Intel's Otellini shows off November quads, benchmarks

THE IDF KEYNOTE started out the CPU 'more speed' race again, pointing to video encoding and multitasking as waypoints to the future. The old refrain of "does speed matter?" was definitively answered, yes.

The show itself started out with a spoof on the Apple I'm a Mac commercials, both of the people in the commercial showed they had Intel CPUs, and made friends. Awww. Cleanse with fire. Apple went on to run over its product line, pointing out that Intel was in them all. Needless to say, the Apples were shown to obliterate the older unnamed CPUs by large margins.

Then it was off to quad cores, the first one is going to be a Core 2 Extreme CPU, followed in Q1 by the new brand name of Core 2 Quad. Looks like someone got the name definitively wrong, wonder if it will retract?

The funny part is Paul Otellini pointed out the benchmarks printed on Tom's Hardware. Why is it funny? Intel tried everything in its power to stop that review from going up, including flat out stating that it would cut off Tom's from release CPUs if they published it. They published it, and theoretically were cut off. I wonder if they still are with Otellini blackmail photos?

Then Intel brought up Remedy, the makers of Max Payne, to demo their new game Alan Wake. This new 'psychological action thriller' is said to use all four cores, mainly for lighting and physics. On 25 foot screens, it looks really good, but fast action games don't take pictures well, so look up screenshots on Remedy's site, it is worth it.

Then on to the shots. Intel has shipped 40 million 65 nanometre chips, and it went out of its way to point out that the number is 40 million more than its competition, give or take none. From here, it is on to Fab D1D currently running test 45 nanometre wafers, production in 2H 07, but we hear it is back to Q4, and Intel is trying to pull it in farther. There are two other 45 nanometre fabs under construction, they are Fab 32 in Arizona and Fab 28 in Israel.

The first new core on 45 nanometres is Nehalem, basically a beefed up Woodcrest wih CSI. The first new core on 32 nanometres is Gesher, and there are a bunch after that. In any case, Intel has promised at least a 300% increase in performance per watt over this time frame. The discussion has moved from speed to efficiency, including a 50W LV quad core cpu.

In the future, Otellini waved around a wafer of mini-core dies. This case, there were 80 dies that could transfer data to the embedded SRAM at over a Terabyte per second, or fast enough for most people. They say this will be productised within five years. Sounds like a project due late next year to me, the numbers are eerily familiar.

And so to the business side of things, where it brought up Rackable Systems, a close AMD partner. What Rackable said, something about about racks of quad cores, didn't matter much, but the fact that they were on an Intel stage was the important thing. Mumble, mumble speed, mumble, big business win mumble.

Speaking of mumbling, or stumbling, we come to ViiV. They were spinning it as hard as they could, but no one really cares. The grasping of straws was introducing DMAs or Digital Media Adapters to link them to legacy TVs. Yawn. Then it was on to the big ViiV news, the program is now in DirectTV set-top boxes, and an upcoming add in card for existing Pcs.

It doesn't tell you about the crushing DRM infection that this inflicts on you. Intel is selling you out for its programs. For Intel to get into the satellite game, it needed to stick with the crushing DRM load, for added cost no less. Remember broadcast flags? Guess what ViiV brings you - the ability of TV providers to shut you down remotely. Can someone put a bullet in this evil?

The news of the speech was the $1,000,000 challenge, it is a contest to supply the sleekest and slickest PC. It may be subjective, but I think this is a really good idea, the PC is way too staid to be cool. Maybe the contest will change things, I hope it does.

Then on to mobile, and a quick rehash of Santa Rosa. The key points here are Vista Aero, NAND flash for quick resume, and 802.11n. From there, it was really mobile with WiMax and 802.16e, something you can't talk about without mentioning Sprint's big so called 4G rollout. Later this year, you will see WiMax add in cards, and Wi-Fi+WiMax chips. In 2008, this will become part of the Centrino program, Intel is going to push this from server to shoelace tips, they want it everywhere.

Last up, it brought out a Volkswagen with a WiMax equipped Rabbit. It integrated with the Ultra Mobile PC they were touting. With the combo, you can stream movies and music from the net to listen to and watch in your car. Nothing earth shattering, more neat and near future.

Overall, there was a lot of glitz at the keynote, but not much hugely new, more updates of things Intel talked about in previous IDFs. There was nothing that wowed me, just solid progress toward the goals it set earlier, and to be honest, that is more important to the customers like you. µ