David Flynn16 September 2007, 9:42 PM
IDF Fall 2007 |What does Intel have up its sleeve for next week's silicon slumber party in San Francisco? Think plenty of 45nm 'Penryn', a dash of quad-core, beyond Core 2 and more.
San Francisco may have just commemorated the 40th anniversary of The Summer of Love , that brief shining zenith of the hippie ‘flower power' movement in Golden Gate Park. But lately, the city by the bay has been the stage for a not-so-cold war between AMD and Intel, with battlegrounds ranging from the mechanics of market share to the moral high ground of innovation, most notably in the quad core stoush.
This week should give Intel plenty of chances to preen and crow at its annual IDF (Intel Developer Forum) Fall conference, which kicks off on Monday (US time) with the traditional ‘Day 0' media briefing before the doors open to developers, analysts and the odd Intel groupie for the three-day event.
Budgetary constraints have seen the previous score of IDFs held around the globe trimmed back to three cornerstone events this year with the San Francisco conflab losing its annual kick-off crown to Beijing, which this year ranked as the largest IDF held outside of the US. The third IDF will take place in Taiwan on October 15-16.
APC will be attending IDF Fall, and Intel's advance notes predictably show plenty of love being directed towards the new 45 nanometre ‘Penryn' processors, even though desktop versions of the superslab won't appear until early 2008. Penryn is Intel's best chance to shift the focus back to its own technology leadership, as well as an ability to further beef up the processors beyond the realm of mere physics by cramming extra cache memory into the space made available by the smaller die.
 Core 45?: This banner heads our invite to Intel's IDF press party for the 45nm 'Penryn' processor. Intel, please tell us that you're not about to add 'Core 45' to your array of brands! |
To set the mood, Intel has already announced an ‘invitation only' press party on the first evening of IDF, the invitation for which bears an intriguing ‘Core 45' banner next to the familiar Core 2 badge. Surely there's not another rebranding exercise about to take place? We hope not - in fact, we'd rather like Intel to use IDF to address how they'll clear up the confusion as they move from the current Core 2 architecture, with its dual-core and quad-core skews (plus Centrino, vPro and Viiv platforms plus the to-end Extreme brands) to the next-gen ‘Nehalem' microarchitecture due late next year as part of Intel's ‘tick tock' strategy.
We're certainly expecting the first dose of details on Nehalem, along with more on the low-power Silverthorne CPUs intended for ultra-mobile devices. Built on the same 45nm process as the Penryn family these will be Intel's first true generation of bespoke UMPC processors, compared to the current Stealey chips which are reheated ultra-low voltage Pentium M processors.
Intel will also use the first day keynote by President and CEO Paul Otellini, entitled "Extreme to Mainstream", to mark its territory as being, well, just about everything, as well as rolling out Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in a rare IDF appearance later that day.
David Flynn is attending IDF Fall 2007 as a guest of Intel Australia