Intel CTO Justin Rattner on Thursday showed off this 3D input device that includes 'haptic' force-feedback technology.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)SAN FRANCISCO--Most folks who try the Second Life virtual world grimace as the primitive 3D imagery drags its way onto their screens. Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner, though, smacks his lips with anticipation.
The chipmaker, always on the lookout for something that will give people a reason to buy a new PC, has reason to be excited about Second Life and its ilk. The technology, while still mostly for a fairly nerdy audience, has the potential to appeal to a broader audience than video games where overmuscled marines blow away aliens.
And just as significantly, Rattner said in a speech here Thursday at Intel Developer Forum, virtual worlds will stress out servers as well as PCs.
Intel has also eagerly anticipated some processor-taxing technologies that have come to fruition, including streaming audio and video, and some that haven't, such as speech recognition.
Rattner showed statistics that indicated a PC's processor bumps up to 20 percent utilization while browsing the Web, while its graphics processor doesn't even break above 1 percent.
Intel CTO Justin Rattner
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)But running Second Life--even with today's coarse graphics--pushes those to 70 percent for the main processor and 35 to 70 percent for the graphics processor, he said. The Google Maps Web site and Google Earth software pose intermediate demands.
Running a virtual worlds server is vastly more computationally challenging, though, when compared with 2D Web sites and even massively multiplayer online games such as Eve Online. An Eve Online server can handle 34,420 users at a time, but Second Life maxes a server out with just 160 users. Network capacity also is much more heavily used.
In addition, virtual worlds exercise parts of a processor such as math calculation engines that are idle when handling Web sites.
SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft next week plans to issue its first Windows Server 2008 release candidate, a near-final version of its operating system, a senior executive at the software company said Thursday.
"We expect the release candidate next week," said Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization, in an appearance during a speech at the Intel Developer Forum here.
The release candidate will include a test version of software code-named Viridian and formally called Windows Server virtualization. This "hypervisor" allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously, a useful technology in improving server efficiency and eventually leading toward more flexible data center operations.
Neil showed a server running virtual machines on Viridian, one the bare-bones "reduced-footprint" version of Windows Server 2008 and another Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The software can take advantage of the horsepower of a four-processor Xeon system, Neil said.
Microsoft hasn't had a smooth time delivering either software to the market. In May, Microsoft stripped out several significant Viridian components from the first version of the technology, and in August, it delayed Windows Server 2008's release to manufacturers from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008.
Viridian is scheduled to ship in final form within 180 days of the final version of Windows Server 2008.
SAN FRANCISCO--Intel will begin building flash-memory drives into servers in 2008, starting with 32GB models that the company promises will boost system performance.
Flash drives can perform 10 to 50 times as many input-output transactions per second as conventional magnetic hard drives, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech at Intel Developer Forum here. In addition, they consume 4.5 times less power and write data at twice the speed.
Of course, the flash-drive capacities are much smaller. "The cost per bit is clearly going to be higher," Gelsinger said in a meeting with reporters. But some customers are bound much more by performance, he said, often running lots of hard drives in parallel but filling them only to 10 or 20 percent capacity.
Intel will offer samples of the technology this year and sell production models in 2008, Gelsinger added in an interview.
Intel will start with 32GB models, using NAND flash memory. "We'll have nice progression as we go to 64GB and 128GB over time," he said.
SAN FRANCISCO--This Nehalem plan better work out for Intel, because the chipmaker set very high expectations for the next-generation processor design Tuesday.
Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, speaks at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, demonstrated a Nehalem-based system at the Intel Developer Forum here that he said will bring major performance improvements for the company's x86 processor line. The processor family itself is due to arrive in 2008.
The Nehalem demonstration featured a system with two quad-core processors; each processing core can handle two independent instruction sequences called threads, and the demo showed all 16 threads at work on various tasks. The processor was the very first incarnation of Nehalem--the "A0" version--built for the first time three weeks ago, Gelsinger said.
"What you saw today was incredible health," he boasted during a meeting with reporters after the speech. "It really is pretty spectacular, and we're excited by the progress."
Nehalem brings major changes not just to the processor but also to the way in which it communicates with memory and other processors, a technology formerly called CSI, which variously stood for Common System Interconnect or Interface, and now branded as QuickPath Interconnect, or QPI. QuickPath reproduces a technique that rival Advanced Micro Devices used for years to market share against Intel and secure a solid position in all four major server makers' product lines.
The Nehalem processors demonstrated Tuesday each had four cores on a single slice of silicon, the approach AMD uses with its new Barcelona member of the Opteron processor family. In 2009, Intel will sell Nehalem processors with eight cores on a single slice of silicon.
Intel also is expected to sell less expensive Nehalem processors with dual cores per die, a source familiar with the company's plans said.
... Read moreUpdate: I added some details about USB 3.0 device availability and performance.
Intel showed off prototype USB 3.0 connectors and an add-in card at Intel Developer Forum Tuesday.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)SAN FRANCISCO--Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.
Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.
In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there's typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. A prototype shown at the speech is working now, and USB 3.0 will have optical and copper connections "from day one," he added.
The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second. Many devices don't need that much capacity, but some can use more, including hard drives, flash card readers and optical drives such as DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. The fastest flash card readers today use IEEE 1394 "FireWire" connections that top out at 800 megabits per second.
In addition, USB 3.0 will offer greater energy efficiency, Gelsinger said. It will be backward compatible, so current USB 2.0 devices will be able to plug into USB 3.0 ports.
Virtualization start-up SWsoft announced a partnership with Intel Monday to develop software support for technology built into Intel's newer processors.
SWsoft sells two broad categories of virtualization software, Virtuozzo and Parallels. Virtuozzo makes a single instance of Windows or Linux appear, from the perspective of higher-level software, to software to be subdivided into several independent partitions called containers, and it's chiefly used on servers. Parallels lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on one PC, most notably letting Windows run on Mac OS X systems.
Through the Intel partnership, announced in conjunction with the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, SWsoft will support a host of Intel chip features. Those features include VT-d to improve input-output on virtual systems, Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to make the boot process more secure.
The partnership also includes joint marketing work. It's not the first alliance between the companies: Intel invested in SWsoft in 2005.
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