Thursday, 05 June 2014 15:01

Intel is looking to cut the cords...

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Intel has been working on making the “PC” a standalone unit for a very long time. The started the process by developing he standard to put the audio card on the motherboard and have been pushing to include more and more info either the CPU itself or mount it on the motherboard. This has not been a surprising move simply because the world keeps looking to smaller and smaller devices to perform its computing. However, Intel wants to take things one step further by getting rid of all of the cables that are needed to run a PC.

At Computex Intel showed off a new concept calls Skylake that featured wireless charging based on the Alliance for Wireless Power’s standards. Of course Intel is on their board and has been pushing this for a while. It is actually a little surprising that it is not already here. However Skylake will not be viable until late 2016 at the earliest.

Intel would still like to get rid of more cables though. They are working on technology that allows you to connect to a wireless dock at upwards of 7Gbps, anything ancillary would be plugged into this doc instead of your tablet or laptop. We already have wireless displays, keyboard and mice so there might not be that much left to disconnect.  

The problem will be in getting the consumer to do this. All wireless peripherals require power of some sort. Wireless can also introduce lag and performance issues which make it not the best choice for gaming and precision applications. When you put these together there could be a slight market resistance to removing all ports on a mobile device like a laptop or even a tablet. People like being able to plug things in and, as we saw with Windows 8 and ModernUI the consumer market can be very resistance to change.

In the end we anticipate that the biggest piece of this push from Intel will be in wireless charging. This area is becoming more popular with manufacturers and consumers so it is likely to be adopted much faster than other wireless technologies that are just not seen as the best option right now.

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Read 3245 times Last modified on Thursday, 05 June 2014 15:02

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