Tag: Ivy Bridge

Channel cautious on Ivy Bridge notebooks

Posted on August 6, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoSome channel retailers are expected to switch away from Ivy Bridge based notebooks and back to the classic desktop, on the back of weak industry demand.

Plenty of channel retailers, according to Digitimes, are struggling getting rid of their Ivy Bridge notebook interviews and are taking a cautious approach to placing new orders for the classic back to school period of September and October. This is traditionally serves as a boost for notebook sales, but the economic outlook is having varied depressive effects on the industry in general.

Intel Haswell desktops could account for as much as 30 percent of all desktop shipments for the third quarter, above the 10-20 percent in notebooks, so Digitimes believes channel retailers are pinning their hopes on the former.

Ivy Bridge inventories, still reportedly high, will be the main focus for the channel – so Haswell models with touchscreen features may not be promoted until the beginning of 2014.

If correct, a way to read this is Ivy Bridge PC prices could be knocked down for the back to school period, and almost certainly will become cheaper when efforts are concentrated on Haswell next year.

Cash strapped consumers and cautious businesses may not want to upgrade to the highest end gear either, save enthusiast communities. As a result, there will be an effort to popularise low end gear, with cheaper kit coming out like Atoms in Q3 and more affordable Kabini laptops.

Ivy Bridge notebook prices slashed

Posted on May 9, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Intel-logoThe UK market is following in Taiwan’s lead and slashing Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop prices in preparation for Intel’s Haswell launch, resellers have said.

However, they have warned that in the current climate the company is doing itself no favours with the price reductions.

The comments come after a report in DigiTimes suggested  that retail channels in the Taiwan market had begun to slash prices of Intel’s Ivy Bridge machines, which retail from $611, by an average of 10 percent. However, other models were reduced further with discounts between 20-30 percent.

And the orders from above have filtered down to the UK with resellers also feeling the pressure to slash.

“We’re getting orders for reductions too for the same reasons. But, this isn’t anything new, it’s the way the cycle works,” one reseller told ChannelEye.

“I’m not sure about the 20 to 30 percent reductions. At the moment we’re seeing five to 15 percent. But as the date of launch comes closer we’ll probably be forced to slash prices even more.”

However, others claimed the company wasn’t doing itself or the new launch any favours with the reductions.

“Whenever Intel is about to make a new release we see the old models, even if they haven’t been on the shelves for long, slashed in price,” another reseller added.

“While it works for us in terms of not carrying so much surplus stock, for companies it means they are losing potential customers and money with consumers and businesses now taking heed of these sales and waiting until these price cuts happen.

“Once the new products are launched the sales circle starts again.”

Another agreed, telling ChannelEye: “This is nothing new. It’s the way of retail life. But it’s not a good model to follow, especially in this climate where consumers are waiting to pounce on bargains and refusing to pay full price for anything.

“Maybe Intel should concentrate on getting existing lines right before making price cuts and new products that will no doubt be left sitting on the shelf.”

AMD launches battle against Intel over APUs

Posted on April 8, 2013 by - Interviews, News

roytaylorcropAn interview with AMD last week shed light on the latest battleground between Intel and AMD which underlies future changes in computing.  In a meeting with corporate  vice president for global channel sales, Roy Taylor, he said  both AMD and Intel are investing in microprocessor architectures which give equal prominence to both serial and parallel computing. And he claimed AMD is ahead of the game.

Using both the CPU as a serial processor and the GPU as a parallel or GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) processor these new devices form a category that AMD calls the APU.  The APU will be the bedrock of a new generation of x86 based HSA or Heterogeneous System Architecture devices. Current generation APUs such as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and the forthcoming Haswell parts from Intel, and AMD’s Trinity and Richland parts from AMD still use separate memory configurations, with each processor  having its own defined memory block.

But future devices in 2014, said Taylor, will use single memory configurations, allowing both the CPU and GPU to dynamically share a single memory array and be true HSA enabled processors.  Intel’s introduction of an L4 cache to speed up the performance between its CPU and GPU is also an indication of its intentions.

In defense of his argument for APU as a new microprocessor category, Taylor showed a diagram that illustrated the increasing commitment by Intel to a larger GPU configuration in its APU generations.  These indicated, he said, the need for successful HSA architectures to be balanced.
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APUs and Open CL
The growth and success of Open CL, which is able to take advantage of APU devices by using the GPU to accelerate parallel functions, is further ammunition to the establishment of the category, said Taylor.  Popular applications such as Handbrake for transcoding, and VLC Player for watching movies, take advantage of this open standard maintained by Khronos and supported by AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel and Nvidia. Open CL received a strong endorsement last week by the announcement by Adobe that it is using Open CL to hardware accelerate its Premier Pro product.

Since HTML5 also takes advantage of GPU acceleration it seems to make sense that in the future we will see APUs used wherever there is a need for a device which can replace the traditional but separate PC configuration of having a separate CPU and GPU.  “That configuration makes sense for higher end systems’”, said Taylor. But in the meantime currently available APU performance is surprisingly strong, he said.  To this end he went on to show the performance of AMD current APUs compared to Intel’s or configurations using both Intel and a separate Nvidia GPU together.
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When asked what this meant for the channel, Taylor said that at a time of austerity, being able to build relatively high performance desktop and notebook computers at a fraction of their traditional prices could have a huge impact. He may be right but only if system builders and e-tailers recognise the value of the new category and get behind it.

A quick read of the HSA Foundation website seems to show a significant ground swell behind the use of balanced compute architectures.  With companies like Qualcomm, ARM, Imagination Technologies and Samsung also investing in HSA it does seem that we can expect to see strong developments in this area.  It will be interesting to see what Microsoft thinks of the use of APUs to power Windows and whether the software community in general gets behind the category too.

We contacted Intel in Santa Clara for comment but at the time of press had not received a response.