posted by Guest Blogger on March 31, 2008
Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket has the power of a laptop and can deliver a rich computing, telephony, media, gaming, and Internet experience. Imagine a day when this device knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time. Imagine a day when this device is not constrained as a standalone unit, but can dynamically become a hybrid combination of other computing and multimedia devices in close proximity. In the labs at Intel, we have been looking at what makes sense for mobility in the future – a vision we refer to as Carry Small, Live Large.
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tagged: csll, IDF, IDF2008, Intel, kahn, kevin kahn, mobility, research
posted by Guest Blogger on March 31, 2008
Now we are already in a Multi-core era, dual-core has become mainstream, and some people even have Quad-core CPUs in their desktop PC. But some people still are are not clear if, in the future more cores will benefit them, due to it seems that most of applications they care about have been reasonably fast in Dual-core or Quad-core. The below questions is often asked by people: Will future applications (especially desktop applications) need more cores? and what are those applications? Some people may say HPC, but other people will not be satisfied with the answer due to they are mainly concerning the applications on the PC, and normal people don’t need to run HPC applications on their desktop.
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tagged: IDF, IDF2008, intel, many core, model-based computing, multicore, research, terascale
posted by Jeffrey Foerster on March 28, 2008
This years CES was filled with a variety of wireless display and wireless HDMI solutions using various combinations of radios (proprietary radios in the UWB or 5 GHz unlicensed bands, WiFi-based, UWB/W-USB based, and 60 GHz based) and compression algorithms (uncompressed, proprietary lossless and lossy, JPEG2000 based, and H.264 based). So, it appears there is interest in the industry to enable this usage model, but how can we reign in all this chaos? Clearly, lots of industry harmonization and standards will be needed before this application can really be ubiquitous. There will be a session on wireless displays during the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in April which we hope will spark further discussion and collaboration in this area.
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tagged: csll, research, standards, wireless
posted by Guest Blogger on March 27, 2008
Intel is in the enabling game. As a building block supplier, our business is based on the premise that when our customers win, we win, too. We are also in an industry that is constantly pursuing the next big thing to drive new waves of growth and business opportunities. The Mobile Internet Device (MID) category is a candidate for the “next big thing” in mobile computing, although some skeptics question its appeal.
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tagged: composed computing, csll, MID, mobile device, research, standards, wireless
posted by Roy Want on March 27, 2008
In the last 10 years, personal computing has evolved from being primarily a desktop activity to a highly mobile one: the laptop computer, despite its large size and significant weight, has been the most popular mobile platform to date. While smart phones and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) have made in-roads into general computing applications, their use is limited to a few key tasks (e.g., calendar, rolodex, mp3 player) that are suited to the small size of their keypad and screen. However, given ever increasing processing and storage capabilities, the potential of these devices far exceeds the computational needs of these applications, and a significant problem facing the mobile industry is how to give users access to a full personal computing experience with the mobility afforded by a smart phone or MID.
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tagged: dynamic composable computing, HotMobile, MID, mobility, research, Ultra-wideband, WiFi, wireless
posted by Justin Rattner on March 19, 2008
Today, it’s a pleasure for me to report that Intel and Microsoft are joining forces to accelerate the mainstream adoption of highly parallel computing technology. Together, the two companies are pioneering the concept of industry-funded “Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers” (UPCRCs) at both the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The two schools were selected in an open competition judged by experts at both companies.
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tagged: IDF, IDF2008, intel, parallel computing, parallel programming, research, terascale
posted by Guest Blogger on March 19, 2008
I can’t help but feel the excitement and optimism that accompanies the launching of a bold new venture which will involve nearly 90 talented researchers focused on parallel computing. We’ve got great partners in Microsoft, Berkeley, and Illinois, an exciting technical focus, and a commitment to create fundamental breakthroughs in parallel computing – applications, software, and hardware. The awareness that we’re attacking a critical problem for the entire computing only fuels the adrenaline! Why are we doing this?
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tagged: Andrew Chien, applications, Berkeley, hardware, Illinois, Intel, Microsoft, parallel computing, research, software, UPCRC
posted by Cheryl Miller on March 19, 2008
While I was at our Berkely lablet open house in early March, I had a chance to interview some of the folks involved in the UPCRC lab on the UC Berkeley campus. It was exciting to learn more about this multi-organizational collaboration.
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tagged: Berkeley, Dave Patterson, Intel, Kathy Yelick, Krste Asanovic, parallel computing, research, UPCRC
posted by Sean Koehl on March 17, 2008
I wanted to share a video of some of the application research we have going on at our Intel China Research Center in the area of video mining. In collaboration with Tsinghua University, Yimin Zhang and his team at ICRC are trying to create improved computer vision algorithms for use on future multi-core hardware. The idea is to allow computers to recognize content in professional or user-generated video so that one can automatically edit (or at least pre-edit) to isolate only the most interesting parts of the video.
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tagged: China, ICRC, parallel programming, research, soccer, terascale
posted by Guest Blogger on March 13, 2008
Wireless is cool. But nobody wants a slow wireless connection. However, fast wireless means large bandwidth and in today’s crowded spectrum bandwidth is a scarce resource. Recently, 60GHz radio (often referred to as mm-wave radio) has attracted the attention of the wireless communications community for very wide-band application opportunities. Why 60GHz? First, there is a huge amount of unlicensed spectrum available around there. Second, if we think of the bandwidth as a fixed percentage of the carrier frequency, 10% of 60GHz would give 6GHz, compared to 250MHz at 2.5GHz. With channels larger than 2GHz, applications with data rates over 5Gb/s over relatively short distances (i.e. 10m) are possible. Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN), wireless HDMI, synch & go and wireless docking station are just a few examples of what could make mm-wave technology attractive for the high-volume consumer market. Moreover, low-cost technologies like CMOS are already proving to deliver the performance required to build a reliable millimeter-wave wireless link.
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tagged: 60 GHz, IDF, IDF2008, ISSCC, multi-radio, radio, research
posted by Guest Blogger on March 12, 2008
One of the consequences of widespread use of wireless is that the spectrum is getting crowded. Radio standards must be designed to operate under this rather hostile environment with the presence of a lot of blocking signals in the channels adjacent to the one your radio is working in. It turns out that the standards account for the worst possible scenario, and all radios are designed to meet that specification all the time whether blockers are present or not. This means that a receiver design consumes power whether a blocker is present or not. This is rather wasteful and an obvious way to fix it would be to have a way to reduce power of the receiver if we can determine that there are no blockers present.
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tagged: IDF, IDF2008, ISSCC, multi-radio, radio, research, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, wireless
posted by Guest Blogger on March 11, 2008
If you have a mobile phone with GPS in it, you can now sense you location and summon appropriate directions. If you have mobile friend finding software, you are already able to know whether your husband is picking up milk on the way home or your friend is waiting for you at the bar. In the future it will be possible to use an expanded array of naturally occurring datastreams to make lots of inferences about human activity. But is this really the same thing as ‘context awareness’?
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tagged: anthropology, context awareness, ecommedia, location, sensors
posted by Cheryl Miller on March 10, 2008
I have followed this project over the past few years as it has moved from an exploratory project in the Intel Research lab, to testing in such remote places as Vietnam, India, South Africa, Panama and…Berkeley.
The demo that was presented at the Berkeley Lab open house had two antenna transmitting video via WIFI connection. One of the antenna was on top of the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the UC Berkeley campus which is about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) away from the lab in downtown Berkeley.
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tagged: 802.11, Berkeley, Intel (r) RCP, Intel Research, long distance WiFi, Rural Connectivity Platform
posted by Guest Blogger on March 10, 2008
Power amplifiers are used in wireless systems to transmit the desired information from the user device to the base station. Power amplifiers used in cellular systems typically deliver significant amounts of power (~1Watt) in order to be able to communicate over large distances (few miles). The modulation used in such systems is usually optimized to reduce the power dissipation of the power amplifier. For example, in GSM the information of the signal is encoded in the phase of a sinusoid waveform only (rather than phase and amplitude), which allows the use of very efficient switching PAs. (Switching PAs operate on 0-1 signals. Because the transistor operates as a switch, switching PAs usually have substantial efficiency advantages over more conventional PAs, especially in CMOS processes that are optimized for optimal switching operation for the digital circuits). Modulated waveforms optimized for PA power dissipation give good PA efficiency but at the same time result in suboptimal utilization of the available bandwidth and reduced data rates.
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tagged: IDF, ISSCC, radio, research, Wi-Fi, WiMAX
posted by Megan Langer on March 06, 2008
Wouldn’t it be great to customize the web so it fits your needs? Maybe you already read the blog from Rob Ennals last fall about mashmaker. It’s a research project within Intel Research Berkeley which allows you (not a PHd researcher…but you or me) to actually manipulate, repurpose and twist multiple different websites into a form that gives you the information you want, presented exactly the way you want it. Mashmaker is an extension to your normal web browser that allows you to mash together information from different sources on the web, as you browse. There is a trial running now with 6000 participants (and waiting list) where they are gathering feedback for the next version.
posted by Anwar Ghuloum (葛安华) on March 06, 2008
One of the constants valued by our developers is the backward compatibility provided by our architectures in the form of a consistent ISA. Historically, a corollary of this has been that legacy software has benefited from process and micro-architectural improvement. Of course, we are doing our best make sure this “forward scalability” corollary still holds true (AKA the “free lunch”). But, the stakes are increasing to re-optimize software to better take advantage of new micro-architectural features that don’t obviously benefit legacy binaries. As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, core counts increase (this shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point), memory hierarchies change, and ISA evolves as power-efficiency becomes the first-order concern. (The graph below shows a combination of a retrospective look at changes in Vector ISA and a speculative look at how Vector ISA change in the future considering stuff like co-processor/GPU trends, application usage, and so on.) These changes may have the unintended consequence of tempering the forward scalability corollary…or even regressing performance in some cases.
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tagged: Multi-core, Parallel Programming, Programming Languages, SSE
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