![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, September 27, 2006
- Author:
- Paul Jastrzebski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Developer Forum Fall 2006 - Day One
The Intel Developer Forum is well underway and as expected, Intel has made new announcements related to their soon to be released quad-core Kentsfield chip, 45nm wafer production, and even showed off an 80-core wafer prototype.
With Intel’s NetBurst architecture officially retired, one of Otellini’s key objectives is increasing Intel’s performance per watt throughput to over 300% by 2010 over today’s Core 2 micro-architecture. Intel hopes that decreasing the power it takes to run it’s CPU’s will lead to newer and more creative OEM VIIV designs that will make putting a PC in the living room of a typical American household more attractive from both a feature and aesthetic standpoint. Basically, Otellini’s goal is to get rid of the ugly beige PC once and for all.
To further show Intel’s commitment to this new performance per watt and attractive looking desktop approach, today Intel announced a $1,000,000 reward for the OEM that designs the best “Sexy, Small, and Stylish VIIV PC” as judged by a panel including Otellini. In addition to aesthetics, Intel will be trying to brand VIIV as a mainstream media platform, and has announced partnerships with AOL, NBC, and Yahoo! Sports to bring online media content into VIIV PCs.
Moving onto the mobile arena, Otellini talked about the future of the Centrino platform. Starting in 2007, Intel will roll out its Santa Rosa platform, a platform that features new flash memory technology called NAND, 802.11n, and the 965GN chipset.
Perhaps the most interesting of the new technologies, NAND is a flash memory technology that bypasses the hard drive for dramatically faster power on functionality and stores data you use frequently for quicker access, essentially increasing performance and battery life to the seven hour cycles promised at last year’s IDF. Santa Rosa will also bring 802.11n, a new wireless standard that promises over 300Mb/s throughput, over 5 times the amount currently available with 802.11g.
Anand Chandrasekhera, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobile Group, then came out and showcased Intel’s latest UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) prototype. Weighing less than 2lbs, featuring an ultra-low voltage Pentium M CPU, and having both wireless 802.11g and Bluetooth capability, the UMPC is Intel’s vision of the future of mobile computing.
Particularly interesting is Intel’s partnership with Volkswagen for interoperability between its UMPC platform and future Volkswagen automobiles. The UMPC will be able to communicate with your VW car and stream movies, pictures, music, and even GPS directions through Bluetooth. With increasing wide-spread adoption of WiMax, the city-wide wireless internet implementation, that’ll mean that you’d be able to listen to internet radio and watch live netcasts as you’re driving around town, but perhaps more safely, when some one else is driving you around.
But perhaps the most entertaining event of the keynote happened during the Q&A session with Paul Otellini and Justin Ratner. A few months ago Charlie Demerjian, a writer, and by all means a very unique character at The Inquirer, made a bet with the owner of Voodoo PC about Dell one day carrying AMD CPU’s. Charlie thought that Dell would never use AMD CPU’s and therefore lost the bet, his punishment being that he had to wear a bunny costume throughout this year’s IDF. To everyone’s surprise, he wore it to the keynote and asked Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini if he’d ever been asked questions by a six foot tall bunny. Otellini’s response was “It's a good thing you write better than you gamble otherwise you'll be living in that outfit."
