IDF Spring 2007 - Day One - More Keynotes

After Rattner, Pat Gelsinger bounded out to present a working Penryn system running advanced 3D rendering of three skulls, presumably for medical purposes.



Another impressive slide showed how far Intel has come in a few years. In 2002, a Datacenter delivering 3.7 Teraflops would have taken 25 racks of servers, filled with 512 blades. Now Intel can do it in a single rack, consisting of just 53 blades. In terms of kilowatt hours that down from 128 to just 21, aside from the huge space savings. Nice.



Clearly that’s not enough though as Gelsinger announced, Intel’s Dynamic Power Technology. Power saving is no longer confined to inside the chips – idle time in a server rack will mean significant power savings of up to 15 per cent.

vPro is now available on the notebook - part of the Santa Rosa specification - Centrino Pro. What was impressive was the demo of Active Management diagnosing and fixing a laptop remotely, without the laptop even being plugged in, as it now can operate over wireless. However, unlike in the desktop the laptop can’t be in a sleep state, and has to be powered on.



Gelsinger also presented the Classmate PC, that TrustedReviews first got an exclusive on six months ago.



It’s a low cost simple notebook designed for education in emerging markets with Pakistan deploying 700,000 of them until 2009. I was told later that there has been a lot of interest in developed countries too. One new aspect of the machine that I went and played with later in the day was a USB scanner that’s attached to a piece of paper via a clip. What you draw on it then appears directly on the screen. It’s great fun, and could create a generation of budding architects.



Finally Intel announced a platform called Little Valley It features a Micro-ATX motherboard and a Celeron soldered onto the motherboard. It's cheap, and small and as direct competition for EPIA, it could put paid to Via entirely. It hardly seems fair.