Intel's Rattner hails You Tube as the future

JUSTIN RATTNER kicked off his keynote with a nice little sketch about going through airport security with a laptop. Needless to say, the 'liquid' crystal display was removed by force, poor IB.....Lenovo notebook. Then it was on to far future tech.

The golden child was once again YouTube, and, if you think about it, this is the kind of social phenomenon that Intel drools over. Think about the CPU power on the client and server sides needed to encode and decode all that video. Yeah, Intel loves these guys.

This is a good example of a rich client internet app, and the next gen of net processes will only make the trends seen here more important. You go from apps on your PC to apps being streamed, and data is only cached on the local box. Stateful versus stateless, thing SunRay.

This means data centres are going to need more and more power, growing at an exponential rate. When you stream this content down to the client with video and rich media, you need number crunching on that end too. Both ends will grow a lot.

Intel brought up Luiz Barroso, a Google Distinguished Engineer. I think the tie in is that Google does this, and needs large server farms to feed the massive demands of the users. Maybe there is something more subtle, but I can't think of a better example of the whole streaming apps genre than Google.

Google is also good to look at the whole cost of hardware versus cost to power it. The slides it showed were a tad out of date, but the cost of powering a server was about the cost of the server itself after three years, and after that, the electricity cost more than the hardware.

One part of this is the traditional power supply at 55-70% efficiency. If you go to a single voltage rail, you simplify the PSU, thus making it cheaper while boosting efficiency to 90%. If nothing else, that could reduce the power costs to below the hardware cost over the life of the server. If you think about how much a server costs, this is not a small dollar figure.

Can you do more? Sure, but you need to look at the whole power cycle, from the mains in to the building to the use in the individual computers. About 1/3 of the power that comes in the door ends up doing work, you have many AC -> AC, AC -> DC and DC -> AC transitions, each losing a bit here and there. Those bits end up byting you in the nibble, puns intended.

Intel then brought up one of the older single rail 90% efficient PSU and pointed it out that it was obsolete. Instead of all the transitions, you go to a direct high voltage DC power system. The savings went from 3800 or so watts to power a rack to about 3300W, or about a 15% power savings with that one change. I think someone took a trip to Rackable and noticed what they were doing.

While power is a major problem for IT, so is security. Intel is not pushing Linksec instead of IPsec. Where IPsec encrypts at one end, decrypts on the other while linksec reencrypts at each hop. This allows intrusion detection systems, antivirus software and others to work their magic on the packets. That is the good side.

The bad side is that governments without warrants, people taking over end points, and various other 'bad guys' can take over a middle node and snoop with ease. I can't see how this does anything more than make more attack and snoop points.

Rattner went into more detail about the 80 core chips showed off by Otellini earlier. The cores and SRAM is stacked up in a packaged. They bond the packages directly to each other with bumps on the die. This is the future, and it looks like Intel can do it at least on a small scale. Lets hope they can scale it up.

Then they showed off the a working demo of the Silicon Lasers from last week. Yes, they worked. Yes, they are needed to get the data off the stacked chips with mini-cores. Yes, it will happen. When and how, they would not talk about, but that is what the tech demos are all about. µ