Intel's Renee James gets graphic with Dreamworks

KEEPING THE CORNINESS at an appropriate IDF high, Intel’s Renee James, VP and general manager of the firm’s Software and Solutions Group, announced that, “At Intel, technical advancement is our heartbeat”.

Processor performance was the theme, and multi-core processors were the stars of James’ keynote which posited that Chipzilla’s new mega machines, coupled with multi-threaded software, could considerably speed up progress in all aspects of visual computing.

Showing epilepsy-inducing, flashy clips from films, PC games and even medical imaging, James enthused on and on about Intel’s “next leap forward in visual computing” which, as well as being supremely annoying first thing in the morning, was also supposed to enable developers to make richer, more believable experiences. Its OK, we believe you, now PLEASE switch it off!

To push 3D visualisation literally out of the screen and into our faces, James then decided to call out her special guest, Dreamworks animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. Together they pledged to awe us all with their “next generation of storytelling”, as they unveiled InTrue 3D, their new joint brand, supposedly meant to dole out a souped-up 3D viewing experience. And the plug? Well, apparently the InTrue 3D logo will make its screen debut in the upcoming Dreamworks film Monsters vs Aliens.

Shameless Dreamworks plugging over with, James then went on to introduce Intel’s new Visual Adrenaline developer program, which she claims offers resources to help developers, publishers, animators and “other gaming and digital content professionals”.

Moving swiftly on, probably because most of the room had just passed into an unconscious daze after three hours of keynotes without respite, James decided to finish up by presenting a new software tool suite called the Intel Parallel studio which, she boasted, was just absolutely spiffing when it came to finding, exploiting, debugging and tuning parallelism.

And the rest, as they say, was history. µ