IDF 2012 San Francisco with Haswell, Windows 8 and more

Yesterday was the first day of Intel's Developer Forum in San Francisco so over the coming days you can expect lots of Intel news, including snippets about the company's future processor architectures like next year's 22nm Haswell.

Legit Reviews was at the keynote and heard that Intel's Haswell, the fourth-generation Core processor, will deliver twice the graphics performance of Ivy Bridge. Haswell based laptops promise better battery life and up to ten days of "connected standby", 20x more than in 2011 with the Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip giant also confirmed that Haswell will have a mobile SoC version with a TDP of just 10W, significantly less than the 17W TDP of Ivy Bridge's lowest-power chip, making Haswell a better match for ultrabooks and tablets.

The site reports Intel showed a Heaven DX11 benchmark running on Haswell and Ivy Bridge to demonstrate the performance and power difference between both architectures. From the demonstration it became clear that Haswell has much better graphics performance while consuming less power (8W vs 17W).

Intel also revealed that sub-5W "Clover Trail" based Atoms are coming in 2013, and teased a futuristic Coca-Cola vending machine with an Intel Core i7 processor and a 46" Full HD screen.



HotHardware was also at the presentation and made a video of Haswell's graphics performance demo.

We don’t have exact details just yet, but the highest performing GT3 configuration should offer roughly double the performance of current generation hardware. There is also finer grained power and frequency gating, a new hardware block dubbed a resource streamer which reduces driver overhead, and the ring bus which links the CPU and GPU blocks has been decoupled from the CPU to save power. In previous-gen architectures, when the ring bus speed needed to be scaled up, so did parts of the CPU. With Haswell, should the ring bus need to be scaled up to assist the GPU, the CPU won’t be affected.

Another topic at the IDF was the rise of natural, intuitive computing. Intel showed off a demonstration of Nuance Dragon Assistant, an upcoming voice control application designed for Intel ultrabooks.



HotHardware also has details about Creative SoftKinect, a vision-based gesture input for gaming, Mastercard's new PayPass shopping technology, and video editing on an Atom-based Windows 8 tablet.