IDF: Intel’s new products uphold Moore’s Law

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 17 April 2007 17:02

Your IT - Entertainment

The Intel Developer Forum, held for the first time in Beijing, heralded 20 new products from Intel, although many announcements were confirmations of what has been speculated upon throughout the Internet for months.

As always, faced with the pressure of upholding Moore’s Law of ever increasing technology advances, Intel has announced a raft of new products that make the technology we use today out-of-date, or even more out-of-date than it is already.

Coming later this year or early next is the 45nm generation of Intel processors in the ‘Penryn’ family, besting the 65nm technology currently in use by Intel (and the technology that AMD is only just getting to). This technology makes processors even smaller than they already are, while adding ever more transistors, meaning more with less, a theme that was very prevalent in Intel’s IDF keynote.

As indicated in Intel’s press release, Intel’s Pat Gelsinger provided performance indicators for Intel's upcoming Penryn family of processors. For desktop PCs, he said to expect increases of about 15 per cent for imaging-related applications; 25 per cent for 3-D rendering; more than 40 per cent for gaming; and more than 40 per cent faster video encoding with Intel SSE4 optimised video encoders. The indicators were based on pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad core processor running at 3.33 Gigahertz (GHz) with a 1333 Megahertz (MHz) front side bus (FSB) and 12MB cache versus an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 introduced last week at 2.93 GHz with 1066 FSB and 8MB cache.

Those are pretty impressive figures for what will become effectively mainstream in the middle of next year and naturally make life even more difficult for AMD who lost the performance crown when Intel finally got their act together with in the 'dual core' processing race with Core Duo and then the Core 2 Duo processors we’ve all seen over the past 18 months or so, and which many people are now using as standard.

Intel announced a second-generation version of their ‘vPro’ technology for desktops, codenamed “Weybridge”. vPro allows system administrators to have full access to the desktop PCs in their company fleets, even if they are turned off, and can do cool things like reboot computers and see the reboot process happen in real time. A management console allows sysadmins to see all the details of each computer, including hardware specs, software updates that have or haven’t been applied, anti-virus updates and can push out updates on demand. For system administrators it’s nirvana, and naturally version 2 is designed to make this system even better.

Intel also re-announced the ‘Centrino Pro’ initiative, which basically does exactly the same thing for notebook computers, something that was lacking until the Centrino Pro development.

From a consumer and ‘Digital Home’ point of view, Intel’s Eric Kim, the senior veep and GM of Intel’s Digital Home Group, talked about the ‘four Cs’, which Intel probably hopes will be as explosive an initiative as C4 (the explosive C4, that is).

Those four C’s are “control, choice, clarity and community”, which Intel wants to give more of to consumers, with products and technologies such as “PCs, laptops, televisions, set-top-boxes and other networked media players”.

To make this happen, Intel has a ‘system-on-a-chip’ (SoC) called the “CE 2110 Media Processor” due for release in 2008, which Intel hopes will bring a common architecture to CE devices, although this naturally competes with traditional consumer electronics companies who no doubt have ideas of their own in regards to networked home entertainment – hey, just ask Sony.

So what about those who live in the world of servers and high-end workstations? They got some good news too, read onto page 2 for the conclusion...