Mandy Mock, the Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop, Workstation and Channel Group, part of the Client Computing Group (CCG) at Intel, is responsible for Intel's Desktop and Workstation products and strategy. Today, we're talking to Mandy about Intel's vision for the future of modern desktops.
Q: Intel has been talking about desktop innovation for years, is there any new and exciting current progress and plans that you can share?
A: We are sharpening our focus with a new vision to reposition the desktop as an aspirational choice that offers an amazing compute experience in a defined space. To enable that, we need to shift the perception of desktop from a commodity to a premium want-to-have device. It's more than a standalone device – it's a complete set-up that spans displays, peripherals, workspace and having everything at the ready for work or leisure. Lastly, instead of being in competition with your phone and laptop, it makes those devices more powerful and gives you agency over your space rather than tying you down to a location.
We want users to say that Intel based Desktops and Workstations help them Go All-In. To deliver on this vision, we have outlined four key pillars to illustrate the experiences that we're bringing to market.
1. Know & Enhance Me – This is where we make the desktop personal, for individual or shared experiences. It knows you, is designed for your space, presents you and your work in the best way to the world, and is comfortable for long sessions so you can fully immerse yourself in your task.
2. Emanate Power – This is about being more than you need. You have confidence that your desktop can handle what you throw at it, that it will safeguard your sensitive data and be ready when you need it. And it conveys a sense of your individual power and capability to the world around you.
3. Work when I'm not there – Your desktop will be two steps ahead of you, using AI to recognize your workloads, process critical tasks overnight or while you are away, and increasingly providing predictive analytics.
4. Grow with me – as your skills and aspirations grow, so should your desktop. This pillar is about desktop upgradeability and reconfigurability to keep pace with you as your needs change. It focuses on desktops designed for sustainability and the ability to proactively optimize performance based on user needs.
As people turn to intentional computing, this is how we will lead desktop innovation and reposition the Desktop as an aspirational choice across the Commercial, Enthusiast, Mainstream and Workstation segments. These are all key experiences that tie back to what we are driving with our new Modern Desktop vision.
Q: How does Intel plan to make the experiences highlighted in this new Modern Desktop vision a reality?
A: We're moving quickly to bring our vision to life. Our Desktop teams have outlined what we call winning specs and are actively working to leverage these specs through our high-touch engineering programs with key OEM customers.
These four winning specs, My Studio, Performance Tower, Little Giant, and Versatile Mini, showcase the variety of desktop form factors and capabilities. In addition to these specs, we're also developing a spec called Beyond Display to deliver an enhanced user experience with the PC.
*My Studio: An all-in-one that provides shareability and interactivity with others featuring a large display and advanced cameras, audio and sensors.
*Performance Tower: provides extreme features such as overclocking, intelligent fan speed and configurability. It also includes premium Intel technologies in connectivity, graphics and more.
*Little Giant: A four to eight-liter mini tower desktop designed to fit into different workspaces with adaptive performance. It will be easily upgradeable and feature powerful GPU, memory and storage options. Little Giant delivers high performance in a small footprint, with low acoustic noise.
*Versatile Mini: This is a one to two-liter modular mini desktop that is Cool, Quiet and Performant. It delivers high performance with Intel Core processors and GPU options while maintaining a nearly silent experience for users. Psys enables a smaller integrated PSU, thereby allowing a smaller form factor. It could be a portable companion device for travel and school needs.
*Beyond Display: These displays could be paired with a tower, little giant or versatile mini to achieve advanced applications such as biometric authentication, wake on approach and walk away lock to create the proper environment for you. Its intelligent collaboration feature enhances the quality of video conferencing for work or moments enjoyed with your family.
By leveraging Intel's Advanced Enabling Platforms program in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, we will develop these products and technologies to foster innovation in the desktop market.
Q: Company workers have been experiencing long term pandemic hybrid work scenarios, what is Intel's strategy to evolve your products to accommodate that?
A: To adapt to new work environments, Intel focuses on how to make the desktop experience more immersive to engage employees, more intelligent to help with routine tasks, and more performant to meet real world compute demands.
Today's new workforce is demanding consumer-like experiences and Modern Commercial Desktop delivers on these needs. From multiple sleek design options to enhanced capabilities to ensure the system is intelligently adapting to the scenario, Modern Commercial Desktop is delivering on key experiences across our four pillars of know and enhance me, emanating power, work when I'm not there and grow with me.
Together, these experiences allow commercial end users to be more effective and productive in getting their work done, while experiencing a more comfortable and exciting workplace. These are just the sort of capabilities companies need to get their employees excited about coming back into the office!
At the same time, we must meet the challenges that hybrid and remote work has set forth. With Intel vPro, the needs of security, stability, and lifecycle management help drive desired business outcomes.
Q: Is Intel expecting the Gaming market to continue growing and if so, where does desktop play a role?
A: Gaming has been the hottest market in computing over the past decade and will continue to grow well into the future. This growth is powered by advancements in the latest games requiring top tier graphics performance, the continued growth of esports, and the latest connectivity options allowing for all players to compete against each other, no matter the platform they are playing on. In the latter scenario, players are choosing desktop gaming machines to get the performance edge over their competitors.
Intel is putting epic experiences at the center of gaming by focusing on what gamers and developers love most about Intel platforms. We deliver the experience beyond frames per second. By measuring average framerates during gameplay only tells part of the experiential story. Measuring low framerates during product design helps us understand overall gaming performance.
You can experience this platform advantage firsthand with our new 13th Gen Intel Core Desktop processors - including the Intel Core i9-13900K, which delivers the world's best gaming experience.
Q: We know that in addition to games and commercial users, there are lot of creators out there as well. How will Intel's modern desktop vision benefit creators?
A: The creator market is over three hundred million strong and growing at a rapid pace. From photographers to architects, genome modeling to 3D animation, creators push the boundaries of human expression. One of their biggest issues is the ability to stay in their creative flow. Our goal is to help them build a desktop compute haven that puts performance at their fingertips, shows off their creative prowess to the world and enables them to deliver their best work, all in a system that will continue to grow with them as their aspirations grow.
If the creators equip the system with Intel's Core i9-13900K, it comes to next level multitasking. The system is able to intelligently assign the tasks to proper cores which provides the ultimate flexibility.
For example, when the creator has Unreal Engine opened up, all the cores are firing at full speed to work on this task. If the user wants to continue working on other areas, he or she could simply minimize Unreal Engine and switch to Blender to work on a different project. Thanks to hybrid architecture, performance-cores are now ramping down and only the e-cores are at 100%. By only assigning the e-cores to Unreal Engine which is rendering in the background, now creator is free to do other work in the foreground.
Whether you are a content creator using different applications or a developer working on other compute heavy projects, Intel's 13th gen desktop processors can help you multitask with ease.
Q: Is modern PC going to include more AI functions or behaviors in the future?
A: Absolutely. From our portfolio of AI computing devices like CPU, GPU and deep learning accelerators, Intel based platforms will continue to bring more AI capabilities to market. For example:
Intel's CPUs are the most flexible processors for most generic AI workloads, and are the foundation for deep learning inferencing with AI enhanced capabilities (e.g. Intel Deep Learning Boost, Intel AVX 512) integrated in the silicon.
Intel's integrated GPUs with hardware support for AI workloads built in (e.g. dp4a) enhance the overall CPU goodness for AI workloads. Upscale and retouch photos and videos quickly and easily with powerful XMX AI capabilities built into Intel Arc graphics, bringing out the best in AI accelerated creation tasks.
Intel® FPGAs are great for AI inferencing usages, like a low-latency solution for safer and interactive experiences. And finally, Intel® Movidius™ VPUs enable computer vision and edge AI workloads on intelligent cameras and edge servers achieving a balance between power efficiency and compute performance.
Q: Now that most cross-country companies are advocating sustainability, how is Intel advancing sustainability in its products?
A: Intel is committed to sustainable manufacturing and sustainable products. As part of our ongoing commitment to sustainability, Intel recently pledged to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions in our global operations by 2040. This also includes partnering with suppliers to decrease supply chain greenhouse gas emissions.
Intel also set a new goal to lower emissions related to our reference platform designs for client form factors by 30%. We are committed to achieving this goal by 2030, partnering with customer engineering teams to implement sustainable solutions in their system designs – such as board area and component reduction opportunities or the introduction of low temperature solder, for example.
To help drive operational energy efficiency, Intel has committed to increase product energy efficiency by 10X for client and server processors by 2030. We continue to develop products on pace with this goal.
Intel also partners with customers to decrease system power consumption through electrical design recommendations or introduction of more efficient components such as the ATX12VO, or Advanced Technology 12 Voltage Only, power supply unit. Among other benefits, the ATX12VO reduces energy consumption at low loads, thus increasing energy efficiency by 5-20% relative to a multi-rail PSU.
For example, the winning specs Little Giant we are advocating adopts single rail power supply and Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology, or DTT, which drive greater energy efficiency to meet strict energy regulations.
Finally, we focus on end-of-life. Intel is working to improve a system's repairability, reliability, reusability, and recyclability to extend product life, thereby reducing the product's environmental impact.
We believe the EPEAT Gold Certification is a critical sustainability target that we should all be designing towards. In particular, the improved product upgradability and repairability requirements that are being added in the new EPEAT standards are increasingly important for customers and tenders.
Mandy Mock, VP and GM of the Desktop, Workstation and Channel Group, part of the Client Computing Group (CCG) at Intel