Intel's future of PCs: Extra screens, modular computing and laptops that know where you are
Intel is showing off a new laptop design that gives more screen directed at your face as well as a new Optane M15 memory module, building on the recently announced H10 memory module for ultrabooks.
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Following Asus' unveiling of the double screen Zenbook Duo, Intel has revealed its prototype dual display "Honeycomb Glacier" laptop that it's been touting to manufacturers in the hope of spawning a new form factor.
Aimed at folks who are glued to their computers all day, the concept adds another dimension to Asus' design by including a second set of hinges that allows the keyboard-level display to be tilted up, towards the user, which also lifts the primary screen.
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While Honeycomb Glacier is targeted at gamers, Intel highlights its usefulness for browsing the web, editing photos, and watching video content and using chat apps.
Intel says it is working with PC makers to bring computers like its concept design to consumers and the first of these is Asus' ZenBook Pro Duo with ScreenPad Plus.
Intel said it was also working on an 'ambient PC' prototype, code-named "Mohawk River", which would show how a laptop can be always-ready and 'aware' of its users, for example by using human presence sensors, 180-degree cameras and exterior secondary displays.
It also showed off its NUC Compute Element: the device incorporates an Intel CPU, memory, connectivity and other components and is aimed at powering devices like laptops, kiosks, smart TVs, appliances and more.
Intel has also announced the new Optane M15 NVMe SSD series, which will be available in the second quarter of 2019 with capacities of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.
The units act as a cache for hard disk drives, promising to deliver performance on par with more expensive solid state drives (SSDs) and giving users faster boot times, zippy app launches times, and faster access to files.
The M.2 80mm form factor M15 SSD memory units were announced at Computex in Taiwan on Tuesday and are an update to the Optane Memory M10.
Intel has boosted the PCIe 3.0 times 2 NVMe interface of the M10 to four lane setup in the M15 and claims to have nearly doubled performance with sequential read and write speeds of up to 2 GB/s and 900 MB/s, respectively. Random read and write speeds have also nearly doubled to 450,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and 220,000 IOPS.
Other specs remain largely unchanged and the 10 gram units have a 5-year warranty.
Finally, Intel announced the 14-inch display AI developer laptop that allows developers to test deep neural network apps using its Movidius vision processing unit in combination with Intel CPUs and GPUs. The PC comes with Windows 10, Windows machine learning, and an Intel version of popular programming language Python.
Intel Optane memory M15 introduces a new class of memory.