Email	Print Reprint
	add to:
	Del.icio.us Digg Google Furl	Slashdot Y! MyWeb Blink

Day 3 of the Intel Developer Conference, and my time here is almost done. It hasn't been the smoothest of trips; my new laptop crashes more often than a blind NASCAR driver and if I fed the food served to us at the Moscone Center to a dog, I'd be arrested.

The greatest challenge, though, has been to catch up on things. I run into old hands, like Anand Lal Shimpi from AnandTech and Loyd Case from ExtremeTech, two guys I haven't seen since the last time I went to IDF, and they seem somewhat jaded. I recommend a three-year sabbatical to renew their perspectives, which is met with chuckles.

Although Intel was talking 4GHz as far back as 2002, the company has since backtracked and capped clock speed. Intel's fastest CPUs now are 3.8GHz. Instead, Intel has focused on things like Double Data Rate Two Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (DDR2), PCI Express (PCIe), Serial ATA (SATA), and multi-core CPUs.

This is serving to provide some big leaps in throughput, which has always been the shortcoming of PC computers. DDR2 promises 10.6GB/sec. of dual channel bandwidth, well above the 6.4GB of DDR. PCIe video cards have 3.5 times the throughput of 8x AGP and the next generation Serial ATA, called SATA II, will run as fast as 3GB/sec., well above the 1.5GB of current SATA.

So it didn't surprise me to see a lot of PCIe on the demo floor. NVidia has revived the old SLI (Scalable Link Interface), where two video cards work in parallel to double video performance. SLI first appeared a decade ago. The way it worked was one video card would draw one line of a frame, the second card would draw the next line, then the first card does the third line, and so forth.

SLI now splits the job over frames. So card one draws one frame instead of every other line, while the second card draws the next frame. Tests on hobbyist sites are showing that SLI allows for very high resolution gaming with full anti-aliasing and offering performance a single card could not do.

With PCIe gaining marketshare in new PCs, VMETRO (http://www.vmetro.com), a Norwegian company that specializes in bus analysis tools, introduced a tool for testing PCIe card performance. Vanguard Express XMC and PCIe Card Protocol Analyzer (that's the full name) handles debugging, testing and validating PCIe protocols on cards.

That was about the only developer tool on display at the show. One Stop Systems (http://onestopsystems.com/) showed off its MAX Express products, which allowed sending data from a PCIe host over cable to other computers, with data rates of up to 10GB/sec.

The rest were mostly new form factors and new hardware. Memory manufacturers are bumping up their DRAM capacity, as several announced 2GB DIMM sticks. This should be news to no one, but 32-bit computers can only access 4GB of memory. With 64-bit computing, you can access up to 16 pedabytes of memory. So, why buy a 64-bit computer and put 1GB of memory in it? With a growing number of motherboards supporting the faster DDR2 memory, memory makers are also upping their memory capacity, and several, including SimpleTech (http://www.simpletech.com/) and Infineon Technologies (http://www.infineon.com/) announced 2GB and 4GB memory DIMMs.

Intel closed the show with a few more bits of news. One technology in the labs that could be the source of controversy is the Automatic Network Outbreak Containment technology. This network feature monitors the number of connections opened per second and will shutdown the NIC if the number of connections rises beyond a certain threshold.

This is an attempt at heuristics to catch unknown/unidentified viruses, Trojans or spyware. Intel claims that the software caught every worm and virus it had in 8000 hours of testing, with no false positives. But it also is intrusive, to a point. It could shut down legitimate high levels of activity. Intel claims there have been no false positives. It will be a while before the Containment technology becomes a product offering, so it remains to be seen how it will be implemented.

Intel also showed off a technology codenamed Diamond. It searches though graphics image for image elements, rather than contained text. For example, it can search thousands of unsorted images for people, or objects. In one demo, Intel compiled a list of images featuring a face from a large, unsorted collection of images.

And with that, I bid adieu and look forward to a six-hour drive back to Smog City, wondering if I can justify upgrading my three-year-old computers to the latest and greatest from Intel and its partners.

1

RELATED ARTICLES No Related Articles		TOP 5 ARTICLES No Top Articles.