Intel is focusing on meeting the needs of users who want their
office, mobile, home and consumer electronic devices to exchange
multimedia content.
The home, office, and mobile worlds are converging to allow users
to transmit multimedia content between desktop PCs, notebook PCs,
and wireless handheld devices, said Louis Burns, vice-president and
general manager of Intel's desktop platforms group. He was speaking
at the company's Developer Forum in San Jose yesterday (Tuesday).
Burns demonstrated several hardware products that he said could let
users move videos and digital photographs among handheld,
notebooks, and consumer electronics devices through 802.11b
wireless technology and Ethernet connectivity.
The company also showed how computer-aided design (CAD) files could
be accessed from a corporate network by notebooks and handhelds
with integrated wireless technology.
Burns confirmed that the Prescott chip would become the first CPU
manufactured on Intel's 90-nanometer process and will be released
in the second half of 2003 on 12-inch wafers.
The Banias mobile processor, to be released next year, was
discussed in detail by Anand Chandrasekher, Intel's vice-president
and general manager of the mobile platforms group.
Intel designed Banias to both improve mobile devices' performance
and power management to extend battery life, he said.
The chip uses an advance in Intel's SpeedStep technology, which
allocates power to different chip functions as needed. It also
features a technology called Advanced Branch Prediction, which
analyses past patterns of instructions passing through the chip,
and tries to anticipate what instructions might be coming the next
time an application is started.
The power management features were demonstrated by comparing the
power usage of the chip while it processed MPEG4 video encoding.
The chip used 7 watts of power while crunching the code, dropping
down to a standby level of less than 1 watt, according to the
presentation materials.
The first Banias chip will be released in the first half of 2003,
and a family of chip products based on Banias will follow in the
second half of the year, Chandrasekher said.
Intel will add MMX technology to its PXA250 and PXA210 wireless
processors, allowing developers to create multimedia applications
specifically for handheld devices.
MMX is based on the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data)
process, which allows the same operation to be performed
simultaneously on multiple streams of data. Wireless MMX technology
will now allow wireless applications and devices to run more
complex multimedia programs.
The company also released what it said was the first Gigabit
Ethernet controller designed specifically for high performance and
low power in mobile PCs.