Top 10 highs and lows of IDF

There were highs and lows galore at this year's Intel Developer Forum

The exhibition halls are being packed up, delegates are checking out of their hotels and another Intel Developer Forum (IDF) has come to an end.

IDF is Intel's main forum for new releases and updates on the older products and, as such, is key to understanding the company's direction. It is also a chance for developers, manufacturers and academics to meet and exchange ideas that will shape the direction of computing in the next decade.

While we have lots of stories and video from the show, there is a lot to process in the three days. Visitors are bombarded with new information about what is coming down the line and strategy for the future.

So I have selected my top five highs and lows of the show, so you can get an idea of what is important and what is not.

HIGHS

5. USB 3.0
USB is not tied to any one vendor, but Jeff Ravencraft, the president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), is an Intel technology strategist in the Digital Enterprise Group and was on the show floor floor showing off the first USB 3.0 products.

Rather confusingly, the USB-IF is calling the technology USB Superspeed (one wonders what USB 4.0 will be called) but whatever the marketing bods do to create confusion will not do too much harm, because the speed of the technology will ensure it is a huge seller.

The new system increases the speed of data transmission tenfold, to a cracking 4Gbit/s, although in the real world it will probably only give around 75 per cent of that. It is stunningly fast, and pretty much means game over for FireWire.

USB 3.0 requires a new USB hub, which NEC was displaying, along with a new cable and receiver, but crucially the rectangular form-factor of the ports remains exactly the same and it will be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 devices.

By keeping ports the same, customers will not have to bin their old hardware, manufacturers won't have to redesign systems too much and everyone benefits. It is a textbook case of how to develop and implement a new standard.

4. Harrison Schmitt
Harrison Schmitt is, to date, the only civilian ever to have walked on the moon, and the only scientist to make the trip as well.

Despite only getting a slot late in the day (we only found out about it when we were leaving the show and the Tannoy announced his talk) he held audiences spellbound with his show on the route to the moon and why we should go back.

One point was especially telling, particularly with an IDF audience. Very few new products or systems were invented in the process of taking humans out of the gravity well. However, the speed of change in things such as processor design and computing was drastically increased, which Schmitt estimated had paid back the cost of the missions sevenfold.

At the end of the presentation he hung around to chat and it was a privilege to shake hands with the great man. When asked whether those who insist we have never been to the moon irritated him, he was unperturbed.

"It doesn’t bother me a bit; I know where I've been," he said.

3. Light Peak
The demonstrations of Light Peak at the show were interesting, but it is the future technologies it will affect that really got people thinking.

Light Peak is an experimental optical technology that will have the capability to transfer data between devices and components at 10Gbit/s, with a theoretical maximum of 100Gbit/s predicted.

It is also flexible, with the ability to support a wide variety of standards and connections. Suddenly the mess of connectors the average power PC user has to have could be seriously reduced.

As one Intel Fellow pointed out, we have run about as far as we can with wire connections, and optical is the next logical step forward. The biggest barrier is cost, but with Light Peak Intel appears to have cracked a major part of that.

2. Core i7 Mobile processors
Mobile computing is all the rage at the moment and the IDF audience was packed out to see the latest mobile chips from Intel.

The new quad-core i7 processors look incredible. They are fast, power-efficient, but also highly customisable. If you need speed then overclocking is perfectly possible, whereas if long battery life is your priority the chips can shut down individual cores to save on power use.

Manufacturers are keen to get the new chips into systems as soon as possible for two reasons. First, the chips will excite the business and consumer markets and are flexible enough to offer OEMs a vast range of new system designs to get sales rising again.

However the chips, like any new hardware, are fairly expensive and, if demand is strong, they will help people get used to the idea of spending large amounts of cash on notebooks again. With netbooks selling well several manufacturers are worried that they will be losing sales to the low-priced systems and the i7 could help with that.

1. Westmere
Without a shadow of a doubt Westmere was the star of IDF, and so it was fitting that Sean Maloney (left), Intel's golden boy, should get to show it off.

Westmere looks to have more grunt and features than almost any mainstream processor technology at the moment, and will be crucial to securing Intel's future in the server rooms and datacentres of tomorrow. As the industry moves towards mass virtualisation and a bigger emphasis on cloud computing, the new chip will be vital.

Intel has also packed a lot of stuff onto the die itself, including support for AES encryption, a very welcome development in today's security-conscious times.

Westmere is also Intel's first 32nm mainstream processor and is key to the company's move to scale down processor technology in the future. Intel is refreshing its manufacturing every two years, and is pushing down to 22nm by 2011. Looking even further ahead, the company predicts getting down to 4nm by the 2020s.

Smaller is usually better when it comes to transistors in terms of power use and productivity, according to Intel (although AMD disagrees), and Westmere is an important step on the road.

LOWS

5. Attendance
This has been my ninth IDF and I have never seen the number of attendees so low. Compared to the boom years, IDF felt like it was deathly quiet and sections of seating were taped off in the keynotes to pack everyone in at the front of the hall.

The situation was even worse in the exhibition halls, with the number of stands from suppliers well down and Intel setting up booths of its own to keep the density of the show the same. There was some interesting stuff there, but the crowd was mainly big-name companies and there were very few of the wacky startups that usually make IDF such fun.

Of course Intel was upbeat about the situation, stressing that we should not so much look at the numbers but at the quality. They have a point, but it is a worrying sign that the industry still has a long way to go before it reaches the levels of interest seen a few short years ago.

4. Atom and 3D TV
Intel's new Atom system on a chip is actually a rather clever piece of engineering, but the uses it has been designed for are a little uninspiring.

The company was keen to stress that it was not looking to reinvent the PC in TV's image, but that is what it looked like to some delegates and I have my doubts that people are quite ready to swap out a familiar technology for something new. After all, Intel's Media PC system was a horrible bit of kit when it first came out and has not gained much traction since.

But what was really mystifying was Intel's insistence that 3D TV was going to be the wave of the future. We have had people trying to push 3D TV systems for decades now and the technology stubbornly refuses to catch on.

People do not want to have to wear special glasses to view something, particularly in a public setting like a sports bar. And I doubt whether cinemas are going to rush to buy every customer a set of glasses to watch their films.

The demos delegates saw were all very impressive, once the glasses had been handed out. I have to say that seeing Bono in 3D was annoyingly tantalising; he looked almost close enough to punch.

3. Whiteboards
This year's IDF had a large number of whiteboards scattered around the venue, where delegates were supposed to write their view of what the future of computing could be and what industries it would spawn.

I'm sure this idea may have sounded good in the planning meetings, but the end results were less than impressive. If someone has a good business idea they are hardly going to write it down for all the world to see, and some of the delegates recognised this by suggesting sharks armed with lasers or hybrid zombie-helicopters.

Whiteboards have a place in meetings for brainstorming, but at a conference they looked a bit desperate. By the end of the show they were also covered with graffiti by people trying to use them for self-promotion, which was a bit off-putting.

2. Larrabee
For a technology that was supposed to be out this year, Intel is remaining very quiet about Larrabee, and everyone noticed.

Intel's forthcoming graphics processor has been talked up by the company so much in the past that you would have expected a major push this time around to prime the market. Instead we got a grudging mention from Intel chief executive Paul Otellini, a short demo and virtually no technical details at all.

What we did get was a talk on programming for the chip itself but, when it comes to graphics, software is only part of the challenge. With AMD a clear leader in the graphics market and Nvidia firmly in second place, Intel has a mountain to climb before it can come up with a product that is going to win widespread support.

It was all very disappointing and, from private chats with a couple of PC manufacturing representatives, the industry is not holding its breath for anything spectacular from Intel in the next 12 months on this front.

1. Where's Pat?
On the aforementioned whiteboards one message kept appearing (and was almost immediately wiped off by Intel staff) – 'Where's Pat?'. One delegate managed to keep it up by writing it in Hindi, but almost everyone was missing Pat Gelsinger.

Since his surprise departure from the company just before the show, the rest of the industry has been coming to terms with the departure of one of the men who typified the engineering culture at Intel. Gelsinger was a true enthusiast and his keynotes were among the best attended at the show. While he was sometimes wrong about technology, he was a key feature of IDF.

With Gelsinger going the last remains of Intel as an engineering-led company have disappeared and it is clear that the accountants and marketers are in charge now.

Of course, there are still skilled engineers at Intel and there will continue to be so, but one effect of the bloodletting over the past few months has been to keep them firmly in their place.

Intel has undergone a sea-change in attitude and direction and it is going to be interesting to see how it develops as a company.

Some might say that the loss of engineering focus was inevitable as the market matured, but on the other hand a company at the apex of the computing industry needs to have an engineering vision, and that seems to be less in focus than before.