IDF Fall`2002, San Jose
Silicon Valley Capital
San Jose is a relatively small town in California and is regarded as the capital of the Silicon Valley.
See the photo on the lorry side
The town is out of the ordinary, and the forum held over here by Intel is crucial to the developers' community. Intel normally holds several events like this during a year. Hard to say how many a year - besides the major events there are many smaller events held in Europe and Germany, the so-called local IDFs having their own specifics, each having unique tint. Soon after the American IDF, a Russian IDF will be held in Moscow early in October 2002.
On 8 September, Sunday, a group of Russian journalists left for the IDF. Flight from Russia to the USA is a challenge. Over nine hours to fly to New York, then 3 hours more lounging about in the airport, plus six more hours to San-Francisco and an hour by car to San-Jose. Mind you, that was not a piece of cake even for seasoned journalists hardened in travels. On 1 April (the date smoking was banned on board of all Aeroflot flights) our boss took an oath not to fly to the USA any more... well, let's wait and see how strong his oath will be and which sailboat he'll take to get to Nevada next time where the next Comdex Fall `2002 is taking place in two months.
First nighly walk
California is a peculiar place, and quite exotic for a Russian. Smoking is not allowed in public places since that violates the Californian laws. Soon after arrival we had to exchange a luxurious room with all facilities for a no less convenient and comfy room, but in the smokers' zone. The scaring inscription at the entrance reminded some gloomy atmosphere of horror movies like Resident Evil. As per the posters hanging in each room, all smokers are potentially under death warrant. Even Cuban cigars were not at all of Cuban make, because you can't import them into the States even for your personal needs, let alone for sale.
 
 
San Jose is a town of extremes.
In the daytime the heat is awful, but in the evening you might get chilled to the bone. In the town centre there is no single electronic shop, with the mixture of modern-style glass-concrete architecture and the classical 200 year old style is driving you nuts. Half the group contrived to forget US-to-European socket adaptors, and the following day many found themselves left without equipment and had to take a far travel to the nearest large supermarket selling household appliances and computer hardware. You feel the specifics at once - lots of things are not on sale at our home place. For example, ASUS notebooks are not available anywhere in the USA on principle. The company is operating in Taiwan and Europe. But there are awful lots of Wi-Fi card manufacturers. Prices for some things were extraordinarily low, but... Let's not talk about the sad.
We were astounded by the way the locals treated their air-cons. It seemed like San Jose locals wanted to freeze us up: chilling cold everywhere - at snackbars, hotels are like freezing chambers, even at the Forum the cold makes you creep. And that is with +35 C outside where the air is dense and thick of heat. One more nation-specific feature of which few have known is no taxis in the streets. You can't take a sip of fanta, raise your hand and catch a yellow cab. You won't pick up a cab driver unless you get to a nearest phone-booth and dial the right number.
Russian-Ukrainian press assembly: from ITC to iXBT
That Russian economics press members switched their mobiles off already at the Sheremetyevo airport so as not to go bankrupt on coming back caused some problems. Well, enough with lyrics - let's get round to the forum coverage.
IDF Fall'2002
This time as before, the participants got access to the two-band wireless network at the access points Intel Pro Wireless 5000. They feature in support of both two Wi-Fi protocols, i.e. 802.11b at 11 Mbit and 802.11a at 54 Mbit.
The building where the IDF was held.
Moreover, the network covers not only the center where the expo was based and where major tracks and training events were held but the hotel itself either where journalists were sleeping overnight between work sessions. All in all, Intel deserved a firm 5/5 for the organization - service support and workplaces were arranged at a high professional level. All the cons of previous events were taken into account and eliminated.
Intel keeps on investing into research and development.
The first day at the IDF for the press was opened by Frank Spindler, Intel's vice-president for corporate technologies, who told what would be presented at the forum and on which days. Frank reminded that Intel keeps investing into R&D and mentioned of IDF-Russia to be held in Moscow on 2 October onwards.
Frank Spindler opening the IDF
A few words was devoted to the Intel research labs whose number currently exceeded 75 all round the world. By the way, engineers at the expo stand of the Novgorod laboratory of which we'll talk in detail below told us that during the expo Frank was calling at the stand from time to time showing a lively interest in what's going on.
For all the participants, the opening ceremony of the expo was held at the so-called "Keynote". That event took place in the biggest forum hall and gathered the absolute majority of participants. During the keynote they usually demonstrate some topic films and shows illustrating the superiority of future technologies vs. currently developed. Pat Galsinger, Intel's chief technical administrator and vice president, started the opening with this unusual question: "Is Intel a computer or communications company?" to which he himself gave a more unusual answer by yelling "YES, IT IS!". Such an extraordinary slogan has livened up Intel's new advertising campaign and serves the purpose of making the public aware of the new concept saying that in the years to come Intel will give a maximum bias to merging computers and communications equipment.
During the short time while IDF lasted, 4000 specialists, developers and journalists attended it. Over 200 events, lab workshops, lectures, 22 tracks on technology and Intel's vision of these were arranged for them. On the whole, the program was quite extensive. We even had no spare minute to sit down and relax or play slot-machines installed at the expo especially for that. To heat up awareness of the event, Intel arranged several contests: an Compaq iPaq pocket PC or a wireless access point were raffled off among the expo participants. Well, let's start covering the major topics.
We can outline the following key topics for this IDF:
- Banias (new mobile architecture and processor, companion chipsets);
- Pentium 4 at 3.06 GHz with HyperThreading;
- Intel's vision of the digital home;
- PCI Express;
- Networked data storage systems;
- SerialATA II (first specifications presented);
- AGP 3.0 specifications and implementation of AGP8x;
- Wireless MMX technology.
So it's hard to mention something outstanding in the list. All the topics are very intriguing. One of the hits and major topics was Banias, an entirely new Intel mobile platform expected to appear on the market by 2003-2004. In parallel to this, much focus was given to the wireless technologies, the digital home concept and to the interaction of household appliances with computer equipment. Of course, a lot was spoken about new memory types, new processors, systems etc. We start our IDF coverage with the Banias.
There is a reservation, though, - the technical details are far from completeness. As we know for now, a 0.13 mk processor will have 77 mln transistors, that is, it will be more complicated than today's Pentium4. What we shouldn't expect is the boost in the clock speed. The prototypes presented at the forum were running at 1.33 GHz inclusive. Paul Ottelini who reported at the conference noted that higher speeds can't be a measure of processor performance. By early 2003, a new Banias model running at 1.6 will appear, while the desktop chips will leave the 3 GHz frontier far behind.
Leading manufacturers produced re-designed successful Banias-based notebook models especially for the forum. Among the exhibits we saw a Portege 2000, the world's most lightweight full-fledged notebook. "Full-fledged" means having a normal-sized matrix and a function set quite distant from sub-notebooks. But we were not able to notice anything revolutionary - mind you, the Portege 2000 is an existing model, and it would have been quite reasonable to prepare at least a single prototype of the super-lightweight and super-compact notebook having no analogs so far on the market. Had there been a dummy with exterior shell without functionality, the press would have been amazed.
While advertizing the Banias, Intel intentionally accentuated the fact that the chip was originally developed for use in mobile devices. That is, unlike the mobile Pentium 3 and 4, it was not developed following the principle "add mobility to the core", but from scratch keeping the portable equipment specifics in mind. Four key aspects underlie that specifics. The mobile chip must have heavily reduced power consumption, low heat emission, be of small bulk and highly integrated so as to create a truly compact system on its base.
Along with these, high performance would have been an added bonus to a mobile system because modern applications are resource-hungry and pose high demands for all the key components of a mobile system, including the processor. Of the architectural changes, Intel mentioned of the four technologies:
- Advanced Branch Prediction;
- Micro-Op Fusion;
- Power Optimized Processor Bus;
- Dedicated Stack Manager.
The Advanced Branch Prediction will make it possible to improve the processor performance by building a forecast of the program operation in future on the base of data collected through analyzing the program's past actions.
The Micro-Op Fusion provides merging several commands into one in case the system is ready to perform a number of operations at once simultanously. As Intel suggested, that will not only increase the processor performance, but improve the power savings.
The Power Optimized Processor Bus is trying to solve the major problem of modern mobile systems - to temporarily disable power from the system and the processor while the chip is not handling data.
The so-called Dedicated Stack Manager uses special means for monitoring the system load and resources consumed by the system. As per Intel's data, all these technologies used together will allow to increase performance and substantially decrease the power consumption.
Banias-based notebook presentation
The Banias system bus will in many ways be similar to that of Pentium 4, but, as Intel said, that will be an absolutely independent solution. What will be optimized with special care is the power consumption modes, including the depowering of unneeded and idle components.
During the Banias presentation, only one but the most effective demo was shown which most vividly demostrated its potentials. The presenter was encoding a video in DivX with XMpeg, while the power consumption figures were displayed on one of the screens in the hall.
Banias power consumption demonstration
At its peaks, the load was not higher than 7 watts, whereas the movie was digitized at a quite good speed - about 30 frames per second. As soon as the video encoding was complete, the processor reduced its power consumption down to 1 watt. Intel believes Banias will be able to make notebooks run continuously in the offline mode for more than 8 hours using relatively small batteries. The models demonstrated at the expo were equipped with 3000 to 5000 mA/h batteries, but due to evident reasons we were not allowed to measure the duration of the offline operation. For more details on Banias, see a separate review of ours.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
