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Intel's Latest 8th-Gen Core Processors Focus on Improving Wi-Fi Speeds (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the for-the-record dept.

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?

3 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Nah. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Funny

    Also being added to the new Y-series and U-series chips is built-in support for virtual assistants like Cortana and Alexa.

    Oh, hell no.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. Re:"Virtual Assistant" hypetrain? What? by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Funny

    so I expect (and hope) it's just the non-technical Verge misunderstanding some piece of meaningless PR-speak.

    No, Intel is adding new opcodes to support virtual assistants. This will make them much more efficient, since there will be no high-level language overhead involved in processing user requests.

    One of the most significant new opcodes is the SCIFALXWV src instruction, or "Set Carry if 'Alexa' detected in WAV data". This scans the memory buffer pointed to by the source operand, and of length specified by RCX, using a language code specified in RDX, and then uses advanced pattern matching logic to determine whether or not it contains a recording of a human voice speaking the word "Alexa". If it does, it sets the carry flag, otherwise it resets the flag.

  3. 9th gen with integrated facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    ..is going to blow peoples minds. Amazingly faster, you've never seen Facebook run this fast.