Tech Palooza panel talks 802.11n, UWB, PCIe, more

Kicking Pat Gelsinger gets the job of coordinating this Palooza.

3D Industry Forum
Intel started the Universal 3D Industry Forum in 2003, and brought a group together to make 3D more ubiquitous. Members include ATI, Microsoft and others. Goals are to make a single visualization format for sharing CAD data in any application, and to develop enabling technologies.

The group is working on schemes to augment images with a universal language, and to build in not just techie diagrams for engineers, but also for sales, for marketing and for real world applications.

Technology will be announced later this year in the form of a base specificationm with U3D Open Source Gold available in Q1 2005.

UWB
The Wireless USB promoter group has demonstrated a prototype wireless USB application with multiband interoperability.

There will be UWB and WUSB silicon in 2005, by 2006 and 2007 there will be internal modules, PCI, PCI Express, and WLAN and UWB on the same module.

UWB relace cables for USB 2 and IEEE 1394, with wireless LANs providing the network backbone.

Serial ATA
On July 1st the 3Gbps Serial ATA specification was agreed, and there are already 3GBps S-ATA products available. Logo and compliance will be administered by the SATA-IO, which is now a separate organization.

Intel and other storage leaders will launch the CE-ATA initiative for the small form factor market, including handhelds. The initiative is with Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate and Marvell.

PCI Express
Intel claims PCI Express offers a 69% improvement in the number of frames per second. Infiniband and PCI Express gives a 3X IO bandwidth increase. Storage IO can give a 70% performance/bandwidth increase over a PCI-X adaptor. IEEE 802.11n
This is the next generation on the horizon, with 10, 20 and 40MHz channels, higher order modulation and coding and other OFDM PHY tricks.

That's a way of multiplexing to allow more data to be transmitted. Intel sees 802.11n as suitable for video distribution in houses. It also has a future as voice over IP carrier.

When? It might get ratified in 2006 and products to come in 2007.

Place Lab
This is an idea to bring location aware computing to the masses, allowing widely available location computing. The biggest problem with GPS is that it needs line of sight, while Place Lab is intended to be used both indoors and outdoors. The system will only reveal your location if you choose to allow it to.

The research is intended to improve on the ability of laptops, phones and PDAs to sense 802.11, Bluetooth, and GSM networks. There's more info at www.placelab.org, with some software downloadable to try out. There are users at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, Trinity College Dublin, and the Kelvin Institute in Scotland.