The Day Zero (press day) documents have been released on the Intel IDF website site and I’ve been walking through them to get an idea of the main themes. There’s nothing there about Menlow, Atom, Moblin or MIDs but there’s a lot of talk about what amounts to a vision for the wireless mobile future. That is, using the MID as the core, lightweight, accessory-free, personal processing unit and radios, made by intel of-course, to allow near-field discovery and connectivity with screens, keyboard, cameras and all the other deices that you usually connect to a PC with cables. The core user requirement of mobility is there of course and the ‘Carry Small, Live Large’ theme continues through most of the presentations. ‘Carry Small’ is the essential computing components that make a MID. ‘Live Large’ is the ability to wirelessly connect and use any accessory that comes into range.
The Day Zero summary notes PDF gives a good overview of what Intel are getting at:
- Smaller form factor and improved power efficiency: The research to support power saving and smaller form factory includes enabling hardware control of platform components for longer and deeper sleep states, algorithms to control when and how a radio can be powered down and complete digital multi radios and reconfigurable antennae which will save power and help enable smaller form factors.
- Personalization that anticipates user needs: Intel is researching techniques for mobile devices of the future to have greater awareness of the user’s preferences and deliver new services and capabilities to satisfy those preferences using sensors, context framework, Web-based services as well as privacy and security for user data protection.
- More aware mobile devices that leverage and interact with technology in the environment: Researchers are looking at how tomorrow’s mobile devices will easily operate beyond their own form factor or built-in capabilities by leveraging the power and capabilities of nearby wireless devices including display, storage, compute and user interaction.
The second and third point there are lead-ins to tunable radio technology that Intel are pushing. The idea, I understand, is that you can reduced the amount of radio silicon in a device by using processing power to tune and virtualise a single tuneable digital radio and therefore save power, heat and size by letting a dedicated processor deal with tuning, sensing and control of multiple signals. It’s a lot more complex than that of course and if you want to dive into the details of Multi-Band CMOS transceivers, read this PDF.
Click to enlarge.
Other interesting technologies from Day Zero are Cliffiside, a technique that is said to virtualise a single WiFi signal into two so that it can be used for multiple simultaneous networks. Think concurrent WLAN and PAN for simultaneous Internet access and local device syncronisation. Finally, and this one doesn’t seem to 
fit into the mobile strategy as well as the others, Intel MashMaker that will launch on April22 at the Web2.0 conference. MashMaker is a browser plugin that will take information from two websites and ‘mash’ it into one display by linking information from both sites. Presumably this relies on a web full of metadata (see Semantic Web.) Part of this MashMaker software technology is the ability to create Widgets which sit together to build pages. I guess these could also form the basis of a ‘home’ screen on a mobile device. There’s a website for MashMaker at mashmaker.intel.com
Bearing in mind that all this information has been given to journalists today, its not surprising that there appears to be a large PR content here but look at what they are presenting; A mobile future. Small devices. MIDS and power-efficient silicon. For Day zero of IDF, Intels biggest technical showcase, it gives you an idea of exactly how big they think the little devices really are.
Take a look through all the Day Zero presentation papers on the Intel IDF Press site and bookmark the video page for access to the live keynotes. The important one for readers here is ‘Enabling the Best Internet Experience in your Pocket’ by Anand Chandrasekher at 0500 GMT but most of the 2 hour keynote will have mobile content in it so tune in at 0300 GMT for the start.
