Intel Haswell and Tablets – The future of computing

Like many enthusiasts, I’m very excited about Intel’s upcoming Haswell chips, and I’m really hoping that Intel can deliver on the hype. If you want more information on this new architecture, there’s nothing better than the ( as usual ) in-depth article at Anandtech.

AnandTech article

Now while any new processor launch gets people excited in terms of more horsepower being available , here we also expect better integrated graphics performance and much reduced power consumption. And it’s that last aspect, together with the timing of this launch that makes this a significant milestone on the computing timeline, in my opinion.

You see, we’ve been hearing recently about how we are now in this “post-pc” era, and how tablets and phones are the computers of the 2010’s. Its something we certainly see , people walking around with massive smart phones and, in meetings, everyone holding an iPad.
But what is also clear to me is that these devices haven’t replaced PC’s for most people. Maybe it has with college students, but not in the enterprise. They are simply complimentary devices.

Enter Windows 8. When launched, I really thought that Windows 8 tablets would change all this. I felt that tablets like Surface would be to notebooks what notebooks were to desktops 10 years ago. We didn’t see that happen in a big way , because the launch of Windows 8 was only the first step.The second important step that I feel will drive this will be the launch of Haswell. Why ?

How does 5 times the power efficiency of current chips sound ?

Xbit labs article

I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for a long time , but an article from Seeking Alpha today spurred me into action.

Seeking Alpha Article

“The advantage of the Windows 8 based tablets and hybrids was supposedly that it can run legacy software, but the disadvantage was that there was an awkward trade-off between power and energy and cooling needs. The user could either buy a rather underpowered Atom CPU based tablet/hybrid that was as sleek and energy efficient as most of the competition, or a much less energy efficient iCore based tablet/hybrid that is thick, heavy, doesn’t last all day but is fully powered in terms of processor needs.
With the new Haswell processors, that trade-off has become distinctly reduced, perhaps it even disappears completely.”

As I said , this is the next milestone and I can’t wait. Of course , we will then have the improved Windows 8.1 released after that and we’ll then be truly into the “PC-Plus” era…..