Intel Unveils Fanless PC Reference Design Based on Upcoming Broadwell Chips

[scoobydoo99]

...a 12.5-inch tablet-notebook hybrid that is thinner than the iPad Air, ...

Why would you even make such a comparison? A TABLET that's thinner than a NOTEBOOK computer? I should hope so! How is that accomplishment or even a feature to tout?

I don't see anything "hybrid" about it. Either it's a tablet with a touch screen interface or a notebook with a full physical keyboard.

 

[DTphonehome]

I'm sorry to say you are right.

I would probably of had a Mac years ago if, like a PC I could of chose how I wanted it and the price I wanted.

Hey, if Apple are SOOOOOO clever why can't they write an OS that works on almost any hardware combination like Msoft can do ?

Apple could of slaughtered windows years ago if they had done this.

Even now, if OSX ran on almost any hardware combination, like Windows, their market desktop share would probably blow sky high after a little while.

Apple isn't interested in desktop OS market share. They're interested in selling Macs. Releasing Mac OS X for any old PC gets them nothing in return. Plus they'd have to deal with supporting a zillion combinations of hardware.

 

[cube]

You're kidding right? I'm 33 years old and these days technology leaps forward a lot faster than before. Just look at how much mobile computing changed in 7 years since the introduction of the iPhone. Which 7 years can you point out in the 80's or 90's that saw that kind of a change?

CPU performance improvements are crawling since several years ago.

Hard disk capacity too (this should change relatively soon).

 

[Skika]

Why would you even make such a comparison? A TABLET that's thinner than a NOTEBOOK computer? I should hope so! How is that accomplishment or even a feature to tout?

I don't see anything "hybrid" about it. Either it's a tablet with a touch screen interface or a notebook with a full physical keyboard.

What are you even talking about man? It says its thinner than the iPad Air.

 

[cube]

Why would you even make such a comparison? A TABLET that's thinner than a NOTEBOOK computer? I should hope so! How is that accomplishment or even a feature to tout?

I don't see anything "hybrid" about it. Either it's a tablet with a touch screen interface or a notebook with a full physical keyboard.

Isn't it a Windows tablet with an attachable keyboard?

 

[yellowtruck]

Good news. Less likely that the rumored 12" rMBA will be ARM based.

I think the Broadwell delay may have given the idea a major boost to supply their own ARM based chips so as to not be totally dependent upon another company to deliver the heart of their machines. What if Broadwell was delayed again? What if it had been out already, Apple upgraded. Would their cycle in the future remain yearly? Would we have already seen a mac mini update? I hope at some point they offer both ARM and Intel. That seems like the classy “Apple” thing to do is offer a choice. And maybe the mac mini will be re-branded the imac without the screen.

 

[barkmonster]

Mac Mini.

Missing the point there. Since the switch to Intel and the removal of the BTO £1,399 Mac Pro from the range since the initial line up, it's either a Mac Mini, a Mac Pro or a giant glued together laptop for your desk.

The performance of higher end quad i7s used in the Macbook Pro and iMac and quad Xeons in the Mac Pro are so close that a headless iMac or 'Xmac" geared towards the video/audio market that would be easily repurposed as a server Mac would make sense for so many reasons.

People fanboy blathering about Hackntosh, buy a PC etc... whenever this issue is raised really miss the point. There needs to be something other than barebones entry level and over-the-top Xeon niche market workstation (if you could call the iBin a workstation with it's utter lack of internal expansion).

 

[iPhysicist]

This might be Intel panicking and responding to the rumors of Apple moving Mac's to ARM. [...]

Intel has to deliver actual Broadwell's and then we can talk about what looks good and what does not.

Thats just coincidence if you'd ask me... Intel does not have to worry that soon. Think about the corporate market and the industry... they all use intel.
In my opinion Intel has listened and they are on it for a long time now. Apple "asked" Intel to start optimizing their chips for power consumption when the macbook air debuted years ago. Its a time consuming process to build a processor that is energy efficient without sacrificing processing power.

.
.
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I like the new reference design, it is "very Apple" and Intel knows it. The reference design to "ultra books" was very Apple too.

I love competition - without Android (AND certainly Samsung!) we would never have seen the recent shift to customizability they introduced to us for iOS8.
If I like what I see I maybe upgrade my loved iP4 to a cheap iP5s if they really release these big iP6 ...

 

[knewsom]

I don't understand these "cannibalize" arguments. A sale is a sale, I'm guessing Apple always tries to have roughly the same profit margin on everything they sell.

Of course the margin on a lower-priced Mac means less profits, however given the number of comments about people who don't want an all-in-one, I'm guessing the loss of sales (and the loss of potential switchers) is much greater than any "cannibalization" that would happen with a "screen-less iMac" (i.e. decent CPU and GPU).

The only two non-laptop options are, for a lot of people, the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. There is a terrible gap between these two units, both in price and in computing power.

As item quantity increases, so do margins. The more you sell, the less each one costs. The fewer you sell of an item, the more each item costs to make.

I'm sorry to say you are right.

I would probably of had a Mac years ago if, like a PC I could of chose how I wanted it and the price I wanted.

Hey, if Apple are SOOOOOO clever why can't they write an OS that works on almost any hardware combination like Msoft can do ?

Apple could of slaughtered windows years ago if they had done this.

Even now, if OSX ran on almost any hardware combination, like Windows, their market desktop share would probably blow sky high after a little while.

They did, and it can, though not officially. Ever hear of a Hackintosh? MacOS will run on a VERY wide range of hardware, especially with the massive community of hackintoshers.

The reason this isn't done with their blessing is they dont' want to have to support everything and they also don't want to lose all their shiny hardware sales like they did back in the day when they allowed clones.

You gave up? Why didn't you buy the old Mac Pro when it was available?

Heh, I didn't want to spend 3 grand on an out of date computer and instead opted to spend 1.2k on a screaming fast up to date liquid cooled extremely stable machine?

The next Surface should benefit in a big way. Should be a real crowd pleaser.

I quite agree!!

 

[cube]

This might be Intel panicking and responding to the rumors of Apple moving Mac's to ARM.

They don't need Macs, there're Chromebooks for that.

 

[Cougarcat]

You're kidding right? I'm 33 years old and these days technology leaps forward a lot faster than before. Just look at how much mobile computing changed in 7 years since the introduction of the iPhone. Which 7 years can you point out in the 80's or 90's that saw that kind of a change?

It depends on what tech you're looking at. Mobile computing has improved, but raw CPU power has definitely slowed down with an emphasis on energy efficiency. I built my computer four years ago and it can still play almost any game I throw at it on high settings; that would've been unheard of in the 90s.

It's only going to get worse, too, as we're rapidly approaching the limits of silicon.

 

[dblissmn]

Presumably then, this is the next Macbook Air. It was very significant to me that Yosemite has no increase in hardware requirements over Mavericks; it's still the late 2007 Macbook Pro and 2007 iMac as the cutoff. In other words, any old machine will do, so long as it's cleanly 64-bit and has 2GB of RAM. And more so, because the new developer tools strongly encourage more efficient coding.

So the logical direction for the Macbook Air is something that preserves existing performance, but sharply reduces power consumption and complexity. This would be it.

 

[Piggie]

You're kidding right? I'm 33 years old and these days technology leaps forward a lot faster than before. Just look at how much mobile computing changed in 7 years since the introduction of the iPhone. Which 7 years can you point out in the 80's or 90's that saw that kind of a change?

We went from:

Atari VCS 2600 in 1977
Atari 800 1979/1980
Commodore Amiga 1982
Atari ST 1985
Commodore Amiga in 1985

With a massive amount of other companies bringing out home computers (MSX, DRAGON, etc etc) and other games consoles.

We were not getting a bit quicker. We were going from a few blocks of colour to full screen animation in the space of 8 years or less.

Staggering leaps of tech, And yes, every time you generally dumped your software and got a fresh.

Today's people would never cope with that concept, but it allowed designers to start with a clean sheet every machine they made.

Backwards compatibility kills innovation.

We never went from 2.3 Ghz to 2.5 Ghz, to 2.8 Ghz, steps so minute you could barely tell you changed anything, Those were the days you got your new machine and went WOW look how much more advanced this is compared to my old one.

 

[Mattsasa]

obviously for new retina MacBook Air.

and Surface Pro 4.

Can't wait to see what other OEMs create

 

[darkslide29]

A Mac Pro is an expensive workstation. What we want is a mid-size tower. iMac Consumer-grade CPU with PCIe slots.

I gave up too and built a Hackintosh. I'll only buy Apple laptops from now on.

Just curious, is it difficult to update a hackintosh? Say when a minor OSX system update comes in? Anything special to do?
I am thinking of going this route myself in order to have a more powerful machine than my Mini. Thanks.

 

[ValSalva]

Just the opposite of my reaction. I would love to see the Air product line switch completely to ARM one of these days. The A7 computational core has shown what the architecture can do-- they now need to figure out how they want to beef up the graphics and I/O.

I just don't want the go through another processor switch. And having some Mac lines with ARM and others with Intel is a recipe for app fragmentation. Apple has to switch all at once or wait until they are able. Can't see ARM replacing Intel Quad Core i7's in rMBP's or Xeons in Mac Pros any time soon. Yet...

 

[NT1440]

I just don't want the go through another processor switch. And having some Mac lines with ARM and others with Intel is a recipe for app fragmentation. Apple has to switch all at once or wait until they are able. Can't see ARM replacing Intel Quad Core i7's in rMBP's or Xeons in Mac Pros any time soon. Yet...

Why does everyone point to the highest end hardware when discussing this topic?

 

[cube]

I just don't want the go through another processor switch. And having some Mac lines with ARM and others with Intel is a recipe for app fragmentation. Apple has to switch all at once or wait until they are able. Can't see ARM replacing Intel Quad Core i7's in rMBP's or Xeons in Mac Pros any time soon. Yet...

It just needs to run Windows. RT is not a bad idea, there's MSIL for that, push the developers forward.

 

[Cougarcat]

Presumably then, this is the next Macbook Air. It was very significant to me that Yosemite has no increase in hardware requirements over Mavericks; it's still the late 2007 Macbook Pro and 2007 iMac as the cutoff. In other words, any old machine will do, so long as it's cleanly 64-bit and has 2GB of RAM. And more so, because the new developer tools strongly encourage more efficient coding.

So the logical direction for the Macbook Air is something that preserves existing performance, but sharply reduces power consumption and complexity. This would be it.

It's not very significant. The reason for the cutoff is the elimination of 32-bit support. Memory management was improved in Mavericks. I expect that OS X will have the same requirements for quite some time, perhaps for the rest of the OS' life.

Just curious, is it difficult to update a hackintosh? Say when a minor OSX system update comes in? Anything special to do?
I am thinking of going this route myself in order to have a more powerful machine than my Mini. Thanks.

Minor updates are painless, though you will probably have to re-apply a patch to get sound back. I wouldn't recommend it though if you aren't willing to tinker. It is NOT as seamless as a real Mac, and some things like FaceTime can be a pain to get working. The community is very helpful though, for troubleshooting.

 

[GhostRaider]

I kind of wish Intel would put more focus on perfecting the GPU. The processor speeds are fine but their GPUs are still weak compared to NVIDIA GPUs. Its 2014 already and these processors should already deliver great graphics performance on any computer. Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro aren't really that great as they say.

Would have been nice if Intel bought NVIDIA and somehow worked together to perfect an integrated GPU. Apple could then create a slim Macbook but with killer performance. A guy can dream right?

 

[Benjamins]

Heh, I didn't want to spend 3 grand on an out of date computer and instead opted to spend 1.2k on a screaming fast up to date liquid cooled extremely stable machine?

There was a time when people simply don't buy things they can't afford.

 

[LordVic]

It's not very significant. The reason for the cutoff is the elimination of 32-bit support. Memory management was improved in Mavericks. I expect that OS X will have the same requirements for quite some time, perhaps for the rest of the OS' life.



Minor updates are painless, though you will probably have to re-apply a patch to get sound back. I wouldn't recommend it though if you aren't willing to tinker. It is NOT as seamless as a real Mac, and some things like FaceTime can be a pain to get working. The community is very helpful though, for troubleshooting.

yeah, ran into a bunch of issues with updates with a hackintosh.

Somethings worked flawlessly all the time, like LAN and GPU.
but updates kept breaking my sound. even with patching. I ended up giving up on the Hackintosh route when I couldn't figure out why my computer would lose sound when resuming from sleep.

 

[Piggie]

I kind of wish Intel would put more focus on perfecting the GPU. The processor speeds are fine but their GPUs are still weak compared to NVIDIA GPUs. Its 2014 already and these processors should already deliver great graphics performance on any computer. Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro aren't really that great as they say.

Would have been nice if Intel bought NVIDIA and somehow worked together to perfect an integrated GPU. Apple could then create a slim Macbook but with killer performance. A guy can dream right?

I wish Intel would stop integrating GPU's totally and focus on CPU speeds, leaving the GPU's to those who actually know how to make something worth having.

 

[LordVic]

There was a time when people simply don't buy things they can't afford.

what does that have to do with his comment?

he didn't buy something he couldn't afford. He never even said he couldn't afford it.

What he did, was buy a comparable, newer, Better performing product for significantly less money.

that is what we call savings.

All purchases have what is called opportunity cost. for him, the opportunity cost of paying 3 grand for an Apple computer with 2 year old performance was not worth it, when he could buy for less than 1/2 that, a more modern, up to date and better performing computer elsewhere.

its a market that Apple has been ignoring for years.

----------

I wish Intel would stop integrating GPU's totally and focus on CPU speeds, leaving the GPU's to those who actually know how to make something worth having.

Like they did during the Pentium 4 era and Netburst?

LIke when intel in the late 90's promised that the Pentium 4 would be able to hit 6ghz on normal cooling?

The MHZ race is over. it was fruitless and it didn't have the performance gains that everyone was expecting.

Parralel processing and power efficiency has proven overall to be the best way of getting more performance out of a chip than just ranking up the MHZ.

I also don't see how bundling a limited power GPU on die takes away from the actual performance of the CPU itself. Intel didnt decide to lop off 50% of their performance just to bundle in their GPU's. In fact, for everyone who isn't a gamer, bundling in competent 'enough' GPU's on the actual CPU saves them in power, and cooling, since you only need to cool 1 die, instead of additional add on boards.

 

[Piggie]

Perhaps as I simply don't believe "some" of the so called limitations some chip companies go on about.

We see it all the time. Your chip is the best, and you almost do nothing other than rake in the sales.

Then your competitor brings out a new model of chip which places you in 2nd place.

Then, wow, could you believe it, you just the manage to magically make your chips just that bit faster again to get the lead back. Who would of thought it.

Whilst I understand or course we are hitting limitation in areas all the time. I also feel there is little incentive for them to actually do much. Necessity is the mother of invention and so many now are saying "well this is fast enough" there is no killer need for them as there used to be.