Intel Offers Glimpse of PC, Server Roadmap

While Intel CEO Brian Krzanich didn't dwell on the company's traditional markets of PCs and servers during his keynote at this year's Intel Developer Forum, some of his key lieutenants did discuss where those products are heading, even if they didn't formally launch any new processors or spell out the roadmaps in any detail.

I was most interested in the technical details behind the Skylake microarchitecture and the 3D XPoint memory, but there were plenty of other discussions of the traditional platforms as well.

Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, and Doug Fisher, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group, gave a big talk on PCs for gaming. Skaugen noted that the sixth generation of the Core processors (which use the Skylake microarchitecture) have up to 50 percent more performance than the previous generation, and that Intel's Iris graphics can outperform 80 percent of the discrete graphics currently in use. He also said that the Optane SSDs introduced earlier in the show "will be revolutionary for gaming."

Skaugen promoted the idea of 4K gaming (with a demo of three 4K screens, each running at 60Hz on multiple displays), gaming in mobile units, a connection between gaming and the Internet of Things, and virtual reality and augmented reality solutions. Demos included overclocking a K version of the Skylake processor to 5.8GHz, and a great-looking iRacing simulation. Meanwhile, Fisher promoted Intel's software tools for building games.

Talking about tablets, Fisher emphasized the progress Intel has made, and mentioned the company's SoFIA integrated processor, which has begun to roll out.

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, focused more on the opportunities for big data and the Internet of Things than on specific products in her session, which she hosted with Doug Davis, senior vice president and general manager of the Internet of Things group. Davis said the number of connected "things" could hit 50 billion by 2010. Bryant highlighted the importance of data scientists and "the algorithm economy," and announced Discovery Peak, an open-source analytics platform that builds on top of standards like Hadoop and Spark.

Bryant's one real general hardware announcement was that a forthcoming Xeon chip would support the company's 3D XPoint memory, which she said would enable up to 4x the memory as current systems (suggesting up to 6TB in a typical two-socket system), with what she later said was similar latency to DRAM.

On the show floor, Intel was demonstrating the new Iris Pro graphics of the sixth-generation Core processors (Skylake), as well as new tablets running the latest Atom chips and Android 5.1.1.

One thing I found particularly interesting was a product known as Valley Vista, which uses multiple Xeon processors with graphics for high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) and advanced video coding (AVC) in the Cloud.

Also on the show floor, Super Micro was showing a 1U server that could hold four Xeon Phi coprocessors, which are typically used in high-performance computing. Note that Intel plans to launch its 14nm "Knights Landing" version of Xeon Phi shortly – most likely at the Supercomputing 15 show in November – and such a server could pack in a lot of processing power. Super Micro said that this server could also work with Valley Vista processors.