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Intel's Latest 8th-Gen Core Processors Focus on Improving Wi-Fi Speeds (theverge.com)
IFA 2018 is here, and to go along with the wealth of new laptops that will presumably be announced over the next few days, Intel is taking the wraps off its latest 8th-Gen processors. There are three new Whiskey Lake U-series chips (Intel's midrange line for laptops), and, for the first time, there are three 8th-Gen Amber Lake Y-series processors. From a report: While Intel is still using the same underlying architecture as its previous processors -- making these new chips ostensibly an "8.5-Gen" lineup, at least where the U-series models are concerned -- the big change that the company is highlighting is integrated gigabit Wi-Fi support. Intel promises that this should result in dramatically faster internet speeds, especially apparent on the cheaper, midrange laptops that may not have been able to offer those kinds of speeds before. Also being added to the new Y-series and U-series chips is built-in support for virtual assistants like Cortana and Alexa. So you should expect to see the digital assistants cropping up on more laptops in the near future. Further reading: Intel Launches Whiskey Lake-U and Amber Lake-Y: New MacBook CPUs?
That's what I think of when I think Intel.
I really dont trust Intel to build secure chips anymore, but god damn the name "whiskey lake" is incredibly intoxicating.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
So now Intel processors can be back doored directly from the nearest WiFi hot-spot. What could go wrong with that?
is improved WiFi? Seriously, I know we're at the end of Moore's law and all but come on. My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows. Maybe do something about that first please?
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Oh, hell no.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why in the name of all that is holy would anyone want "support for" something that far down the application pipeline added to a *CPU*?! Especially in light of the recently very public inability to secure even the most basic aspects of the core CPU.
It's worth noting that the AT article linked (yes, I read both of them first, for all that it breaks the /. ToS :P) makes no mention of this "support" at all, so I expect (and hope) it's just the non-technical Verge misunderstanding some piece of meaningless PR-speak.
I would have liked to have been in the meeting where the on-chip radio product manager was told his feature had to be pushed onto center stage to redirect attention away from the whole speculative execution / prefetch arena. What minor wifi improvement could be spun as the greatest thing since politician retirement announcements?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
No. The chipset and cpu are on the same package for the low power parts. Therefore major chipset changes get equal billing.
Shouldn't the network card of my PC be handling that?
If I ever chose to put WiFi in my desktop, that is.
Not sure why I'd ever want slower internet, but sure, WiFi is an option.
Way to much IO on the DMI bus!
Improving speeds and letting people benchmarks the speeds? Let some other chip do wifi.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Integrated ethernet, wow, why am I not getting excited? I mean, I do like intel network chips, I actually seek them out in a motherboard. But spinning this as the central feature of an entire processor generation? Right.
And I am confused... what is special about wi-fi, that needs special support on the processor?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
lost interest in chip one-upmanship well over 10 years ago.
most computers are just a commodity compute device now...please deposit your 3D glasses in the bin on your way out.
Wow. You/ve got to hand it to Intel, they sure can innovate! Man, we are talkling processor breakthroughs one after another. Geez my head is swimming!
This has nothing to do with CPUs.
First, the wifi is generally provided by the motherboard or an addon comm board... not the processor... and I don't want the processor to have that feature even if it could.
Second, who the flying fuck cares about these assistants especially when you have a keyboard etc?
The assistants are superfluous bullshit. I can appreciate them in the car when interacting with your phone. There is some sense to a voice interface in that singular context. But outside of that? Complete garbage. And to suggest you're building in any way the CPU around these shit applications?
We really need solid alternatives to Intel. The desktop CPU market has been an Intel monopoly for too long.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
My Wifi network is already several times faster than my internet speed, and due to the lack of competition (only one broadband provider here, I can't even get a DSL line, I'm stuck with cable internet), I don't see that changing anytime soon.
..is going to blow peoples minds. Amazingly faster, you've never seen Facebook run this fast.
AMD: we will try to make upcoming Zen 2 architecture more spectre-proof (not that there that many of the various spectre vulnerabilities that affect us, but still)
Intel: with 8th Gen Core architecture, we will make your Wifi a tiny bit faster, and make the various "voice assistant" devices even more efficient at spying on you.
(Forget about the ~20 and still growing list of spectre vulnerabilities affecting our chips, look at the shiny trendy instead !)
huh... what ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
it's just the non-technical Verge misunderstanding some piece of meaningless PR-speak.
Probably Intel just advertising the capabilities of their current simd AVX-whatever-number-they-are-at-now and the GPGPU capabilites (opencl? vulkan used to computer shaders ?) are now so good that the various voice assistant can locally run even larger NN to handle the speech processing, before streaming it to the cloud.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I mean, dramatically faster "Internet speed"? That's just crapola. Fastest Wifi so far is 450Mbps which is way faster than any Internet connection you may have upstream. The thing this can be useful for is local networks with shared drives and similar high data rate sources. And frankly, for a corporate network you'd rather want to rely on cabled networks primarily. Much less congestion and opportunity for eavesdropping.
And I am confused... what is special about wi-fi, that needs special support on the processor?
Chip counts.
Nearly any low-power (ultrabooks, chromebooks, tablets, and everything else with an atom inside) device nowadays has Wifi.
You might as well put as many of the Wifi part as possible inside your main pacakage (basically, everything except the radio itself an the antenna).
Makes less parts, which enables cheaper low-power devices, and might even reduce consumption a bit.
(Though in this hardware class, the display makes the largest part of monetary and power budgets. So don't expect miracles either)
Same logic as putting GPU and PCIe and SATA controller in the same package as already done.
Same logic as smartphone chipsets putting the cell modem in there too (see Qualcom).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's sad, but this is actually the first question that comes to mind whenever any hard- or software announces new features:
"Can we turn it off?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This has nothing to do with CPUs.
Not with the CPU code (not the x86 core itself), but the package.
First, the wifi is generally provided by the motherboard or an addon comm board... not the processor... and I don't want the processor to have that feature even if it could.
In that hardware class where Atoms and co are used (ultrabooks, chromebooks, tablets, etc.) you use SoC : package where you try to cram as many other cores as possible to reduce the number of chips and thus some impact on the price and power usage (the screen is still the largest consumer, so don't expect miracles either).
You already have GPU, PCIe, SATA, etc. in there.
As nearly all of these devices Atoms devices have Wifi, that is just yet another functionality of which you can cram as many former chips as possible (basically, everything else beside radio and antena).
Smartphones have already been doing the same regarding cell modem for quite some time.
Also, it's a marketing stuff. Wifi is popular, telling people that they wifi is going to be better and that they'll stream netflix better is a good attention grabber.
Second, who the flying fuck cares about these assistants especially when you have a keyboard etc?
Not you, not me, not anyone on /.
We could probably think 20 more interesting use of the better SIMD, better GPGPU that this implies.
But bloggers, vloggers and other "influencers" think it's trendy and shiny, and they'll be praising it.
It's basically free marketing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
14nm.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Intel integrating gigabit Wi-Fi support into processors and in the process opening up the kernel to drive-by hacking.
>> My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows.
Yeah. Intel cannot do anything about this. You have only one option: Install Linux.
aaaaaaa
"Also being added to the new Y-series and U-series chips is built-in support for virtual assistants like Cortana and Alexa"
That's just nasty, no thank you
I see no mention in the article for blockchain. And whereas support for WiFi and USB 3.1 is probably going to benefit manufacturers (fewer components to make a PC) blockchain would have a much bigger impact on Intel's stock price.
They're all built in China.
There are a couple of dozen chip foundries in the U.S. at least. Intel has several in Oregon and Arizona as far as I know.
In other words, some people would rather buy a product that's known to be insecure, because some asshats have convinced them that other nations are the enemy and are out to get them. Meanwhile, legitimate bad actors will pwn your machine because you've got a bad CPU in it with some known, and potentially more unknown security issues.
Yes, but the "legitimate bad actors" are chaotic neutral, while the Chinese are lawful evil.
For faster industrial production, the following features will be important and generic:
1-core 64-bit RISC-V + 7nm process + several PCI-e lanes
So, each PCI-e card maybe any thing, by example a GPU card.
If there are 8 PCI-e lanes then they can be plugged 8 GPU cards.
That's great and all, but can we get chips that aren't vulnerable to Meltdown?
They stole and lied to us for 15 years. Thet owe us money.
Never buying Intel againt until they pay up.
Intel, I am ready for my $1.5 Million Dollars.
and had an older CPU. It's a cooling issue. I wouldn't normally blame a CPU manufacturer for that but it's a bloody Ultrabook, which is an Intel spec for thin notebooks that they crammed down the manufacturers throats so hard my company can't get anything but.
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Whatever little-i, you've reached the end of innovation so now you're just bolting on more bells and whistles. Fred Pollock, Intel's fellow and big brain in the late 90's called these "*T" technologies, but their just digital tchotchke. My bet is on ARM's new A series cores taking over the world.
Does anyone buy a laptop on "how well it runs Cortana?"
Actually, does anyone ACTUALLY USE the personal assistant?
It started in the 90s it was all about integration...
Well, take a Ryzen. Problem solved.
(And apparently, there will soon be desktop ARM CPUs too.)
Also, these CPUs presented here by Intel, are not desktop CPUs either, but their attempt to get into what are currently ARM-only markets. (Not that they had any chance, with the crap they're making. Although I welcome any competition to the ARM "IP" criminals, to bridge the gap until RISC V CPUS are cheap and widely available.)