It's the calm before the storm. The coming weeks are full of big announcements from smartphones to PC components, leaving us to talk about everything we can before the onslaught. We discuss Intel's TV strategy, Microsoft's Surface Pro, the Pebble smartwatch, the removal of unofficial LTE support from the Nexus 4 and Broadcom's LTE baseband. We also set expectations for performance and power consumption on Haswell. Finally, we touch on the recent controversy surrounding range testing Tesla's Model S.

The AnandTech Podcast - Episode 16
featuring Anand Shimpi, Brian Klug & Dr. Ian Cutress

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RSS - mp3m4a
Direct Links - mp3m4a

Total Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

Outline - hh:mm

Microsoft's Surface Pro - 00:00
Setting Haswell Expectations - 00:24
Intel's TV Initiative - 00:31
The Pebble Smartwatch- 00:51
Nexus 4 Removal of LTE - 1:04
Broadcom LTE Baseband - 1:06
Controvery Surrounding Range Testing Tesla's Model S - 1:13

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated. 

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  • Kevin G - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    It looks like I'll have to correct myself a bit. I was browsing ARK and the mobile i3's don't support the 8x+4x+4x configuration. The desktop models do.

    I'm hope for Google Fiber by the end of the year so it'll be a bit of a wait. The impressive thing is that various SpeedTests are having issues saturating the connection. I also offered Cyrus over at Arstechnica a hardware loan when he visited Homes4Hackers a few months ago. Turns out that you can't run a local server according to Google's ToS. Regardless one of my stress tests will be seeing how many people I can host on a MineCraft server. :)
  • tynopik - Sunday, February 17, 2013 - link

    There's no sense assuming they can't do that, right


    wrong

    that is the core of the objection, there's just no way they can get enough content to make it compelling

    simply not possible

    then there's no point even discussing the platform, right


    right

    also,

    Please, please, please get a Tesla to test, it would be awesome!
  • mayankleoboy1 - Sunday, February 17, 2013 - link

    +1 for getting a Tesla based on GK110, and have a Tahiti Vs. GK110 compute shootout. I am sure Asus would be more than willing to lend a card or two for publicity... :D
  • IanCutress - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    If you have suggestions of Compute benchmarks, please email us and let us know :)

    Ian
  • silenceisgolden - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    Either in a reply or sometime in a future podcast can you all offer your opinion on Ivy Bridge - E vs Haswell? I am looking to upgrade to what would be considered a workhorse build, since I'm running an i7-930 currently. I'm running Adobe products constantly, and when I look on Newegg now, the i7 3820 is $10 more than the i7 3770. Currently it would seem like you would get much more value with the 3820, and since I'm going to continue to need a video card for the foreseeable future I don't see a reason to get on chip graphics. Its a workstation basically, so I'm not really concerned with power. Is there any reason to go Haswell over Ivy Bridge - E except that Haswell might be launching sooner?
  • tynopik - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    the answer to this is simple

    there are very few situations where IVY-E makes sense

    1) need more than 4 cores
    2) need more than 32GB
    3) really really rare cases that need more PCI-E bandwidth

    that's it
  • noblemo - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    I would also like to hear feedback from AnandTech. Presumably the primary tradeoff is better memory bandwidth in the 3820 (up to 51.2 GB/s via quad channel memory) versus Haswell's processing improvements.
  • tynopik - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    no

    the difference in memory bandwidth is unnoticeable in the real world
  • JarredWalton - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    That's not at all true. There can be a noticeable difference in performance thanks to the improved memory bandwidth, but it's usually limited to specific applications that actually hit memory more than most. Server and workstation applications can sometimes benefit, but most consumer applications are fine with dual-channel. I believe Ian even has some stuff that he uses for his other job (scientific research of some form I think) that benefits from quad-channel.
  • silenceisgolden - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link

    I was looking at a few graphs on overclock.com that compared the extreme LGA 2011 versions against the 3770K (stock speed) and concluded a noticeable decrease in time for video encode. I've had to encode 30 minute videos before and probably will in the future so I'm very interested in the memory bandwidth argument. If the answer is only that 6 cores is better than 4 cores for that workload then ok, I'll have to see if a thousand dollar processor is worth the added cost - which it might be. But if the added cache and what I believe is better throughput makes a difference, then I'd like to know if there's a better value to be had from a product only $10 more than the 3770.

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