Month: May 2017

Enlarge (credit: Dell)

Most companies that make gaming PCs and laptops are trying to snag the attentions of new "casual" gamers. These customers either can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end gaming device—or they don't want to. However, they still want a machine that can handle their regular bouts of gaming.

Dell's current answer for these customers has been its Inspiron 15 gaming laptop, but now it's adding its first desktop PC to the Inspiron Gaming line. Today, the company announced the Inspiron Gaming Desktop, which it hopes will attract casual gamers who don't need to bring their gaming endeavors outside their home.

Dell's Inspiron Gaming Desktop looks like a standard tower, but with a cross-hatched, semi-open design on its bottom-left side. This design has practical and aesthetic purposes: it provides better ventilation for the PC's internals while also giving the tower an edgy look that most customers associate with gaming devices. The center Dell logo and the inside of the PC emit an electric-blue light, which also fits with the gaming-device style (if you're not into the blue light, there's also a model with basic white light).

Enlarge / Back in February, Intel said only "greater than 15 percent" boost from 7th generation (Kaby Lake) to 8th generation (Coffee Lake) on its incrementally improved 14nm process. Now the company is saying "30 percent" improvement. (credit: Intel)

While Intel's big news today is the announcement of its 18 core, 36 thread, high-end desktop X-series processors, the company has revealed one detail for the 8th generation mainstream processors that are due to be released later this year: the new chips will, at least in some particular circumstances, be 30 percent faster than 7th generation Kaby Lake parts.

That's a huge generational improvement, but of course, there are footnotes to consider. The 30 percent boost came in one benchmark—SYSmark 2014 version 1.5—and applies to 15W U-series mobile processors. The comparison pits an i7-7500U (2.7GHz base, 3.5GHz turbo) with two cores and four threads against an unnamed next generation chip. The new chip has an unspecified base clockspeed, a 4GHz turbo, and doubles the number of cores and threads to four and eight. The 8th generation chip is built on a refined iteration of Intel's 14nm process.

Any further details on the new architecture, codenamed Coffee Lake, are not forthcoming. The chips are still scheduled for release some time in the second half of the year.

Intel

AMD announced its new high-end desktop (HEDT) platform, the 16 core 32 thread ThreadRipper a couple of weeks ago. At Computex in Taipei, it's Intel's turn to update its HEDT platform, and it's one-upping AMD in the process. The Intel platform, consisting of the new X299 chipset and new X-series processors, will go all the way up to 18 cores and 36 threads.

The HEDT segment is aimed at gamers, video streamers, and content creators with deep pockets or an insatiable desire for more concurrent threads than the mainstream processor segment has to offer. The value proposition for this segment is always a little skewed, with the chips being as much prestige parts as anything else. Straightforward gaming workloads may struggled to make full use of the chips' resources, but serious Twitch streamers, for example, can make good use of the extra cores. Software developers are another group that can make good use of all those cores.