14 DAY TRIAL // Today is the last day of Intel's Developer Forum, the conference held in Los Angeles at the Moscone Center. As anticipated before it kicked off, Intel has revealed a number of details regarding upcoming products, including the soon-to-be-released Core i7 processors. The company has also detailed its highly anticipated graphics product, the Larrabee, believed to drop sometime in 2009 or 2010.
As we have already noted in several of our previous posts, Intel's next-generation graphics product, codenamed Larrabee, could change the face of the graphics market by providing new levels of performance for both consumer and professional users. The chip is based on a many-core CPU architecture and is expected to support DirectX and OpenGL APIs, enabling it to run today's games and programs, as well as future software applications optimized for dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores. As a matter of fact, Intel is poised to become a main competitor in the consumer graphics card market, which naturally makes many wonder as to how NVIDIA and ATI will try to compete with the Santa Clara-based leading chip maker.
Besides the Larrabee project, Intel has also discussed its next-generation mobile platform, said to support the company's notebook Nehalem-based CPUs. Furthermore, David Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group, has even demonstrated the first working notebook platform codenamed Calpella.
Mr. Perlmutter unveiled Intel's mobile-focused quad-core notebook workstation, the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor that, despite its impressive four cores, consumes only 45W of power. Furthermore, coming to confirm recent rumors, Intel has also introduced its second-generation mobile processors designed for ultra thin and light notebook PCs. As expected, the new processors have been designed as dual-core products.
Furthermore, Mr. Perlmutter also outlined the company's upcoming high-performance SATA Solid-State Drive product lineup, set to improve the system's responsiveness, power consumption, and provide a rugged and reliable operation. The new SSDs are expected to be released later this year.