San Francisco, 07 Mar 2006
Technological collaboration to meet the demands of future workflows is likely to be a dominant theme at the 2006 Intel Developer Forum (IDF), which starts in San Francisco today.
At a media briefing ahead of the event yesterday, Intel CTO Justin Rattner highlighted various aspects of research being undertaken by Intel by more than 1 100 researchers at 18 different locations in different parts of the world.
Rattner underlined the importance of research to advancing new technology platforms, but also stressed that it was vital to establish standards through collaboration across the IT industry as well as between the industry and academics.
"We have established open collaborative agreements with four top universities to enable Intel to work with leading academics to identify technology that will be critical to business in future," Rattner said.
Announcing Intel`s new global Tera-scale computing research programme aimed at developing future platforms able to deal with trillions of bytes of data, Rattner said: "Intel believes the future of computing will be characterised by terabytes of data and teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) of power that will enable personal computing to become truly personal."
Rattner says the programme covers many different research areas including the development of silicon and platform technology. It also looks at enabling highly threaded software to be able to realise the potential of processors using tens or even hundreds of cores within the next 10 years.
"To take advantage of parallel computing, we must understand how to design and program for future software workloads. The whole IT industry will have to be involved in setting the new standards and the way we do programming in future."
The three main components of the Tera-scale computing research programme will be research into improving silicon performance through configurable caches, research into platforms to improve energy management, and research into software development to simplify the writing of parallel programs.
"An important part of the new research project will be analysing what people will need from their PCs and servers in the coming decade," said Rattner.
In a technical briefing by various speakers, the unified display interface, HomePlug Alliance, certified wireless USB, ultra-wideband technology and mobility emerged as the other themes likely to feature strongly at this week`s IDF.
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