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IDF Spring 2005: Day 1 Keynote : Pat Gelsinger

by David Ross on 2 March 2005, 00:00

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IDF and Intel's CPU roadmap for the future

IDF Spring 2005: Day 1 Keynote : Pat Gelsinger

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We always like speaking with Pat and attending his keynote's, often some of the most insightful outlooks on the industry come direct from this man.

This Spring IDF was no different, in his keynote speech Gelsinger, the man who is no longer CTO is now heading up Intel’s Digital Enterprise division, announced that data now compiles to their Moores Law theory in doubling every 12 to 18 months. However, to keep up with demand, it’s important to have scalable architecture ready to cope with the increase.

With Intel at the heart of a business, they want to go back to days of old where they provided lots of smaller solutions now they want to provide a complete solution rather than just the ‘oomph’ of a CPU buried inside a machine. This is a message that seems to be the theme for Intel at IDF this year.

Intel’s Dempsey platform (Who do they pay to pick these names?) which is due for a 2006 release, will contain Intel’s IO protocols and workloads. Intel have made smallt weakes to the CPUs and chipsets, in order to make sure the IO performance is ready for the disk subsystem which is in place. Dempsey runs a CPU which works on a 65nm process and a fully buffered dimm. This dimm gives the x86 architecture that of Sun for memory referencing.

One of Gelsinger's demos featured virtualisation technology, which has widespread support from all the big companies such as Xen, Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat (keeps the Linux crowd happy, for once).

He showed off the Itanium but with dual core suport in the form of montecito which was running VT, which we should see for Q3 and Q4 release, he stated that Intel will deliver VT from top to bottom.

Alongside all this Pat also disclosed some specs about Intel’s iAMT technology. Using some nifty software, 32 Itaniums were fed images from an array of cameras and matched up faces to a database. This was very impressive since there was thousands of records in the database and this was almost on the fly lookup. Maybe the Homeland security will replace their Logitech QuickCams with this? I suspect this is an ideal solution for them.

Something else that Intel were proudly showing off were the Presler and Dempsey chips. (I guess the license was just too much for a Presley chip? Would’ve been a massive seller in the Southern States, for sure). These cores are based on 65 nanometre die. This had support for i/O AT which we saw a live demo of with a virus being sent across the network. The system was inteligent and isolated the problem and downloaded the updates

Before we plunge on with more of the Intel family tree, let’s just take a very quick word from Pat Gelsinger about WHY Intel are firmly motoring off down the multi-core route… Well, simply put, Gelsinger reckons that multi-cores will show a ten fold performance increase in the next three years, which is pretty compelling stuff. We will apparently no longer need one fast core but many slightly slower ones - which can do more tasks at the same time. I will be writing about AMDs thoughts on this later today.