Intel Wants "User-Aware" Consumer Electronic Products

At IDF, Intel spoke about the future. And the future means smarter and safer electronic products, adaptable to the way people use them around the world. These "user-aware" platform technologies could be used to build systems that intuitively respond to people and their ever-changing needs.

User-aware platforms will place new demands on the way the industry develops hardware, software, services and interfaces. Intel is already evolving its processor architectures toward supercomputer-like performance by employing multiple processing cores in each processor (which is like adding multiple "brains" to a computer). To enable platforms that are more aware and help meet people's needs in future, Intel envisions putting tens to even hundreds of energy-efficient computing cores inside a single processor.

Each chip will be capable of dynamically assigning individual or clusters of processing cores along with the necessary memory and bandwidth to specific tasks such as seeing, listening, network security, gaming, and understanding commands. These future platforms will use virtualization software to put protective walls around each task's dedicated slice of computing resources so they run better and don't interfere with other applications.

Justin Rattner, Intel senior fellow and director of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, explained in a keynote that current electronic products have almost no way of knowing how they are being used, who is using them, or what the user wants to accomplish without that person directing their every move. This leads to frustration because of all the things people have to do just to use and manage their technology. The future of electronics will be driven by the need for simpler, more intuitive ways of dealing with technologies that in turn help people do what they want to do. To achieve this will require a new generation of user-aware platform technologies.

User-aware platforms will use this new level of intelligence to manage multiple tasks and sources of input (video to see with, audio to hear and speak, sensors to feel, storage to remember, the network and radios to connect with the Internet and other devices) and then apply machine learning to simplify our lives.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge of building systems that intuitively respond to our ever changing needs is helping them understand context: the "who," "what" and "where" of our lives. Location-aware computing technology could help systems more intuitively respond to requests, such as downloading different types of music to the family car, kitchen or cell phone based on a person's tastes. Or, it could alert a factory worker to specific maintenance needs of different equipment based on proximity, safety conditions and the worker's level of training. And, it should do this in an appropriate, privacy observant manner.

Intel will work closely with the industry - original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers - on a number of fronts to make this vision of user-aware computing a reality and to bring better, more intelligent products to people around the world that are useful to them where they live.