Intel Solutions Summit 2013: Move over ARM, Intel gets a leg up

Intel unveils range of new products that match modern processing and data needs.

MACAU: "My nickname is Touch Me Not!" cried a slightly giddy Intel partner to everyone in the bus heading to the post-gala dinner bash. As his colleagues start to crack up, he added a postscript:

"But I sell Touch!" He was obviously referring to the touch screen technology that is all the rage. There was good reason for him to celebrate. He and nearly 700 other channel partners from 20 countries in the Asia Pacific region were hosted by the chip-making giant for three days of the Intel Solutions Summit 2013 in the glitzy Macau, May 16 to 18. It was a marathon exchange of trade secrets, training, networking and most of all, learning about what was new and upcoming in the stiffly competitive computer industry.
In a grand hall the showcase was divided into zones with something for everyone from the gamer to the government. Stall after stall showed off shiny toys: server raid cards, All-in-One or AIO systems, tablets, Ultrabooks, smartphones. All the big partners were there: Western Digital, Microsoft, Toshiba, HP, McAfee. Here are a few highlights:



Perceptual computing

We are already familiar with face and voice recognition software that are out in the market. Your face is your password. Or for example or you can tell the computer to search for something. But the coolest advancement yet is gesture recognition. You use hand movement to control the PC. All made possible with a High Definition (HD) web cam that is able to detect your gestures down to your fingertips. As the representative demonstrates here, he moves his hand and the glass balls move.



So tiny you miss it: the 4-inch NUC

Intel's Next Unit Computing (NUC pronounced 'nuk') is a 4-inch wonder - it's that little black box in the middle of the four screens. It has the Core i3 processing chip so it is powerful enough to say manage digital signage and content. You can show different images on different billboards, explained the representative at the stall. But more than that, the NUC is a tiny, tiny PC that saves on space.

 



Smartboard - electronic white board

Intel is involved with a partner AOPEN that makes an adjustable electronic white board that will slide up or down after a touch-screen command to adjust to the height of the teacher. The maximum height is 2.1m. It's sturdy because they factored in that kids would be rough. You can kick and hit it and nothing will happen. Pull up videos or presentations in different windows or write on it. It supports multiple pages, as if you laid sheaths of paper one on top of each other. So you want to do a quiz, it's like showing a portion of the question 2+8 with another sheet covering the answer =10 - slide the answer out into the open for the children to see. It costs about US$8,000 with wifi, software.



Big data and bigger storage

The Intel partner Western Digital had plenty of hard drive choices to show off that came in a colour-coded array of blue for everyday storage, green (cool and quiet), black for performance storage and red with the new NAS (network-attached storage) vertical that is going quickly worldwide. There was even a gaming drive. "A lot of the form factors are getting thinner," added the representative. "We're going to announce at Computex in a few weeks time how much thinner it will get [in blue and then black]." But what truly impressed was the My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system. "It is the fastest system-to-system 10 gigabit transfer," he said, adding that it went from 4 terabytes to 8. The good news is that use doesn't wear out the drive. Even cooler is the personal cloud storage for PCs and Macs.
As was explained, these are not toys but productivity tools, which is why their prices start at US$600. But it will do a 20-gigabyte file transfer in less than 4 minutes. Especially useful for anyone working in graphics. For example, a film production team shoots on site. Dumps all the video on a Thunderbolt and couriers it back to the studio for editing. Read more here.



From laptop to tablet

Intel partner Toshiba, the inventor of flash nan technology over 25 years ago, was chuffed about its new Satellite U920t Premier Series Convertible Ultrabook that goes from laptop to tablet in one second. It has a 12.5-inch diagonal HD touch screen. Just slide the keyboard away and the top is a tablet. Here is the Asus version.

McAfee uses biometrics with new security software

At the ISS 2013, the McAfee team was talking about LiveSafe, their new security solution that uses face and voice recognition and a PIN to keep your devices safe. It is expected to be launched in June.
"The LiveSafe technology is going to be an absolute game changer," said Robbie Upcroft, small and medium business sales manager in Asia Pacific at McAfee."You have documents that you want to keep secure, imagine that on scale."
McAfee has been part of Intel for about two years now. According to Upcroft, they were Intel's largest-ever acquisition. "The thing that really interests me is that Intel plays the long game," he said. "They are not about this quarter or this year." They want to worry about what is happening for the last five, ten or 15 years. "The next big battleground is security." The rise of the security-obligated executive, as he put it. Every single person who runs a business or has data that they want to manage has to think about security. McAfee as a stand-alone security company is the largest in the world, he said. "A lot of what we do you won't find in the press."

Published in The Express Tribune, May 21^st, 2013.

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