First, it was announced that there has been significant improvement in a technology first developed at MIT to wirelessly power devices. You would be able to place your device like a laptop or cell phone on a special counter for instance, and have the electricity power the unit without being plugged in. Intel was able to demonstrate lighting a 60 watt light bulb from 2-3 feet away from the source. This will be incorporated into devices in the future.
The other area of interest to me was the Intel Roadmap. Here are a couple of highlights from there.
Next month Intel will ship its six-core Dunnington server processor, the last of the chip giant’s Penryn family of processors. According to Wachovia analyst David Wong Dunnington will offer a big performance improvement over Intel’s 2-chip, quad core Tigerton chip. “We think this should allow Intel to pull significantly ahead of AMD’s Barcelona chip on most applications, especially integer based applications, and equal or perhaps exceed Barcelona’s performance on floating point benchmarks,” said Wong in a research note.
Details of Nehalem are emerging. The biggest news was Nehalem’s turbo mode, which can turn cores on and off depending on the workload. John Morris notes:
To make turbo mode work, Intel said it designed “new transistors and silicon technology” so that a power gate at each core can shut down power completely, and added a Power Control Unit–a separate microcontroller with more than 1 million transistors of its own–to control the gates. In a not-so-subtle knock at competitor AMD and its “asset-smart” plans, Rajesh Kumar, an Intel fellow, said the new power management features showed why close cooperation between process technology engineers and chip designers was so important in advanced microprocessors.
And Intel is launching a wide range of solid state drives with various form factors.
Look for Atom based low energy desktop computers soon.
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