While Intel gave us the technical rundown on its next iteration of Thunderbolt two months earlier, it's now announced that it will officially be known as the not-particularly-original Thunderbolt 2. Promising 20 Gbps throughput and support for 4K video, Intel is now vowing to bring the port to market sometime this year. For a reminder, we've added the company's NAB demo after the break.

Video Creation Bolts Ahead – Intel's Thunderbolt™ 2 Doubles Bandwidth, Enabling 4K Video Transfer & Display

Everybody seems to be sharing video these days - at higher resolutions than ever. This always-increasing demand has helped expand growth and adoption of Intel's Thunderbolt™ technology in 2013, especially for the video editors creating the best and richest content. Originally brought to market in conjunction with Apple*, Thunderbolt is now a standard feature of Mac* computers sold in the market today. The last year has also seen the PC industry get on board in earnest, as Thunderbolt is currently included on over 30 PCs and motherboards worldwide, including on more than a dozen new 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor-based products. In addition, there are more than 80 Thunderbolt-enabled peripheral devices, covering everything from storage drives, expansion docks, displays, and a myriad of media capture and creation hardware. More than 220 companies worldwide are developing Thunderbolt-enabled products, and that's only going to increase.

At the video geekfest National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in April, Intel announced plans for an important advancement in Thunderbolt technology – the upcoming controller codenamed "Falcon Ridge" running at 20Gbs, a doubling of the bandwidth over the original Thunderbolt. Named "Thunderbolt™ 2", this next generation of the technology enables 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously – that's a lot of eye-popping video and data capability. It is achieved by combining the two previously independent 10Gbs channels into one 20Gbs bi-directional channel that supports data and/or display. Current versions of Thunderbolt, although faster than other PC I/O technologies on the market today, are limited to an individual 10Gbs channel each for both data and display, less than the required bandwidth for 4K video transfer. Also, the addition of DisplayPort 1.2 support in Thunderbolt 2 enables video streaming to a single 4K video monitor or dual QHD monitors. All of this is made possible with full backward compatibility to the same cables and connectors used with today's Thunderbolt. The result is great news for an industry on the cusp of widespread adoption of 4K video technologies.

"By combining 20Gbs bandwidth with DisplayPort 1.2 support, Thunderbolt 2 creates an entirely new way of thinking about 4K workflows, specifically the ability to support raw 4K video transfer and data delivery concurrently," says Jason Ziller, Marketing Director for Thunderbolt at Intel. "And our labs aren't stopping there, as demand for video and rich data transfer just continues to rise exponentially."

Professionals and enthusiasts alike will be able to create, edit, and view live 4K video streams delivered from a computer to a monitor over a single cable, while backing up the same file on an external drive, or series of drives, simultaneously along the same device daisy-chain. Backing up terabytes of data will be a question of minutes, not hours. And finally, since Thunderbolt 2 is backwards compatible, original investments in cables and connectors continue to pay off while supporting dramatically improved performance. Thunderbolt 2 is currently slated to begin production before the end of this year, and ramp into 2014.

Haswell is hardly a secret at this point: there's been a steady drip-drip of of demos and technical leaks since as far back as 2011, and just a month ago we brought you the low-down on its integrated graphics. But today, finally, we have official pricing for a number of variants, a concrete date for availability (this coming Tuesday, June 4th) and, perhaps most importantly, some detailed benchmark claims about what Haswell is capable of -- particularly in its mobile form.

Sure, Intel already dominates in MacBooks, Ultrabooks (by definition) and in hybrids like Surface Pro, but the chip maker readily admits that the processors in those portable PCs were just cut-down desktop chips. Haswell is different, having been built from the ground up with Intel's North Cape prototype and other mobile form factors in mind. As a loose-lipped executive recently let slip, we can look forward to a 50 percent increase in battery life in the coming wave of devices, with no loss of performance. Read on and we'll discover how this is possible and what it could mean for the dream of all-day mobile computing.

Mobile Haswell

Although Intel has previously claimed a 10 hour battery life for North Cape, that figure isn't actually promoted in today's slide deck. Instead, we're told Haswell will provide up to 9.1 hours of HD video playback on an Ultrabook-class Core i7. Video playback isn't particularly processor intensive, but nonetheless this benchmark bodes well compared to what an Ivy Bridge machine can manage, and indeed it's said to be the "biggest battery life increase in Intel history."

The above slide also hints at how this sort of gain is achieved: largely through a drop in power from 20W in Ivy Bridge (17W for the processor plus 3W for the chipset) down to 15W in Haswell (which now incorporates both components). Of course, these wattages are just upper limits, and the chip has plenty of scope to scale down further during easier tasks. A Haswell-based Ultrabook actually draws less than 6W during video playback, or two thirds that of an Ivy Bridge system. It also supports an ultra low-power standby state that can hold fresh data for up to 13 days, which is three times as long as Ivy Bridge, and it can wake from sleep mode in three seconds instead of seven.

All of this should come alongside a 40 percent increase in graphics performance in Ultrabook-class machines with HD 5000 GPUs, which ought to make Tomb Raider playable at 1,366 x 768 and medium settings, and BioShock Infinite almost playable with a frame rate of 27fps. On the other hand, fatter Haswell laptops with higher wattages (above 28W) and Iris-branded GPUs should see more of an improvement over the last generation, of up to 2x.

Desktop Haswell

You can blame us for neglecting the desktop components up until now, but hey -- Intel started it. You have to scroll some way through the presentation before you get to concrete desktop info.

In terms of gaming, both Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite should now be playable at 1080p and medium settings without recourse to a discrete graphics card, thanks in part to the use of embedded DRAM to reduce latency in communication between the CPU and GPU. Further gains should be possible from enhanced overclocking on K-branded products, and in particular the ability to increase base clock tuning ratios.

Finally, we also have pricing for the quad-core desktop parts that are set to become available to end users this coming Tuesday. These will start at $192 for the lowest-spec Core i5-4570 and go up to $242 for an unlocked Core i5-4670K and $339 for the Core i7-4770K. Pricing and various other details for dual-core SKUs will follow soon, but we've already reviewed our first quad-core Haswell gaming laptop -- MSI's GT70 Dragon Edition -- with some pretty encouraging results.

In recent years, Intel's Celeron and Pentium processors have been cut-down versions of more advanced counterparts. For the chips' next updates, Intel is taking an opposite tack -- it's bringing low-end Atom architecture into the big leagues. The company is confident enough in the speed and flexibility of the Bay Trail-based Atom platform that it's launching desktop and laptop versions (Bay Trail-D and Bay Trail-M) under the Celeron and Pentium badges. There isn't much more to share regarding the CPUs beyond their expected releases late in the year, although there's a good chance that we'll learn more at Computex next week.