capabilities that will improve the lives of people by building smarter cities, healthier communities and thriving businesses.

Bryant unveiled details of upcoming technologies and products that show how Intel aims to transform the server, networking and storage capabilities of the datacenter. By addressing the full spectrum of workload demands and providing new levels of application optimized solutions for enterprise IT, technical computing and cloud service providers, unprecedented experiences can be delivered.

It's traditional for AMD to camp outside an ongoing IDF event (at a nearby hotel suite), siphoning off a small portion of its visitors. In the backdrop of this year's IDF event in San Francisco, AMD showed off two of its upcoming flagship client processors, the socket FM2 A10-5800K "Trinity" APU, and socket AM3+ FX-8350 "Vishera" CPU. The two chips were shown running fully-loaded gaming PCs.

The FX-8350 was shown installed on a machine with ASUS Crosshair V Formula (-Z?) motherboard, liquid cooling, and Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. The chip was clocked at 5.00 GHz (4.80 GHz when the picture was taken), and running popular CPU-intensive benchmarks such as WPrime and Cinebench. The A10-5800K was shown running application demos, including a widget that displays real-time boost states of the processor and GPU cores.Source: Hardware.fr

At IDF 2012, Intel showed off an experimental SoC codenamed "Rosepoint," targeted at low power mobile consumer devices. Built on the 32 nm process, the tiny chip combines a full-featured dual-core Atom processor with a WiFi transceiver. This could eliminate the need for external transceivers on Atom-powered devices, reducing the platform's board footprint, and of course, power draw.

The current chip comes with its share of limitations. It supports just 2.4 GHz radio band. According to Intel's Justin Rattner, the chip should scale with Moore's Law, and future versions could have greater capabilities, including cellular data, and built-in antennae. Production versions of the chip aren't due for another two years, so it's safe to assume that Rosepoint is just a development milestone.Source: Guru3D

Ultrabooks, despite their formidable computing power compared to netbooks, inevitably trade some of it for lower thermal/power specifications. LucidLogix feels that Ultrabook users could gain graphics processing power on demand using external graphics cards, that work in tandem with its VirtuMVP GPU virtualization technology. At IDF, the company demonstrated an external graphics card that uses 10 Gb/s Thunderbolt interface to communicate with an Ultrabook.

Lucid's external graphics card is a Thunderbolt to PCI-Express enclosure, which runs an AMD Radeon HD 6700 series GPU. With the VirtuMVP layer running, the Ultrabook uses the graphics computing power of the external graphics card to render complex graphics onto its display, which is wired to the processor's integrated graphics core. Lucid's idea of on-demand graphics compute power allows Thunderbolt-equipped Ultrabooks of all shapes and sizes to lack a discrete GPU, which adds to the device's cost, and taps its limited power and thermal-control resources. At the moment, Lucid's external graphics cards are still in development, with no concrete release date in sight. The concept is solid.Source: LaptopMag

Yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum 2012 in San Francisco the OCZ Technology Group (OCZ for short) provided a quick peek at its upcoming solid state drive named Vector. Coming in a 2.5-inch form factor, the Vector features a Barefoot 3 controller (designed by Indilinx from top to bottom, unlike the Barefoot 2 which has Marvell technology), 2x nm MLC NAND, and a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface. Unfortunately OCZ didn't say anything about the drive's performance.

The Vector is set to be released in Q4 in at least two capacities - 256 GB and 512 GB.Source: Engadget

Seagate Technology announced today that they will be working with Intel Corporation to demonstrate new advancements in solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) at this year's Intel Developer Forum taking place September 11-13, 2012, at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco. In the Advanced Technology Zone of the event, Intel will demonstrate Seagate's latest solid state hybrid drive design, accelerated with Intel Smart Response Technology, which run common office productivity applications almost on par with solid state drives.

Separately, an educational presentation titled "Ultrabook Responsiveness: Performance & Power End-Users Can Feel", will provide details on how SSHD technology combined with Intel Smart Response Technology will contribute to a powerful new combination of performance and capacity in the next generation Ultrabook devices. Solid state hybrid drives combine performance similar to a solid state drive with the large capacity of a hard disk drive in a single disk drive enclosure.

Following last Friday's Q3 outlook lowering by Intel, market punters such as Merrill Lynch cut estimates. Vivek Arya, an analyst with the firm, cut its Q3 and Q4 estimates for Intel, while remaining optimistic about upcoming processes in the company's pitched battle with ARM in the lightweight SoC segment. Arya believes that with upcoming technologies, Intel has a fighting chance against ARM heavyweights. Said Arya in his report:

Next-gen chip manufacturing has become a 3-horse race between Intel, TSMC and Samsung, with Intel holding a 1 to 4 year lead, in our view. As we saw in 1H12, foundries were unable to ramp 28nm capacity, leading to product delays. Rising costs/ complexity (tri-gate) could further widen this gap. We believe this could enable Intel to gain a foothold (vs. zero today) in mobile over the next 2 years, as smartphone/tablet vendors look to Intel as a second or even primary source […] We firmly believe in Intel’s ability to reliably produce the lowest cost and highest performance silicon can help it maintain a dominant position in servers/data centers (20% of sales, 10-15% CAGR), and transition from legacy PCs to next-gen smartphones, tablets, Ultrabooks and other converged devices in the next 1-2 years. Investors, meanwhile, benefit from a 3.6% div yield, $7.5bn in available buybacks (6% of mkt cap) and <10x PE.

At IDF Beijing, 2012, Intel unveiled a large selection of its upcoming Ultrabook designs, including what it referred to as "Letexo," a sliding-Ultrabook, which bridges the gap between high-performance Windows 8 tablets, and Ultrabooks (devices with keyboards). MSI is working on one such device, which lays to rest the looming question of whether the company plans to do Ultrabook PCs. The unnamed Letexo by MSI was unveiled as a teaser picture, earlier today. The device is a fully functional Windows 8 tablet, driven by Intel architecture, a comfortable and responsive chiclet keyboard slides out, when you have a lot of typing to do. We expect to see this device at Computex.

Come 2013, and PC consumers could finally break the shackles of regressive PC resolution "standards" such as 1366x768 and 1920x1080, if Intel has its way. At a presentation at IDF Beijing, Intel expressed its desire to see much higher resolution displays for all computing devices, not just PCs, which could in true terms be "retina-matched" display resolutions. At an optimal (comfortable) viewing distance, the resolution of a computing device's screen should match that of your eyes.

If Intel has its way, a 21" all-in-one desktop PC, and a 15" notebook PC screen will have a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels; a 13" Ultrabook PC could have a resolution of 2800x1800 pixels, a 11" Ultrabook and 10" tablet with 2560x1440, and 5" handheld/smartphone with 1280x800. Compare these to the $500+ 27" 1920x1080 monitors that are still sold in the market! A very bold proposal, but one only a company with the industry prominence of Intel can pull off.Source: Liliputing

Custodian of the Ultrabook specification, Intel pushed the storage industry to churn out slimmer devices to go with increasingly slimmer Ultrabooks sold by the various partner ODMs in the ecosystem. Even as HDD and SSD makers have only just come up with 7 mm-thick storage devices, Intel has a fresh list of changes it wishes to see with storage devices in the very near future, to be able to make it to the constantly-evolving Ultrabook specification. Intel wants near-future storage devices (SSDs and HDDs) to be no thicker than 5 mm.

Further, it wants to see the standard SATA host interface changed from "around" (out of) form, to "along" (inside) form host interface, which further slims down the drive compartment. These proposals were floated at IDF, Beijing. While coming up with slimmer SSDs was never really a tough task for SSD makers, as SSDs are essentially just millimeter-thick printed circuit boards with millimeter-thick components (controller logic, NAND flash memory, and ancillaries), it posed a huge technical challange to mechanical HDD designers, who have had to slim down key components that work to maintain inertial motion of spinning platters. This new proposal for 5 mm-thick HDDs could pose a newer, tougher desgin challenge.Source: VR-Zone

Intel is on the brink of launching its new line of enterprise PCI-Express SSDs, codenamed "Ramsdale", carrying the market name "SSD 910 Series". The new SSD 910 series is coming to existence leapfrogging SSD 710 series, which was also codenamed "Ramsdale", but never made it to the market. The original Ramsdale SSD 720 was meant to be primarily based on SLC NAND flash memory with the probability of an MLC variant, Intel decided against launching it, probably because it was hedging its bets on 25 nm HET-MLC NAND flash, which provides endurance levels closer to SLC, while offering the capacity-advantage of MLC. The SSD 910 implements this new NAND flash standard that attempts to offer the best of both SLC and MLC.

The new SSD 910 will be available in two capacity options: 400 GB and 800 GB. Built as a PCI-Express expansion card, the SSD 910 consists of three stacked PCBs that hold SSD subunits and HET-MLC NAND flash chips, lots of them. Each of these subunits interfaces with the core logic over SAS. The core logic connects to the host over PCI-Express 2.0 x8 bus interface. The 400 GB variant provides sequential read speeds up to 1 GB/s, and up to 750 MB/s writes. The 800 GB variant provides up to 2 GB/s reads, with up to 1 GB/s writes.

Throughout Intel Corporation's developer forum that starts today, company executives emphasized the importance of collaborating with China's government and industry to help create new business and innovation opportunities for Intel and its 14 million developers worldwide. The management team detailed its vision of how such collaborations could potentially spawn the next-generation of advances in business, consumer electronics and many more industries around the globe.

"The impact of major global trends, such as the rapidly growing middle class as well as the explosive growth of connected, mobile Internet and cloud computing traffic, is playing out ten-fold in China," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel Corporation and chairman of Intel China.

Word has been flying round the internet about Intel's dodgy Ivy Bridge DX11 'demo'. Intel's Mooly Eden, VP, PC Client Group was attempting to demonstrate a racing game on a prototype laptop – 'ultrabook' - fitted with an upcoming 22 nm Ivy Bridge processor with a racing wheel attached and allegedly rendering DX11 graphics. However, as is very apparent at the start, it's actually a video, because the control panel for the free VLC video player pops up for a few seconds. Eden then 'drives' a car and after a few seconds puts up one hand and then the other, because as he says "they are driving it from backstage". However, there was no one driving the game "backstage", as it was just a video and Eden doesn't say anything about this at any point in the presentation.

This gives conspiracy theorists lots of ammunition, as perhaps the game was actually played on a high powered desktop PC with NVIDIA or AMD discrete graphics cards? What game was it? Eden doesn't say. "IB can't really do these graphics!" they cry and so on. Sure, man 'didn't' go to the moon, either... However, we believe that while yes, there was a bit of deception going on, it was nothing more than a white(ish) lie. Why? Because Ivy Bridge comes out in April and people aren't going to forget this demo. They will immediately put IBs DX11 graphics to the test with similar games and if it doesn't deliver, Intel will have a lot of egg on its face. Here's what Intel had to say about this demo in an official statement:

Gigabyte surprised many last year, when it broke its decade-long tradition of blue-colored PCBs to unveil its first black ones. Pictures of the first black PCB Gigabyte boards were first dismissed as Photoshop jobs, but after some confirmation, news posts carried quite some shock-value. It's such small things that Gigabyte has known to be quite particular about. Not that it's bad, Gigabyte is the second biggest motherboard vendor because many of its rigid design policies paid off, but some of these could work against the company.

One such has been the company's reluctance to use UEFI firmware on its motherboards. With socket LGA1155 and AM3+, we saw motherboard vendors of all shapes and sizes, including much smaller ones such as BIOSTAR adopt UEFI. Besides allowing vendors to deploy mouse-driven graphical user interface for the CMOS Setup program, UEFI addresses many glaring limitations of legacy BIOS, which hasn't changed much over decades. UEFI allows you to boot from volumes bigger than 2.2 TB in size. Eventually, storage volumes several terabytes in size will become mainstream, and that's when the ticking time-bomb that is BIOS, will blow.

LucidLogix demonstrated today for the first time at Intel Developer Forum 2011 (IDF) the injection of HyperFormance technology into its Virtu Universal GPU virtualization software for outstanding gaming responsiveness, visual quality and frame rates.

"Games are all about creating a suspension of disbelief and a more immersive overall lifelike experience," said Offir Remez, president and founder of Lucid. "HyperFormance technology provides a more responsive game interaction together with a clean visual image, making for a more pleasurable experience."

Back in August, it was reported that the retail packages of some, if not all, Intel's Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 LGA2011 processors will not pack the certified cooling solution like Core i7 LGA1366 processors do. It was also reported that Intel will sell its own-branded cooling solutions separately. It became a little obvious right then, that Intel won't selling dinky-little heatsinks that cost a couple of dozen Dollars. At the ongoing IDF event, Intel displayed its first retail-packaged cooling solution that's not only LGA2011-compatible, but also supports older socket types such as LGA1155, LGA1156, and LGA1366.

The cooling solution is a closed-loop (self-contained) liquid cooler made by water cooling OEM Asetek. Called the RTS2011LC, the cooler is rated to cool processors with TDP of up to 130W. The cooler consists of an exposed-copper block that also houses the pump, tough and flexible tubing that runs to the radiator assembly, which houses a reservoir, and a fancy-looking 120 mm fan. Along with the fan, the Intel logo on the block lights up blue. The radiator used looks similar to that on the Hydro Series H70, a popular cooler by Corsair, which is also made by Asetek. Expected to be available around the same time as Core i7 LGA2011 processors, the Intel RTS2011LC could command a price over $99.Source: LegitReviews

As with every IDF event, AMD camped nearby at hotel suites, showing off its latest. Even as Intel is busy selling Sandy Bridge to the press, AMD has some goods of its own. The green team displayed a notebook development platform built around the Fusion "Zacate" APU, which a dual-core APU based on the Bobcat architecture, with a DirectX 11 compliant GPU embedded into it. A more interesting specification is its TDP, just at 18W, with a more energy-efficient die suited for netbooks, at just 9W (codenamed "Ontario". The test platform was pitted against an Intel Core i5 processor-driven notebook, and the two were tested on casual gaming a run of City of Heroes, and HTML5 web-rendering performance using Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 test suite.

The Intel HD graphics embedded intro the Intel Core i5 managed just 6~7 fps @ 1024 x 768, while the Fusion "Zacate" managed close to 5 times that, around 30 fps, which made the game playable. Next up, the two setups were compared with MSIE9 HTML5 demos. In one such graphics-intensive demo that shows a virtual bookshelf from which you can pick up books, read a teaser, and then buy it off Amazon.com, the Fusion "Zacate" was able to deliver smooth animations, while that from the Core i5 looked choppy. Lastly, a close look at the demo board reveals that Fusion is indeed a 2-chip solution (APU + chipset). Compared to current AMD mobile platforms, it will significantly cut down board area, letting manufacturers build faster, and smaller ultraportables and netbooks. A video of the demo can be watched here.Sources: TechReport, Netbooknews

At the ongoing Intel Developer Forum event, OCZ Technology showed off its upcoming RevoDrive X2 PCI-Express SSD. For those unfamiliar with RevoDrive, it is a PCI-Express addon card that holds a couple of SandForce-drive SSDs in an internal (abstract to OS) RAID 0. The SATA bandwidth bottleneck is eliminated, as the drive connects to the system bus over PCI-Express x4. The RevoDrive X2, uses no less than four SandForce-driven SSDs in an internal RAID. The drive connects to the system over PCI-E x4, and is bootable. According to OCZ's internal testing, the drive offers read speeds of up to 740 MB/s, writes of up to 730 MB/s, and 4K random write performance of up to 120,000 IOPS. An IOMeter session running on the demo rig measured 107,124 IOPS live.Source: HotHardware

If you recall, at this year's Computex event held in Taipei, almost every motherboard vendor scuffled to show of their first motherboards based on the Intel P67 and H67 chipsets, that support new socket LGA1155 socket processors based on the next-generation Sandy Bridge architecture. The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2010 event is presenting many of them a second chance, and we're beginning to see some new designs that didn't make it to Computex. Intel's own Desktop Board division came up with a new Extreme Series motherboard, the DP67BG "Burrage". As with every other Intel Desktop Board, this one looks clean, and well spaced-out. While there's nothing fancy about the heatsinks, the glowing skull is there, and this time it's positioned properly.

The processor is powered by a 4+2 phase PWM circuit, it's wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots for dual-channel memory support. Among few of its kind, the Burrage makes room of all seven expansion slots in the ATX specification. There are two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (x8, x8 when both are populated), three PCI-E x1, and two PCI. Apart from six SATA 3 Gb/s ports from the P67 PCH, there's an additional Marvell-made SATA controller that drives an eSATA port. Connectivity includes 8-channel HD audio, gigabit Ethernet, a number of USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, and eSATA. After being neophobic toward USB 3.0, Intel has finally embraced it on its Desktop Board brand, an NEC/Renesas controller gives out two ports on the rear-panel. This feature-set should put rest to rumors of Intel embedding USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s into its chipset. The DP67BG from Intel should be out when the first-wave of LGA1155 processors make it to the market.Source: Legit Reviews

Rambus Inc., one of the world’s premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed memory architectures, and Kingston Technology, the independent world leader in memory products, today announced a collaborative development of a threaded module prototype using DDR3 DRAM technology. Initial silicon results show an improvement in data throughput of up to 50 percent, while reducing power consumption by 20 percent compared to conventional modules.

As demand grows for throughput-intensive computing in notebooks, desktops and servers, the performance requirements on DRAM memory subsystems rises dramatically. As a result, multi-core computing requires more bandwidth and higher rates of random access from DRAM memory.

Intel Corporation's largest technical conference returns to San Francisco on Sept. 22-24. Registration is now underway for the Intel Developer Forum, featuring 3 days of vision, learning and collaboration at Moscone Center West. In its 12th year, IDF focuses on Intel's technology and platform roadmap directions for the next year and beyond in the areas of digital enterprise, mobility, digital home, software, manufacturing and research.

Earlier this week, Intel conducted the Intel Developer Forum (IDF): Spring 2009 event at Beijing, China. Among several presentations on the the architectural advancements of the company's products, that include Nehalem and its scalable platforms, perhaps the most interesting was a brief talk by Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, on Larrabee. The term is Intel's first "many cores" architecture used to work as a graphics processor. The architecture will be thoroughly backed by low-level and high-level programming languages and tools by Intel.

French website Hardware.fr took a timely snap off a webcast of the event, showing Gelsinger holding a 300 mm wafer of Larrabee dice. The theory that Intel has working prototypes of the GPU deep inside its labs gains weight. Making use of current-generation manufacturing technologies, Intel is scaling the performance of x86 processing elements, all 32+ of them. As you can faintly see from the wafer, Larrabee has a large die. It is reported that first generation of Larrabee will be built on the 45 nm manufacturing process. Products based on the architecture may arrive by late 2009, or early 2010. With the company kicking off its 32 nm production later this year, Larrabee may be built on the newer process a little later.Source: Hardware.fr

The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) serves as a platform for technologists to discuss Intel technologies and products based on or around Intel technologies. With China and Taiwan being almost the epicenters of consumer electronics manufacturing and development, Intel began holding annual events in the two countries, apart from the event at San Fransisco, United States. The IDF schedule for 2008, for example, included events in Shanghai, China and Taipei, Taiwan.

Fresh news emerging from Taiwan, sourced by industry observer DigiTimes suggests that Intel canceled IDF Taiwan 2009, originally slated for November, later this year. The company is holding this as part of its cost-reduction efforts to counter the global economic slowdown. The move comes as a surprise to Taiwanese computer hardware firms affiliated with Intel technologies, as the company has been hosting the IDF Taiwan event since the year 1996. Additionally, the company plans to restructure the IDF Beijing event scheduled in April from a two-day event to a one-day event focusing on China. Intel however clarified that it will continue to maintain its cooperation with the Taiwanese to sustain the country's industrial growth, which it hopes to achieve through presence at the Computex event. The main event held in San Fransisco, however, will not be affected. The company hopes to maintain the event in the same proportions as it was, in the past.Source: DigiTimes