Every year September brings round the Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco. This is the event at which Intel brings us up to date with its long and short term plans. A chance, or at least we hoped, to learn a bit more about the Sandy Bridge Es and their platform, Ivy Bridge and the 22 nanometre process, Cedar Trail and tablets and the MIC architecture and successors to Larrabee.
The opening keynote from Paul Otellini, Intel President and CEO, was however unusually sober and vague in terms of announcements, notably avoiding all references to the Sandy Bridge Es, the finalisation of whose platform seems to be posing some last minute problems.
Paul Otellini mainly highlighted the importance of offering users a consistent environment in which to be able to circulate information in a transparent way between various connected and ever more numerous peripherals. This task naturally includes providing sufficient security and the McAfee buyout will start bearing its fruit very soon with the arrival of DeepSAFE, reserved for the pro environment at first and which will offer stronger security against rootkits. This is a first step before DeepSAFE is integrated more thoroughly across the board between the CPU and software to strengthen security across all Intel platforms.
To facilitate “all day computing”, Paul Otellini says that he is relying on Intel's determined work undertaken over the last few years to reduce energy consumption of the platform. In addition to
reducing the thermal envelope in load by 50%, the Ultrabook 2013 platform, built around the Haswell CPU engraved at 22nm, should allow a more than x20 reduction in energy consumption in connected standby mode, extending battery life in this mode to over ten days! To recap, connected standby gives you, for example, instant access to your email when you wake the PC up, as well as any other data that comes from the new usages made possible by the mode (weather, news, how full your fridge is…).
Paul Otellini and Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile, Google.Lastly, to conclude this first keynote, Paul Otellini announced an important, long awaited partnership: further cooperation with Google to optimise the Android platform on the Atom family of chips. Intel is thus assuring itself of access to an ecosystem that is growing like wildfire and Google’s payback is an x86 platform that is far from having come to the end of the road. To demonstrate the impact of this announcement, Paul Otellini briefly showed us a smartphone based on the Atom Medfield SoC, which will serve as the development platform for Android 2.3.
