IDF Spring 2007 - Day One - Keynotes: Gelsinger and Kim

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Returning to the keynote, Gelsinger was followed by Eric Kim, Senior VP for Digital Home. A cool system that he had up on stage was codenamed Skull-Trail. This uses a dual-socket motherboard that can accept two quad-core CPUs – that means eight cores in one machine. He brought in a champion World of Warcraft game player who gave his verdict on the machine, after demoing some of the quickest fingers you’ve ever seen playing.

Kim also demoed a 45nm quad-core, with a 1,600MHz front-side bus, against a current 65nm quad-core, with the former completing a demanding VC1 encoding task in 18 vs. 29 seconds for the 65nm system, some 45 per cent faster. This was said to be primarily down to the additional 47 SSE4 instructions that have been added to Penryn.

Next was the announcement that vPro would find its way into consumer desktops and laptops in 2008. This is something I speculated might happen when I attended a briefing on Active Management Technology back in November 2004, so it’s good to hear that it’s on its way. Will Dell, Evesham et al, be able to fix your Dad’s dodgy PC without you having to go round? Personally, I can’t wait.

Kim’s biggest announcement though was of a new chip from Intel that’s designed for CE devices such as set-top boxes, networked media devices and even TVs moving Intel for the first time where ATI has previously tread. It’s appropriately called the CE 2110. The CE 2110 is a System-on-a-Chip, with an integrated AV pipeline for HD video, ‘PC class’ graphics, a section dedicated to security, such as HDCP, an I/O part and an integrated memory controller. After news that Nehalem will feature an integrated memory controller, after many years of resisting the move, has Intel gone integrated memory controller mad?

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