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Intel Presents the Computing Future: 70 Projects UnveiledThe company highlighted some futuristic projects which are believed to become reality in the near future |
By Ionut Arghire, Windows Editor
12th of June 2008, 13:49 GMT
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Intel presented on Wednesday, at the Computer History Museum more than 70 projects and concepts aiming at the future. They are all underway in its labs. The projects include areas like environment, health-care, wireless networking, visual computing and the list goes on.
Justin Rattner, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Fellow at Intel, stressed on the
fact that all the investments made today on research would have a dramatic impact on the next five years' technology. The investments would also bring major changes in the manner people interact with computers and great improvements on the environment.
"Hundreds of researchers inside Intel, and our close work with other technology companies, scientists, universities and governments will bring dramatic change over the next 5 years," Rattner said. "The sampling of projects on display here, and the doubling of our R&D investment over the past 10 years, will speed scientific discovery, improve health care, better the environment, advance visual computing and bring a rich and wireless Internet experience from the device of your choice, anywhere in the world."
Future devices will boost performance in visual computing
One of the major changes in today's computing performances will be brought in the visual computing area. The future chips will scale more than one core, and, while all tendencies walk towards parallel computing, there will be quite a boom on visual computing capabilities, translated into life-like 3D environments, instant analysis of video feeds and more friendly ways for people to interact with their devices.
Intel has already demonstrated, together with Neusoft, a car application featuring video cameras as eyes and multi-cores processor-based computers as the brain. Future cars are estimated to be equipped with such machines that will allow them to make accurate identifications of cars or pedestrians that are coming too close to it, as well as to take its own safe actions to prevent accidents.
This area of visual computing has high requirements in computer power, which also raise parallel programming challenges. The car demonstration used Intel's Ct programming research, a C/C language extension created in Intel's labs. The program was able to scale from 2 to 8 cores and needed no additional software code or compilers to be written for the accident prevention work.
New performance enhancements with the 32nm processors, more power reduction available
Since the 45nm processors are on the lead now, the time has come for a new scale down. Intel showed that it's making progresses in the development of the 32nm processor, due to strike the market somewhere in 2009. The main idea behind the 32nm process is that it doubles the transistor density when compared to that at 45nm. Both performance and performance per watt are improved due to the incorporation of the 2nd generation of high-k/metal gate. For the first time, Intel uses on the 32nm the immersion lithography for patterning critical layers. The company presented a 291 Mbit SRAM wafer built on 32nm as a part of the demo.
Computational modeling is used by ray tracing to simulate light rays in a 3D scene. The scaling to multi-core processors allows ray tracing to be used in interactive 3D graphics for different visual computing applications. Intel and researchers at VRContext demonstrated visualization of extremely complex industrial models using Intel multi-core processors.
Another tendency in today's computing is the reduction of energy consumption. The environment and energy efficiency of Intel-based products is continually improving, and researchers plan to continue in finding ways to reduce the levels of power consumption and the electricity needs of these products, as well as enhancing performance at the same time. New power management techniques are explored, together with a way of redefining the power management needs of Intel products.
The Platform Power Management, the new technology, features a continuous monitoring of any changes in the operations performed by the computer. It can intelligently cut down power to portions of the system that are not in use at certain moments. Demonstrations showed that the power efficiency is increased by 30% on a lightly active or idle system. Intel researchers believe that they will manage to develop the technology that will allow them to reduce power consumption to 50%, no matter if the system is idle or under heavy load. Some day, all Intel based systems, from MIDs to high-performance servers, will benefit from the Platform Power Management.
Small devices could deliver performance levels similar to laptops
Less energy consumption and smaller devices seem to be the key these days, yet that does not mean there will also be performance reduction. On the contrary, the tendency is to create small devices capable of delivering the same high performance that a large laptop or desktop computer is capable of. The increasing demands in the last two require the finding of new technologies that will allow MIDs to provide more user experience than suggested by their size, as well as interaction with their surroundings.
Mobile devices could benefit from speech interfaces, for example, mainly for their limitation of the physical input and output channels. Intel demonstrated that a speech interface could allow the creation of a connection between two mobile devices and a wireless display for resources and services sharing. A simple example would be the synchronization of such a mobile device with a large display only through a spoken command, allowing fast sharing of recent photos.
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