14 DAY TRIAL // This year's edition of Intel Developer Forum is about more than minuscule mobile Internet devices and Atom chips. During yesterday's conference, Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group, demonstrated the chip manufacturer's next-generation Montevina mobile platform in a manner that reminds us of AMD introducing the Puma platform during the CeBIT expo.
According to Perlmutter, the new platform will provide twice the 3D processing performance of any integrated graphics solution by now. We don't know if his allegations include AMD's 780G graphics cruncher, but Perlmutter's allegations were not just plain words.
Intel's VP demonstrated a reference Montevina product running the brand new Universe At War: Earth Assault game, and it managed to achieve decent gaming speeds and impressive framerates.
Of course, the enthusiast gamers will not strip their dedicated graphics off the system, but this step is in fact a huge leap in a sector where Intel never managed to stun the audience with its achievements.
However, the 3D graphics performance is not the only ace in Montevina's sleeve. There are more nifty novelties packed with the platform, such as its ability to offload the video decoding tasks from the CPU. The dedicated video decoding hardware comes with important optimizations in HD video playback, that allows the system manage its energy resource more efficiently.
However, Montevina will not arrive on the market until later this year, when it will face the challenge of newly-released gaming titles.
Another key factor to the platform's success will be the driver support for the product, that would allow users to fully take advantage of the integrated graphics processors. If Intel manages to provide the same driver support as its rivals on the chipset market AMD and nVidia, then we'll see more and more users ditch their desktop PCs and go mobile.