UPGRADE AUSTRALIA
Intel’s Graham Tucker engages the PCPP audience
Already home to Australia’s finest coffee, best small bar scene and the Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne’s reputation as one of the world’s most happening cities was further cemented with the recent Intel Upgrade Australia event. Held at Monash University with support from most of Australia’s leading PC tech companies, the primary partner for this special PC&TA community event was none other than the CPU manufacturer who has been at the core of PC technology for over three decades; Intel.
The event hosted Intel’s Graham Tucker, the local Aussie Technical Manager who has spent a hefty 28 years with the company. When it comes to Intel products, Mr Tucker is the man in the know. He imparted his wisdom on the crowd with a fascinating insight into Intel’s latest products, highlighting how the latest Thunderbolt connection has the speed and power to host any type of peripheral, including external graphics processors. The crowd was lucky enough to see Intel’s brand new NUC design (Skull Canyon), which has a totally redesigned chassis that incorporates a Thunderbolt 3 connection and a quad core Intel Core i 7 processor with Iris graphics. It’s perfect for road warriors who need a powerful system on the go, which can then be plugged into an external graphics processor to deliver rich gaming performance.
Tim: Moore’s Law is dead. Now what?
graham tucker: Moore’s Law is not dead. We’re working on 10 nanometer. I’ve been at Intel a long time, we’ve had challenges in the past and that’s what happens when you’re working on the cutting edge. You do run into the laws of physics. To get to the 14nm process, we needed to re-engineer the whole lithography process. We were getting to the point where the single wavelength of light wasn’t creating transistors the way we wanted them.
In terms of materials – over the years we have done a lot of research into silicon alternatives. Silicon continues to be the foundation of our technologies. We are using some exotic materials like the introduction of hafnium high-k replacing silicon dioxide gate dielectric. There are other technologies that we’re investing in, such as Quantum computing, which is a totally different philosophy in terms of the fact that standard logic doesn’t work. Not all algorithms scale with quantum computing but there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pipe relating to process technology.
Ashwin Nathan: I would like to ask Graham about the new Skylake processor and how its on- board video is going to support/handle next- gen games. Does a consumer have to buy a $1,000+ video card for a decent gaming experience?
Graham Tucker: We have tested Iris Pro on a wide range of games. There are other gaming processor companies in the market, and Intel likes them. The likes of Nvidia are producing great graphics processors that have come down in power use while increasing in performance. But from an Intel perspective, we’ve really focused on bringing graphics into the processor, taking performance per watt with graphics to a new level. So you can fit it into devices like the new Intel NUC – you can’t do that with the traditional gaming processor package. So we have the graphics on the processor itself, with 72 execution units. So yeah, it is good enough.
Audience question: Do you envisage systems that use Thunderbolt 3 as the sole connection type? Power, display, everything?
Graham Tucker: USB 3 is the first step, where we have a single connector supporting all the protocols. If you look back to USB 1, everyone was speculating 1.1. It took two years for high-end devices to happen. But there has only been one manufacturer with Thunderbolt in the last year, but now we’ve opened it up to the PC market and the likes of Asus and Gigabyte, we’ll see a proliferation of devices. As that happens, there will be less of a need to have the other interconnects available.
In mobile computing, we see with USB-C facilitating single wire docking and if you are a gamer, with Thunderbolt you can extend the PCI Express bus and have a high performance graphics engine externally. But we’ve also got to support legacy devices. The other thing about USB Type C, unlike USB, it delivers a lot of power-out. So we can power devices from the USB C ports and the computer itself can be charged via USB-C.
Dale Stohr: In 1993, Intel released its first commercial motherboard code- named Batman. In 2016, where is the ‘ Superman’ motherboard?
Graham Tucker: We’re very careful not to use names that conflict with anyone else’s trademarks, and we protect our own trademarks. So from this point of view we tend to use codenames based on places in the natural world, such as mountains and rivers. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see an Intel codename ‘ Superman’.