TheOverclocker and HWBOT at
INTEL IDF
BEIJING 2013
4TH GENERATION CORE
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Earlier this month, we were fortunate
enough to attend one of INTEL’s most
important events on the Calendar
year, IDF Beijing. Not only did we
attend numerous seminars during the
course of this event, but we were able
to get some inside knowledge from
the people involved on just how INTEL
ticks. Moreover, besides, interacting
with the minds from the firm through
seminars, we also had the opportunity
to meet several employees who
are not only passionate about their
chosen field of technology but very
knowledgeable in CPU and GPU
architecture. For two days solid, we
were practically submerged in geek
heaven learning about what INTEL has
no doubt been planning for years now.
Seeing as we are TheOverclocker
and are mainly concerned with
enthusiasts and high performance
desktop parts, we chose our seminars
accordingly and what we bring you
here is but some of the information
we gathered at IDF Beijing. It is worth
noting however, the forum was more
than just about computing power
using next generation platforms
and technologies. Several Keynote
speakers were actually addressing
computing as a whole and how we as
end users are interacting with our
computing devices. As per usual when
dealing with INTEL, we discovered
some interesting facts about many
things seemingly unrelated to
computing but general society and its
relationship to information and data.
There were several demos
throughout the two days and at turn,
we were intrigued by what computing
30 The OverClocker Issue 24 | 2013
power has allowed in several direct
and indirect ways. Social media
being a big driving force was shown
to benefit in the most interesting
ways from more powerful and
better computing technology. From
nature conservation to resource
management, INTEL covered it all.
Of particular interest to us
as well was the drive for ultraportable devices leveraging several
architectural changes that have
allowed for the most flexible, but
powerful portable devices we have
seen to date. Significant increases in
battery life, hybrid sleep states and
obviously performance advances
have allowed for some unique
usage scenarios that were simply
not feasible with older technology.
The greatest draw for us was all the
information we could gather about
INTEL’s HASWELL microarchitecture
and what gains we could expect from
it. Therefore, what follows is a brief
explanation of what we learned and if
you’re as clued up as we expect you our
readers to be, we can safely say that
you’ll be as excited about HASWELL in
much the same way we are.
HASWELL NOVELTIES IN SHORT –
WHAT’S NEW?
As the technical readers amongst
you already know, Haswell is a new
Tock in the INTEL micro-architectural
evolutionary process. A Tock is
INTEL’s terminology for implementing
a new micro-architecture using an
already known and working silicon
process, In this case the 22nm
process. Previous Tocks were Sandy