IDF September '06 Bulletin No. 2
 

Intel slaps Viiv badge on set-top box
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6830

One of the focuses of Intel CEO Paul Otellini's IDF keynote on Tuesday was the home and consumer market. So where do we stand with PCs in the living room? Will we all eventually have them, or will we have clever set top boxes that connect with our PCs located elsewhere? Otellini spoke of the latter.



Intel: Design a sexy system and we'll give you $1mil
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6831

Intel wants to sex up the PC to make it as desirable as it is functional. In an attempt to encourage the design of swish new systems, Intel's offering up to $1mil to designers and manufacturers who can come up with something alluring.



HomePlug's speeding up, scope is broadening
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6833

Stephen Wood gave a brief update at IDF on how HomePlug is faring. They're speeding up the technology and working on specs that broaden its uses.



Rattner's Mega-center
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6834

With Internet content growing ever richer and web apps seemingly the way forward (some of the time), the demands on data centers is growing. Data centers need to be reliable, scalable, secure and cost effective. A large part of cost effectiveness is power consumption. See what power efficiency ideas Intel has in our summary of Rattner's keynote.



Wireless USB certification program launches
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6835

This week at IDF it was announced that the USB Implementers Forum has launched its certification and compliance program for wireless USB products.

Alan Wake was demoed during Paul Otellini's keynote on an overclocked Core 2 Quad system running at 3.73GHz, mainly because the game itself is significantly multithreaded and could take advantage of the quad-core system. While development is still continuing on the forthcoming game, we did get some insight into exactly how Alan Wake will utilize multiple cores.

Surprisingly enough, Markus indicated that Alan Wake would pretty much not run on any single core processors, although it may be possible to run on single-core Pentium 4 processors with Hyper Threading enabled, with noticably reduced image quality/experience.

The game will actually spawn five independent threads: one for rendering, audio, streaming, physics and terrain tessellation. The rendering thread is the same as it would be in any game, simply preparing vertices and data to be sent to the GPU for rendering. The audio thread will obviously be used for all audio in the game, although Remedy indicates that it is far from a CPU intensive thread.