Intel’s Upcoming Processors

My latest home processor upgrade was a while ago, a Q6600 quad-core 2.4 GHz processor with 65 nm technology. I’ve been running it overclocked at 3.0 GHz for years with no difficulties, aided by a better CPU fan.

If you look at the chart above, you’ll see it’s a few generations old. Kentfield was down-sized to Yorkfield at 45nm. Then came the Nahalem and Westmere processors and the (still-popular) Sandy Bridge and its down-sized brother the Ivy Bridge at 22nm.

HASWELL – 4^th  GENERATION CORE PROCESSORS

The just-released and soon-to-be-released Haswell processors are the current rage. They are the ones that have a new, lower-powered design and the multi-fin transistors that deliver faster response and are scalable to have different speed/power characteristics by playing with the number of fins. This is big news and represents a major improvement over the last big improvement, the high-K metal gate transistors of the 45nm Nehalem-era.

For the few of you that complain that I’ve told you all of this before, yes, I know. But it takes several times going over it in different manners to bring it home, so, bear with me. (At least it does for ME!)

The Haswells are an attempt to have a line of processors that scale well from server-grade, down through enthusiast-grade, through desktop-grade and into the ultra-light laptop grade.

NEW ULTRA-LIGHTS

This last category is very interesting to a lot of people who are tired of carrying their “luggable” laptop around, but don’t feel they have enough “horsepower” in a tablet computer or want a “real” keyboard for more than just texting to friends.

These are currently represented by touchscreen and non-touchscreen laptops running Windows 8 (the regular version). My opinion is that the most desirable machines to come out will have a keyboard and a touchscreen and will be able to run all the traditional Windows software, including Photoshop. You would expect them to have an HDMI port or an advanced wireless interface to your big screen TV. They would have USB3 connectors so you could connect to an external hard drive or blu-ray player with blazing speed, when at home. The biggest deals are that the graphics will be quite good for an integrated-graphics system and the battery life should be in the 6 or 8 hour range, and still fit in an extremely-lightweight frame. An additional feature is the use of a solid state drive (SSD). So you keep the operating system and relevant documents on the SSD and other things are in cloud storage or on your external hard drive at home, or, of course, a USB3 64 GB thumb drive.

The mobile processors, made for the ultra-books, use a soldered-on connecting grid, meaning the processor is not upgradeable on the ultra-book – hardly a concern for most of us.

DESKTOPS

There are a variety of fast, low-powered processors. For over-clocking, you might want to consider the “K” series (“K” at the end of the name) which give overclocking ease. Asrock mother boards claim to have a capability of overclocking a wider range of the Haswell processors, but I haven’t checked them out, yet. You have the usual choice between i7 and i5 processors, which is the difference between, respectively, hyper-threading or not. You have the choice of speeds and the size of L2 cache. The top-of-the-line being the fastest speed quad core, K series, with the biggest cache. All of them use the 4600 (“IRIS”) graphics processor, but at varying speeds.  Should be good enough graphics for all but the gamers.

BAY TRAIL PROCESSORS FOR TABLETS AT CHRISTMAS

This is a big change, and is rumored to be related to work at Intel at Hillsboro. The System(s) on a chip (SOC) to come out at Christmas are for the Windows 8“RT” machines like the Microsoft Surface RT ($499). The “bid” deal is that the processor will run either Windows 8 RT or Android (4.1). This is direct competition to the ARM machines and, for “hackers” like me, the opportunity to have both operating systems on the same tablet. It’s a gamble, but I think it will work and, maybe even, work really well. Probably, by then RT will have a service pack and come into its own, as many of the Microsoft operating systems do after the first service pack.

The difference, here, is horsepower. These will have less compute power but be more flexible than ultra-lights, with either Android or Windows apps, and have long battery life and a price range in the $500 range, compared to, maybe, twice that much in the ultra-lights. Unless you catch the Black Friday Special, either processor grade will be expensive for ultra-lights or tablets. Look for the ability to accept a micro-SD card to add 32 GB flash memory or, by then, 64 GB cards.

OVERVIEW

Here, the world will vote with its pocketbook as to which direction the market will go. It’s a bit like trying to predict politics or the news; you take your best guess and wait for some unpredicted event to alter the direction of it. I suspect that low cost (Android) and low-cost SOCs (ARM or, now, Intel) will prevail. But a machine that can also run traditional Windows software is a big plus. So, I will look closely at an Intel tablet-with-keyboard machine that has a micro-SD slot. I don’t need to crunch video-making for You Tube on a portable, and my phone or tablet worked fine for talking to Facebook or WordPress while in Kauai.