Intel Core iFamily launch Live Blog

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 21 January 2010 09:14

Opinion and Analysis

Intel launch live blog - Core i3, i5 and i7 family of processors and many PCs from a range of vendors! Read on and regularly refresh...

Philip Cronin, Intel Australia MD takes the stage, and explains that there'll soon be 400 designs with Core processors very shortly on the market.

High-end users have ceased to be, technology is now the domain of the everyday user...\

Three things Philip wants to touch on.

1. Online video consumption has soared. YouTube is one of the biggest video search engines, and it used to be younger people that were most interested, but now more and more users are accessing and consuming content and doing things with it, in different age groups.

2. The Creation of Content - increasingly in high-definition. Typically it was a still photo or a small clip - but at CES those Flip HD cameras were everywhere and then shooting it off to wherever you wanted it to go - gigabites of information, moving around. Consumption and increasingly creation of content.

Paul Budde suggests that personal video will be 75% of broadband consumption, says Philip Cronin...

So, consumption and content creation on the other side.

3. "Today is so yesterday", says Intel.

Now, the new Intel 2010 Core Processor family is set to launch... the tick in our tock from the tick-tock model, based on 32nm technology.

"If you look through the launch room, the Australian market will very quickly start to adopt these products", explains Philip.

So, there's the i3, the i5 and the i7.

What are the core strengths? One is HD graphics integrated onto the 32nm processors - put them onto the CPU.

Graeme Tucker, one of Intel Australia's technical executives, is now demonstrating the HD graphics capabilities, using Intel HD graphics - a second die on the package (45nm dedicated to graphics) which is closely coupled to the 32nm core.

It's the first time Intel has integrated graphics onto the processor.

We're about to see a demo of Picture in Picture capability watching the movie "Madagascar 2".

We can see less than 5% processor use on a Core i5 to deliver the picture-in-picture capability on an integrated configuration that previously would have required discrete graphics.

Now back to Philip Cronin, Intel Australia MD...

"We're taking graphics to the processor"... "it's not just faster, it's smarter". HD Graphics runs right across Core i3, i5 and i7.

We're now seeing two PCs side-by-side, one is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and the other is using a hyperthreading Core i5 running at 2.4GHz.

We're a bout to see some CES content, some personally recorded video of hamburgers that were being eaten for lunch.

The Core i5 has finished in 18.6 seconds, the older Core 2 Duo took more than double the time at 39.4 seconds.

Some apps lend themselves to hyperthreading such as this one, using Win 7 and Windows Photo Media Gallery to encode that video for Youtube.

Naturally, the Core i5 unit with hyperthreading looks like it has four cores in "Task Manager" when it's has two real cores and two hyperthreaded ones.

Next up is Intel's TTurbo Boost Technology - which automatically provides a boost when needed, or will throttle back and use less electricity when not needed.

In a notebook context - battery life being a key concern - with the Core i5 or i7, you can throttle up or down on the fly and choose to extend the battery life as much as possible if desired.

Now time for the Turbo Boost demo...

We're using the same two HP machines as before, configured the same way (Core 2 duo and Core i5). We're going to see some photos stitched together. The demo is kicking off.

On the left is the Core 2 Duo, the right the Core i5. On the i5, which runs at 2.4GHz, but we can see Turbo Boost accelerating the frequency of the core up to 2.9GHz... 23.4 seconds in total for the photo stitching versus 28.5 seconds on the older Core 2 Duo.

This "turbo boost" is now everyday stuff, "available to everybody".

The Live Blog continues on page 2, please read on...