Getting deeply embedded with Gelsinger

"PUTTING THE MORE into Moore's law" boomed a disembodied voice as Pat Gelsinger strode onto the IDF stage today to outline Intel's roadmap for higher performance, purportedly more power efficient computing.

Gelsinger, Chipzilla's senior vice president and general manager of the firm's Digital Enterprise Group, got terribly excited as he described Intel's vision for the next generation – or fourth wave – of the Internet, which he codenamed “the embedded Internet”, requiring not only a new concept but also new Internet architecture in order to build such wonders as a "smart highway" and "smart powergrid" .

Intel reckons the embedded internet device market could grow to over $10 billion by 2011 and is optimistic that by 2015, 15 billion devices will connect to the Internet.

Amongst other things in the embedded computer space - like IP networking, security, video intelligence and the medical market – in vehicle infotainment, or "bringing IT to the car" as Gelsinger put it, was next on Intel's embedded agenda.

No sooner had it been mentioned, an Intel guest from BMW appearred onstage, wheeling out the latest Intel Inside kitted out car, complete with Wimax video streaming, GPS systems hooked up to Encyclopedia Britannica and other 'multimedia'. To hell with safety, watch DVDs in your car whilst speeding down the motorway, says Intel, because its cool.

Moving on to Nehalem and new processors, Gelsinger rambled on about the new features of the company's next-generation processor family including something called a turbo mode which supposedly shifts the processor into a higher gears when needed and switches it off when not in use, for what Intel claims is "mindblowing performance without a heat penalty" .

This works thanks to a new power gate feature, transparent to the OS, allowing cores to run at independent voltage and frequency with ultra low leakage to boot.

Noting that the Intel Core i7 processor and a mutated version of it dubbed the Nehalem-EP would be the first bits of the Nehalem microarchitecture hitting the market, Gelsinger also disclosed that a derivative designed for the expandable server market (Nehalem EX) and mobile and desktop versions (Auburndale, Clarksfield, Havendale and Lynnfield) would go into production by the second half of 2009.

As far as Intel Xeon processors were concerned, Gelsinger reckoned the firm's new 6 core Intel Xeon processor for expandable servers would launch at some point this September. Gelsinger also bragged that it had already smashed a plethora of world performance records, notably by being the first x86 based server to break the one million barrier in the industry standard TPC Benchmark.

Touching briefly on Larrabee, Chipzilla's long awaited many core x86 architecture, Gelsinger posited that the first products based on it should surface around 2009 or 2010, and that these early products would be aimed towards the personal computer graphics market, support DirectX and OpenGL and also run existing games and programs. µ