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Chips of the world, Unite: Intel bakes Iris Pro gfx into new Xeon

Plus: New meeting software lets you beam your ugly mug to world+dog

Computex 2015 Intel has, for the first time, baked its Iris graphics chipper into its server-centric Xeon CPUs.

Announced today at Computex 2015, the Xeon E3-1200v4 includes Iris pro graphics P6300. The result is a CPU tuned for video transcription.

If a CPU designed for that workload sounds a bit obscure, consider the many video-on-demand operators who, thanks to device proliferation, need to prepare their moving pictures for all sorts of different situations. The new CPUs are also aimed at desktop virtualisation applications, as Intel says they enable “remote workstations”.

The new Xeons come in five SKUs, all with 14nm architecture and four cores. Details of the five models's speeds were hard to come by at the time of writing.

Chipzilla also used its Computex keynote to reveal a new product called “Unite”. Veep and general manager of end user computing Kirk Skaugen said the product's genesis comes from the seven minutes Intel has figured out it takes to get everything plugged in before a meeting kicks off. To save those minutes, Unite requires a dedicated mini-PC with a vPro CPU. At the start of a meeting, that mini-PC will offer a PIN for meeting participants, who will run a Unite client on their PC or Mac. Once they enter the PIN, Skaugen promised, they'll be in the meeting. Unite is also said to offer “wireless technology that connects immediately to new or existing displays, projectors, or interactive whiteboards”.

The software – client and server – will be free, with Intel figuring it can recoup its investment by selling more CPUs. Unite looks to be aimed squarely at the likes of Cisco and Citrix GoToMeeting, which should make the collaboration market a fun place for the next few months.

Dell, Fujitsu, ASUS, HP and Lenovo will all have Unite mini-PCs in the market real soon now.

Skaugen also used the keynote to announce that Intel has joined the password-banishing FIDO Alliance, in part because its RealSense depth-sensing cameras are a good fit for biometric passwords. He also revealed that the promised merger of the Alliance for Wireless Power and Power Matters Alliance has concluded. The two organisations are now, he said, open to discussions with the Wireless Power Consortium and its Chi standard to ensure interoperability.

Skaugen said he thinks wireless charging is in its infancy and that it will take ten years for it to become ubiquitous. Today, he said, the market is where Wi-Fi was before Intel released the Centrino platform and encouraged PC-makers to include it. That decision, he reckons, accelerated WiFi adoption. Intel hopes the same will happen for wireless charging and also wants all devices - keyboards, mice and phones - to be able to draw power wirelessly from a desktop PC.

Attendees were also treated to a tease of the sixth-generation Core CPUs, due in 2015's second half. Skaugen showed off an all-in-one reference design just 10mm thick, with a so-something-inch 4K screen and the ability to lie flat on a table. There's even built-in LTE and Skaugen joked that Asian markets' liking for very large phones could be satisfied by such a device.

One more thing: Intel announced a new set of gateway devices for sensors and an alliance that sees Ubuntu's Snappy join Windows and Wind River as the operating systems that will run on the device. ®

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