I’ve been to a number of Intel Developer Forums over the years and can tell you that it’s the most important event on my calendar. Not only do you get to see new products launched and have the ability to report about the news coming out of the event but you get to answer deep technical questions and talk to very experienced engineers. You come away with not only an idea about what’s launching today but, if you read between the lines, you can work out what’s going to happen in the next year. IDF Beijing starts on the 11th April. I’m not attending this one (I usually attend the San Francisco event in Sept) but I can guarantee there will be a busy week ahead as news develops and the technical session PDFs get released.
I’ve already taken a look at the IDF Beijing session catalogue and picked out some exciting sessions to follow. The sessions cover the following topics and give you a good idea about what could happen to the Ultrabook over the next year.
- Intel® Wireless Charging Architecture and PC platform touch points. [We saw wireless charging on an Ultrabook demonstrated at CES in Jan]
- Introduction to the Upcoming Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX2)
- Openstack. [Collaborative project for scalable cloud architectures. Intel is a member. More info.]
- Open Data Center Alliance, Open Compute Project, and Intel® Cloud Builder program
- Narrow-VDC (NVDC) – a power control design to enable optimization of the power subsystem in terms of maximizing power-conversion efficiency while reducing the size and price of the Bills Of Materials (BOM).
- Panel Self Refresh Technology. [Already seen at IDF 2011]
- Enhancing Gaming Experience on Ultrabook™ – [Expect to hear about capping frame rates at 30fps and providing ‘just enough’ in terms of mainstream quality and performance.]
- Thunderbolt ™ Technology – Enhancing the Ultrabook Experience
- Intel and McAfee: Security Beyond the Operating System. [This is likely to cover hardware implementations of McAfee technology]
- Enhanced communications architecture that enables great “always on, always connected” experiences. [Note the mention of ‘always on.’ This could become a target for Haswell-based Ultrabooks in 2012]
- Using Anytime Access (remote wake) capabilities on platforms based on the next generation Intel® microarchitecture code name Ivy Bridge
- New Ultrabook platform capabilities such as touch, sensors and context awareness
- Voice and vision in Ultrabook. [Expect this to include gesture and speech control.]
- “Going thin” challenges
- Stamped metal chassis for Ultrabooks. [There’s already one of these on the Toshiba Z830.]
- Batteries and sensors [I’m hoping for an Intel Capital announcement here. What have Intel achieved with their $300 million so far?]
- Hybrid designs [This relates to touch, Windows 8]
- Evolution of the Ultrabook™ responsiveness requirement for 2013 platforms – [A very interesting one. We might get to see the 2013 definition of an Ultrabook]
- Computing Continuum Usage Model. [Not much is known at this stage apart from that it’s intended to be a framework for interconnecting different Intel devices and device-aware clouds]
- Compute Continuum software stack
- Common Connectivity Framework: Simple, Secure, Multi-transport Device Connectivity
- “Intel’s aim with the common connectivity framework is to enable experiences which are seamless, consistent and secure across a range of different device types and operating systems,” ref
- Common Connectivity Framework API testing with North Michigan Uni Maths department in Q4 2011
- How to simply and securely connect different type of devices over WiFi*, WiFi Direct*, WAN, LAN, Bluetooth® technology using a single API
You’re unlikely to see big press releases on many of these but we’ll be following up on everything you see here. Like I said – a busy week!
