Intel Developer's Conference a Bust?

Most of the news coming out of the show was simply further details on announcements made at the spring IDF. A good deal more light was shined on Banias, the forthcoming laptop CPU, but some details, like its clock speed, remain undisclosed. Likewise, it was announced Pentium IV CPUs with Hyper-Threading would ship at the end of the year, but Hyper-Threading was already a known technology.

This led to a little dissatisfaction. One attendee, who asked not to be identified due to his firm's working relationship with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, questioned holding the show twice per year with so little new information. "It costs a lot to bring people here every six months, and in this economy, it's really not worth it if we're not going to learn anything new," said the attendee.

That's not to say the show was totally devoid of substance. Banias, the first mobile chip designed from the ground up for laptops, did get quite a bit of play. All previous chips for laptops were taken from the desktop Pentium chip and then scaled down as much as possible. With Banias, Intel designed a chip from the ground up using the Pentium III core.

Intel put a great deal of effort into improving power management, and Banias laptops, which will ship in the first quarter of next year, are expected to last between four and eight hours.

Banias notebooks will come with 802.11a and 802.11b built in, and able to recognize when the wired connection to the network is lost and automatically switch to the wireless network, if there is one, for a constant connection.

One thing Intel isn't saying just yet is the speed of Banias, which some analyst have estimated to be between 1.3 GHz to 1.7 GHz. That would make it slower than the 2.2-GHz Pentium 4-M mobile chips the company just introduced, and it puts Intel in a quandary of how to sell a slower chip.

"Banias will give you slower speed but a lot more battery life, the question is how to get that message across to consumers," said Tony Massimini, chief of technology for Semico Research, a semiconductor market research firm in Phoenix. "They've done a great job of selling performance, now they have to convince people to buy less speed."

Intel also announced that Hyper-Threading would appear in the 3-GHz Pentium 4 chips due to ship in the fourth quarter. Hyper-Threading lets two processes operate in parallel on a single CPU, without requiring any changes to the applications to take advantage of the new functionality. "What we talked about when we described this for the first time a year ago was it allowed us to do more with less, essentially, free performance, two processes inside of one," said Paul Otellini, president and chief operating officer of Intel.

The company said there could be a 25 percent improvement in application performance with Hyper-Threading. In demos, it showed the greatest benefit when running two I/O-intensive applications at the same time.

Pentium IV chips at 3 GHz with Hyper-Threading will ship in the fourth quarter, and will be backwards-compatible with all 478-pin P4 motherboards.

Massimini thinks Hyper-Threading might prove a good enough excuse to spur sluggish PC sales. "Hyper-Threading won't get people buying just for the sake of Hyper-Threading, but if you've got a machine that's three years old, the question is, what's out there that's worth buying? Hyper-Threading could be it, since more and more people are doing rich multimedia work," he said.

For mobile developers, Intel announced it would bring the old multimedia extensions (MMX) that were first introduced in 1995 for the Pentium chip, would be brought over to its XScale wireless chips under the name Wireless MMX. Wireless MMX will improve video decoding performance by 40 to 60 percent, according to Intel. The company didn't have a time frame on when Wireless MMX would hit the market.

Intel introduced the LaGrande, a hardware-level security system for the internals of a PC. Not much was revealed about LaGrande, except that it would be CPU and chipset extensions designed to "harden" the system, so data is preserved as it's moved around internally. LaGrande would work with Microsoft's Palladium security system, but is at least two years off.

Microsoft almost stole the show on Intel. Executive vice president Jim Allchin was there to show off Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, the latest flavor of Windows due to ship in November. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition uses a pen for input and a new electromagnetic-style screen that did a good job of reading pen input, even sensing when the pen is pressed lightly or hard.

In one demo, he loaded a Web page, drew a circle around an image on the site, scribbled a note around the image, then cut it and pasted the circled area and the note into an e-mail message. The e-mail was then sent off without any keyboard input required.