Update with Dunnington and Core i7 photos, text.
The latest and greatest silicon and derivative products is what the Intel Developer Forum is all about. Moorestown, Tolapai, and Canmore are just a few of the chips detailed at IDF this week, while UrbanMax, new netbooks, and the first laptops based on the quad-core mobile processor were among showcased products.
Intel Chairman Craig Barrett delivers the IDF keynote. Barrett criticized America's K-12 educational system and said great technology still can't take the place of great teachers.
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)Intel Chairman Barrett brought out Carnegie Mellon University's Johnny Chung Lee, who demonstrated how cheap, off-the-shelf technology--in this case a makeshift whiteboard--can go a long way. "To be interesting today, technology has to be the fastest, the best, the brightest, the lightest, but here you can see if you sacrifice a little bit of capability and performance for dramatic savings in cost, you can have a pretty dramatic impact," Chung said.
One of the more novel devices demonstrated was the 10-inch Intel UrbanMax a computer that can switch between a laptop and tablet. This by itself isn't groundbreaking because tablet PCs from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba already do this. The novelty is the size and design: it is smaller than an ultraportable--like the Toshiba Portege--yet is designed like an oversize mobile Internet device such as Compal JAX 10. When configured as a tablet, the keyboard is hidden but can morph into a laptop by sliding out the keyboard, which tilts the screen.
Intel UrbanMax concept design has a 10-inch screen and uses special low-power Centrino 2 processors
(Credit: Intel)
Intel UrbanMax in laptop configuration
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)An Intel official demonstrating the device said that "UrbanMax is an innovation platform from Intel. This is a product-ready concept." UrbanMax uses "Montevina" Centrino 2 small form-factor (SSF) silicon. SSF chip packaging is used in the MacBook Air and results in lower voltage and smaller size than typical Intel low-power mobile processors.
It is interesting to note that major PC makers have adopted Intel concept designs in the past. Last year, Intel offered a ultra-thin laptop concept design that was eventually adopted by HP for its Voodoo Envy 133 notebook.
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Is four processing cores inside a laptop overkill? Probably not for gamers. Intel is expected to meet this insatiable need for speed when it rolls out it first mobile quad-core processor.
An Intel executive is on the record stating an August roll-out.
And this may happen sooner in August than later. System vendors may go public with information about the quad-core mobile processor as soon as August 11, according to sources. This is when other processors, such as the Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3GHz), are expected to go public.
Falcon Northwest already uses quad-core processors in its laptops.
(Credit: Falcon Northwest)Many of the details of the quad-core mobile processor are public already. At the roll-out for Centrino 2, Mooly Eden, an Intel senior vice president, said the quad-core mobile chip will have 800 million transistors and a 45-watt power envelope--10 watts higher than the 35-watt Intel mobile processors used today. "You'll see gaming machines and (mobile) workstations with more compute power than servers two years ago," Eden said.
The quad-core QX9300 chip will be part of the Intel Extreme series of mobile processors. HP's high-end Pavilion HDX gaming laptop line and Dell's Alienware unit both offer laptops with Intel Extreme mobile processors such as the X9000.
Last week, Intel announced the Intel Core 2 Extreme X9100, a dual-core mobile processor running at 3.06GHz.
So, is a quad-core mobile processor overkill? "Definitely not for our customers," said Kelt Reeves, president of enthusiast PC maker Falcon Northwest. "We've been putting quad-processors in (laptops) for a long time."
To date, Falcon Northwest has used desktop quad-core processors and currently uses a Q9550 quad-core chip, which has a 95-watt thermal envelope--unsuitable for a standard-size laptop. But Falcon Northwest quad-core laptops are typically "big power-hungry beasts that weigh twelve pounds," Reeves said. The upcoming mobile quad-core has half the power envelope of the Q9550.
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