I was given the opportunity to attend the launch of Intel Asia Pacific’s 6th Generation CPU in Sydney, 14th October 2015.
The event was held in the Sydney Opera House, which I’d never been in before. Great building, but not so great for phone reception – luckily Wi-Fi was readily available. The event was also live streamed so people around the world could watch and see what Intel had to say. If you missed out, you can still watch a reply of it here.
Intel On Stage
The hashtag for the event was #Experience6thGen and you can check out what people were saying on Twitter – including myself as I live tweeted points I found interesting.
Take home messages from the event for me were:
- Intel are releasing 48 different CPUs for the 6th Generation – ranging from CPUs designed for convertibles, laptops, gaming PCs and servers
- Skylake is the code name for the 6th Gen CPU
- Gaming CPUs are selling great, Intel are seeing a resurgence of console gamers coming back to PC. Intel is focusing more on gamers now along with eSports sponsoring
- CPU sales are still on a slight downward trend, but as an example Q3 2015 was better than Q2 2015, and Intel are hoping this new CPU along with Windows 10 and the new devices coming out help drive growth
- Thunderbolt 3 is supported with the new CPU which is 8x faster than USB 3.0
- RealSense is awesome – 3D Camera support which most laptops will come with. This enables secure face scanning for login via Windows 10 along with a bunch of other cooler things – think 3D printing/copying! Sheldon Cooper can tell you all about it.
- Intel has some crazy new storage technology on the way for 2016 – Intel Optane
- There’s a lot of new devices on their way!
Some of the devices were on display. To get to them, I had to sneak past a robot:
Intel Robot
…then I had to avoid detection of some Stormtroopers:
Looking for droids?
… and I finally managed to make my way to Lenovo’s showcase of devices, with Intel’s new CPU inside.
I spotted:
Sorry about the photo angles, it was very crowded! Personally, I’m most interested in the P50/P70 series of Lenovo laptops because they’re really a decent server in laptop form, go read about them! The ThinkPad Yoga 260 is also interesting for a business user, as a lot of the Yogas lately have been consumer. They all look like decent laptops though, and have their own target audience.
There was also a gaming desktop set up, but I only managed to snap a photo of the awesome red keyboard:
Lenovo Gaming Keyboard
It’s nice to see a focus from both Lenovo and Intel on the gaming community again, which combines with so many people wanting a grunty PC as rich media content creator and editor.
Hi from the event! (I’m 3rd from left)
Thanks for the invite Intel, had a great time and got to catch up with a variety of great people all with an interest in what Intel does. Hopefully I’ll have my hands on a 6th Gen CPU myself, so I can put it through the paces.