No posts for 13 days...

I'll be off to Hyderabad for my holidays from 29th Sept to 8th October.

So there will be no posting till the 10th of October.( one day rest ;-) )

IDF Fall 2006 Day 1....It rocked.

IDF rocks.I'm tellin u .Ill take a visit as soon as I can.It is one place where u can get a peek into the new technologies developed by Intel and some other companies.

Letz begin.

IDF Fall 2006,California.

As usual ,Paul Otellini kicked off the event.It began with the announcement of Apple's transition to Intel's processors.

Intel announced its 65nm acheivements.It had shipped 40 million CPUs fabricated using the 65nm technology while its competitors.....Zero!!!!!!!And of those only 5 million were Core 2 showing that most of the processors shipped are mostly Netburst or Yonah based.The Xeon based on 65nm is codenamed Woodcrest.

Alas with 65nm in, Intel's wasting no time on developing 45nm fabrication plants.One already up and producing test wafers while two more are nearing completion.Probably coming up in 2008, this successor to the Core architecture is called Nehalem. And looking in deeper ,the Gesher microarchitecture will be out by 2010.

Quadro (code name: Kentsfield)will be realesed in November 2006.Initially Intel will offer Core 2 Extreme QX6700 at 2.66GHz and later a Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 2.40GHz. However these will be two dies on a single package.We will have to wait for the 45nm technology for a single die-quad core processor( which will be codenamed Peryn ).

On the server side, Intel is offering the quad core Xeon 5300 in November alongside Kentsfield. Expect a low voltage version of this in Jan'07 ,the quadcore Clovertown which will consume a measly 50W.

Then Markus Maki, Founder and Chairman of Remedy came on stage to display their latest game Alan Wake on an over-clocked quadcore running at 3.73GHz. The game ran smoothly but consumed an entire core demonstrating the amount of processing power that will be needed by games in the future.

And then, a long wait came to an end: What was Intel's answer to The Cell.
The Answer: The Teraflop chip.With 80 FPUs(basically cores with a very simple Instruction set) ,this beast will be able to churn out one teraflop of number crunching power.Intel says this would debut with a clock speed of 3.1 GHz and consume 1W per core or 100W overall.

And then came Toshiba's 2nd generation HD-DVD players and another short update on Intel's Viiv which was almost nothing.

Some updates on UMPC(Ultra Mobile PC) followed showing that Intel is still committed on developing these.The interesting part was the UI which was developed by a company called Streetdeck and seemed to be far easier to navigate than the default Win XP that many of the UMPCs come out with.

Volkswagen came onstage with a demonstration of its in-car entertainment system that could easily link up with the UMPC using WiMAX.

That was Day 1....exhilarating. The new technologies left me breathless and Otelinni's face expression while displaying the wafer of The Teraflop summed up everything.

Intel seems to have enough power to once again rule over the market ...absolutely. Already, with the release of the Conroe based Core 2 Duos Intel has regained the title of manufacturing the most powerful desktop processors.Unless AMD comes out with new technologies to counter Intel, the domination will continue. Is AMD listening?