Computex 2015 has seen the enthusiastic promotion of Internet of Things devices, including a "smart diaper" seen on the show floor and a "smart vase" monitoring air quality featured in Intel's keynote.
The 6th generation of Intel Core processors, the 14nm "Tock" Skylake, was shown off in a 10mm thick all-in-one design with 4K resolution, but no new details about the CPUs were given. Sales of another form factor, the 2-in-1, were said to have increased 75% year-on-year, and they are expected to be more affordable this year. Intel also plans to increase the performance of its Atom-based Compute Sticks and release a more powerful Core M version this year.
Intel's Broadwell Xeon server chips will be featuring Iris Pro graphics. For example, the Xeon E3-1200v4 includes Iris Pro P6300, resulting in a chip suitable for video transcription. More details are at The Platform. Two socketed 65W Broadwell desktop processors with Iris Pro 6200 graphics have been announced. Both chips have 128 MB of on-die eDRAM acting as L4 cache. Other Broadwell desktop and laptop chips have been announced, and should be available within the next two months (followed by the first Skylake mobile chips in September).
Intel wants to bring wireless power and connectivity to Skylake laptops and tablets. Some Skylake devices will use WiGig (802.11ad) for data transfer, WiDi for display transfer, and Rezence magnetic resonance wireless charging. The extent to which PC vendors will commit to these cable-cutting wireless standards across Skylake devices remains to be seen. Intel also formally announced the merger of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP).
Intel has deprecated the current Mini DisplayPort connector for Thunderbolt and adopted USB Type-C as the Thunderbolt 3 connector. Intel intended for the Thunderbolt interface to be used over USB ports in the first place back in 2011, but was blocked by the USB consortium at the time. Now that USB Type-C supports "USB Alternate Mode" functionality, the time has come for Intel to ditch MiniDP, the connector for 100 million Thunderbolt devices (many, but peanuts compared to USB). It has doubled the maximum bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 to 40 Gbps, four times that of USB 3.1. Power consumption is halved, and the connector can drive two external 4K displays simultaneously or a single 5K display, at 60 Hz.
AMD has announced a launch date for graphics cards employing high-bandwidth memory (HBM): June 16th at E3. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU was unveiled and reviewed the day before Computex. AMD's Carrizo APUs for laptops have been launched, at least on paper. AMD is explicitly targeting the $400-700 laptop segment with 15 W Carrizo chips. AMD has demoed FreeSync-over-HDMI, although hardware support remains scarce.
Broadcom and Qualcomm have unveiled 802.11ac MU-MIMO "Wave 2" products with 4x4 antenna configurations. Eight-antenna access points are capable of reaching an aggregate capacity of 6.77 Gbps. Broadcom also announced a 1 Watt gigabit Ethernet chip supporting the Energy Efficient Ethernet standard 802.3az, targeting European Code of Conduct energy efficiency requirements.
Related Stories
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has shared more details about the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in its upcoming GPUs.
HBM in a nutshell takes the wide & slow paradigm to its fullest. Rather than building an array of high speed chips around an ASIC to deliver 7Gbps+ per pin over a 256/384/512-bit memory bus, HBM at its most basic level involves turning memory clockspeeds way down – to just 1Gbps per pin – but in exchange making the memory bus much wider. How wide? That depends on the implementation and generation of the specification, but the examples AMD has been showcasing so far have involved 4 HBM devices (stacks), each featuring a 1024-bit wide memory bus, combining for a massive 4096-bit memory bus. It may not be clocked high, but when it's that wide, it doesn't need to be.
AMD will be the only manufacturer using the first generation of HBM, and will be joined by NVIDIA in using the second generation in 2016. HBM2 will double memory bandwidth over HBM1. The benefits of HBM include increased total bandwidth (from 320 GB/s for the R9 290X to 512 GB/s in AMD's "theoretical" 4-stack example) and reduced power consumption. Although HBM1's memory bandwidth per watt is tripled compared to GDDR5, the memory in AMD's example uses a little less than half the power (30 W for the R9 290X down to 14.6 W) due to the increased bandwidth. HBM stacks will also use 5-10% as much area of the GPU to provide the same amount of memory that GDDR5 would. That could potentially halve the size of the GPU:
By AMD's own estimate, a single HBM-equipped GPU package would be less than 70mm × 70mm (4900mm2), versus 110mm × 90mm (9900mm2) for R9 290X.
HBM will likely be featured in high-performance computing GPUs as well as accelerated processing units (APUs). HotHardware reckons that Radeon 300-series GPUs featuring HBM will be released in June.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @12:50PM
lots of links
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:58PM
I believe in soaking soylenters with information
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:47PM
Man, soaking is when I have 2-3 pints of beer. But that's deluge and drowning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:08PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:33PM
I haven't seen a lot of servers with absolutely no video out on them. Sun comes to mind, but that's about it. Gotta hook a crash cart up to something.
Yes, I realize that's not exactly something that you need Iris level quality for video on. Xeons are used in high end workstations as well, so perhaps that's the crowd they're catering to on this decision, and it was easier to make it standard than fab still more versions of CPU?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2, Informative) by GDX on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:08PM
Actually If you count OpenCL, the IrisPro can be sen as an accelerator for some workloads an then it makes more sense its integration in the Xeon Line.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:46PM
Of course, you can use these processors in high end graphics workstations - the old DEC, HP and SG boxen or yore spring to mind - why would one want to use the word "server" for that context. Maybe they forgot that they can use the word "enterprise" nearly anywhere to mean "expensive, but your company's worth it"?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:45PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by deimios on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:20PM
IrisPro graphics have QuickSync which is a hardware media Encoder/Decoder. Think h265/HEVC.
Also as others have stated they can accelerate certain workloads with OpenCL.
Owerall good stuff that 99% of people will NOT be using in their servers until OpenCL use becomes as simple as editing a config file in /etc to accelerate your web/mail or whatever it can be used for.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:40PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:32PM
and Rezence magnetic resonance wireless charging
Hurray, today I learned about my fourth incompatible wireless charging system.
I wish they were more honest and just said F all this standard stuff you'll have one dedicated wireless charger per device. Like the old days of cell phones when it was one unique charger per phone.
I get the feeling displays are moving to this model too. Every single video card and every single monitor will be made with a new incompatible connector that only connects to exactly one other device. Ditto USB type stuff.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:51PM
Smart diapers ... So you can ignore your child until you know it's full of shit (just like most IoT devices). Sounds useful.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:42PM
My kids are out of diapers but always full of shit. Any ideas?
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:51PM
Retaliate when you're old.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:18PM
Poor parenting?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:21PM
It's actually not hard to tell, if your kid has a dirty diaper. At least with the diapers we have. There is a yellow line that turns blue on the diapers we have. The diaper also has a gel like feel to it when I lightly pinch the diaper, if they are dirty. Sure, newer fancier more expensive diapers will appeal to some, but is there really a need? Now, a diaper that leaves the baby clean when you take it off and all you gotta do is put a new one on. That would be nice. I don't know that such a thing could be made and/or it would be way too big to be worth it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"