Aug 28 2008
Intel Developer Forum 2008
The Intel Developer Forum was extremely well attended, an increased had several themes this year. The press day focused on Intel R&D. The R&D directions included medical visualization, digital monetary systems based on compute technology, and sensing systems to connect the physical world to the digital world. The sensing systems included digital representations of all the senses under the modes of touch (pressure), vision, sound, temperature, The demos went well and the technology looked promising until the internet connection at the hotel stopped and all the demos froze. The assurance was givin, in real life, using wimax, the data would not interrupted. The goal of the program would be 90% aware, 90% of the time.
IDF kicked off by a well attended keynote by Craig Barrett. Rather than just talk about new process clock rates and how many cores can you hang on a single bus, he discussed the societal aspects of the technology and the deployment of technology with some livefeeds of distance medical diagnostics. In addition to the overview of the technical architecture of the new quad core chip, There were demonstrations of the new Nehalem included computer intensive CAD modeling, high throughput video, multiple data stream processing and high memory capacity systems (128GB+ RAM) configurations on a dual processor board. Although the processors were being shown, the staff in the demo booths, indicated the Core I7 ™ would not be available until late Q4’08 to early Q1’09 timeframe.
In addition to the high performance platforms, Intel introduced a number of chipsets/board level products for other markets. In the multimedia space, there were two system combos introduced (1) the DG45ID board which supports the Core(tm) 2 processors and Dolby Home Theater ™ processing; and (2) the DG43NB which uses the dual and quad core Core(tm) 2 chips.
They also introduced low power chipsets and re-introduced the Centrino 2 ™ platform. These were shown in new notebook products, netbooks (internet targeted thin client notebooks) and MID (mobile internet devices). A note of particular interest, of the 19 MIDs on display at the show, 17 were running Linux as thier only or primary OS, 2 were exclusively Windows on Win XP, and a total of 7 would also operate with WinXP or Vista.
Following the trend of several other companies, Intel introduced an Nand Flash based SSD. They have both product types SLC and MLC ranging in capacity from 32GB to 160GB drives. The drive family supports SATA and ONFI 1.0 as interfaces. In the 2.5″ form factor, they introduced and extreme SATA SSD with SLC Flash in 32 and 64Gb capacities. These server targed SLC drives (such as the X25e) feature 70us latency, Read data rates of 250MB/s, and Write data rates of 170MB/s. In the more mainstream products they introduced both 1.8″ and 2.5″ form fact with an 85us latency. The products are spec’d at a 5ye useful life in client PC application and are using 50nm Flash memory.
The drives were also presented in a smaller form factor as an OEM drive for MID, UMPCs, automotive and other space critical applications. These products utilize the same technology as the 1.8″ and 2.5″ products. The demonstrations at the product announcement were shown with a proprietary controller using the ONFI 1.0 interface and presented a 175X improvement in performance when compared to a traditional 2.5″ notebook computer drive. On the exhibit floor, the SSDs were being demonstrated with a streaming video application which did not exhibit the bit error rate problems of multiple streams of 720p data on a std HDD. The drives on the exhibit floor were all being demonstrated with SATA interfaces, so the performance was not on the same level as the product introduction demo.
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