Intel Demonstrates Banius Processor

Intel

Intel Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Michael Splinter demonstrated the processor at Microsoft's Fusion partner conference here.

Splinter said the processor will bring a dramatic increase in battery life, power and functionality to laptops of all sizes.

Splinter touched the heat-sync of the Banius processor as the chip ran a video before Microsoft partners, noting that that would not be possible with today's Intel processor technology.

"This is just a huge new effort for Intel," he said.

Banius will also essentially "wirelessly enable" every laptop, Splinter said. "This is going to tip the point where wireless communications become ubiquitous," he said.

Splinter predicted that Banius, which would have a new, as-yet-undisclosed Intel brand name, will make seamless computing a reality.

Splinter also demonstrated the next version of Intel's Pentium processor, code-named Prescott, which includes hyperthreading that "makes one processor act and work like two processors," Splinter said.

Splinter demonstrated a Prescott system encoding music and playing a video, while a similar Pentium system struggled to run both applications. The video with the Prescott system ran smoothly, while the video with the Pentium system was clipped.

In addition, Splinter demonstrated a Windows Movie Maker application that performed 20 percent faster than the Pentium system. With optimization, that same application could run 30 percent faster, Splinter said.