According to the ONE campaign, every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease and 3.5 million total people die each year. According to non-profit organization charity: water, one in nine people worldwide suffer year-round from lack of clean drinking water, while in Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours each year walking to access water.

Mobile Insights Radio host Peter Biddle talked to Paull Young of charity: water to discuss how the organization is making water more accessible through digital fundraising. charity:water has been considered by some as the tech industry’s favorite nonprofit due to its innovative advancements and ability to use various technologies to meet the customized needs of each geographic region it serves. The charity is piloting various initiatives, such as a mobile mechanics project in Ethiopia where locals visit a nearby charity:water project site to retrieve and share data using cell phones provided by the nonprofit; the locals assisting will text message status updates on respective sites, such as “water is flowing” or “water is not flowing”.

Tune in to hear Paull discuss his experience using social channels to build awareness and education, as well as about having a social voice, being informative, creating movements, and empowering local communities to own and manage projects. Listeners will learn about how charity:water has established new models for fundraising, the technological advancements and pilot projects in play, and how each individual across the globe can help make water more accessible.

But earlier this year, global consultancy Deloitte issued an alarming report. Their research estimates that more than 90% of user generated passwords would be vulnerable to hacking. While the most common passwords like “password” and “1234″ are obviously insecure, researches were surprised to find that even those normally considered acceptable by most I.T. departments—those with eight characters, numbers, and a mix of upper-case and lower-case characters—could be cracked in a matter of days, even hours.

With password day, Intel wants to remind you to switch to more secure passwords. You can find simple tips and guides, and even a password strength tester, to help you take a small step towards digital strength. We are even offering an incentive to do so – over the three weeks following password day Intel is giving away three touch-enabled Ultrabook convertibles, along with dozens of copies of McAfee All Access 2013 to those who pledge to change their passwords. Because we all have multiple passwords, you can enter again each day. 

You can see the tips, and take the pledge to change your password here<intel.com/mobile-security>

Let’s protect out passwords. Keep what’s yours, yours. 

If you change your password, or have any security tips, tweet @Intel with #changedmypassword

Intel Iris graphics delivers unprecedented visual experiences in modern, ultra small notebook PCs. This new graphics lineup brings more choices to consumers and a range of graphics solutions that are optimized for Ultrabooks™, premium notebooks, and desktop all-in-ones (AIOs). The performance improvements will amaze even the hardcore computer geek.

4th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Graphics, when compared to 3rd Gen Intel Core processors, deliver significantly more 3D graphics performance². Customers will see incredible performance gains such as:

• 2X 3D performance increase over Intel HD Graphics for the high performing U-series processors designed specifically for Ultrabooks, with Intel Iris graphics.
• 2X 3D performance increase for Mobile H-series processors (designed for more robust notebook PCs) compared to Intel HD Graphics  with Intel Iris Pro graphics and High Speed Memory (eDRAM)
• 3X 3D performance increase for desktop R-series processors with Intel Iris Pro graphics and High Speed Memory (eDRAM)

Intel Iris graphics delivers not only stunning 3D visuals but also provides faster, more advanced video & photo editing and brilliant display capabilities through features like Intel Quick Sync Video technology, MJPEG* acceleration, 4K UltraHD display resolution, collage mode display, OpenCL*, DX11.1*, OpenGL4.1* and DX extensions.

If you compare to the installed base, consumers upgrading a four year old notebook with an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor to a new Ultrabook with a 4^th Gen Intel Core i5 4200U processor with Intel Iris graphics will experience a significantly better computing experience³:

• Almost half as thin and half the weight
• 17X faster video conversion (optimize a video for a social media site)
• 25X faster graphics performance (playing visually rich, mainstream PC games)

Intel Iris graphics delivered with select 4th Gen Intel Core processor SKUs is part of Intel’s ongoing commitment to increase the processor’s graphics and media performance. 4^th Gen Intel Core processors will be available with either new, high-performance Intel Iris graphics or the improved baseline Intel HD Graphics. Since 2006 Intel has increased the processor’s 3D performance by 75X as measured by 3DMark06⁴ and improved our leadership via technologies such as Intel Quick Sync Video technology. Additionally, Intel HD Graphics provides a power-optimized experience even when a discrete graphics solution from another vendor is used through switchable graphics technology. That means that Intel’s commitment to continual improvement of our graphics technologies has resulted in Intel graphics now delivering the visual experience in almost every Intel processor-based notebook sold.

Intel Iris graphics will deliver amazing and vibrant multimedia experiences from stunning 3D visuals and faster, more advanced video & photo editing, support for brilliant 4k UltraHD* displays and high-speed game performance without the need for an extra discrete graphics card. We are excited about what Intel HD graphics brings to your visual experience and think you’ll be impressed with Intel Iris graphics solutions later this year. And, hint hint, we aren’t stopping there.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

¹ John Peddie Research 2012 Graphics Report, 2/13

² As measured by 3DMark11*, an industry standard benchmark from Futuremark*

³ Weight and thickness physical system measurement. Graphics performance measured with 3DMarkVantage. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.7 used to convert is a 6 minute, ~1GB, 1920x1080p, 23738 kbps, MOV video file that one would have obtained from an iPhone 4S. The file is transcoded to a smaller 640×360, H.264, .MP4 file for reduced file size during internet transfers or for viewing on a portable device with lower resolution such as an iPod.

⁴ 3DMark06 is an industry standard benchmark from Futuremark.

The latest episode of MashUp Radio with Peter Biddle hosted San Francisco entrepreneurs from FarFaria, Drawp, and PlayTell to discuss how the delivery and consumption of children’s books has evolved and what these companies are doing to encourage children to read more and further explore their world. The panel discussion ranged from technological advancements and use of cloud-computing, to the startup founders’ favorite stories growing up.

FarFaria CEO, Ajay Godhwani talked about how children will benefit whether it is reading a story or listening to an audio book on an electronic device on their own or being read to by their teachers and parents.  Ana Albir and Kunal Jham, co-founders of Drawp, discussed how their respective love for books as children paved the way for the two to create a storytelling app.

The startup founders and Peter also exchanged ideas on how they would change children’s education if they had a single swipe of a magic wand. Drawp founders said they would add scent to reading and merge the world of physical and digital. PlayTell chief product officer Jason DePerro, would equip every child with the tools and resources to be passionate, curious, and truly love learning; a wish that would significantly benefit future generations.

While the benefits of reading are undisputable, the data can be astounding. According to The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, children who were read to at least three times a week by a family member were almost twice as likely to score in the top 25 percent in reading compared to children who were read to less. Beyond that, by the age of 2, children who are read to regularly display greater language comprehension, larger vocabularies, and higher cognitive skills than their peers. 

Regardless of age, it’s never too early (or late) to pick up a new book and start reading – for yourself or with a child. Here’s a list of children’s book reviews from The New York Times to help get you started.

 Myth #1: Only Smart Phones and Tablets are Keeping Pace with User Demands for Modern Capabilities.
Tablets are booming and smartphone sales have been on the rise for some time. In this environment, many people have been quick to question the relevance of the PC because it’s sensationalistic or because the PC’s steady sales are far less interesting than those of the booming smartphones and tablets. As Fisher explained in his keynote on Thursday however, personal computing is rapidly transforming and is now taking many different forms – from desktop, notebooks to today’s All in Ones, Ultrabooks, tablets, convertibles and detachables. According to Fisher, Intel and the industry are modernizing the computing experience with new features such as touch interface, fast boot, connectivity, security and more, which are available on all these devices.

Myth #2: Intel Architecture Only Delivers Great Performance on Windows.
Fisher acknowledged that Intel has always delivered great performance on Windows, but he pointed out that the company is equally focused on power because a great user experience requires both robust performance and battery life. He showcased how Intel processors lead in performance and are competitive on battery life, providing the best experience for Windows.

Consumers have plenty of options at their disposal and Fisher explained that the mission of the Intel Software and Services Group is to ensure the best computing experience on Intel processors across all operating systems (OS) including Android, Chrome OS, Tizen and Windows. This includes making sure users get performance and great battery life on anything and everything that has an Intel processor inside, no matter the OS environment being used. It also includes working with the ecosystem on application choice. For example, with the help of the Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel® HAXM), application developers can target and emulate both Intel® Architecture (IA) and ARM-based platforms when writing applications for Android apps that were built with Android NDK. Intel is also the largest external contributor to the Chrome OS ecosystem and is supporting the operating system with the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor family.

Myth #3: It Will Always be Hard to Write a Great App Once and Run It on Multiple Platforms.
HTML5 is an open development technology that will help application developers lower total cost and improve time-to-market for cross-platform application development and deployment. To ensure this technology continues to evolve and remains open to innovation, Fisher announced the launch of the Intel® HTML 5 Developer Environment, a cross-platform development environment to develop, test and deploy applications that can run across multiple device types and operating environments as well as being available across various application stores. Zhao Bo, Director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology China Electronic Standards Institute joined Fisher on stage to talk about development of HTML5 in China.

Myth #4: Only Smart Phone and Tablets Apps Deliver Updated Experiences.
Intel is constantly working on innovating and evolving applications and experiences, not only by introducing new hardware in the form of processors, but also by working with the developer community to modernize PC applications for business and consumer use. Recently, this focus has concentrated on touch interfaces and sensor technology, and over the past year, Intel has worked with application developers to grow these experiences with Perceptual Computing technologies including facial, voice and gesture recognition to enable more human-like interactions.

In modernizing computing, security is always the most important factor to consider particularly as users are entering in more personal information when conducting financial transactions and social media activities on mobile devices. Using the latest technologies, including near field communications (NFC), mobile payments and Intel® Identity Protection Technology, Intel has collaborated with a global bankcard network UnionPay, to make mobile payments both easy and secure. Speaking during Fisher’s keynote, Hongfeng Chai, executive vice president of UnionPay, introduced the UnionPay Quick Pass service in which consumers can use an NFC smartphone powered by an Intel processor to pay for products. On stage, the two speakers demonstrated a real-time secured transaction on a soda machine using this latest technology.

Myth #5: Developers: You’re Alone in Your Success
Developers sometimes feel like they are out there alone and the industry doesn’t support them in becoming successful. Fisher pointed out Intel’s understanding that developers’ success translates into the company’s success. As such, Intel has a number of programs and resources that have been built for developers, including the Intel® Developer Zone which offers technical support, software development tools, marketing assistance, community forums and more. By working with developers to deliver new features and software advancements, Intel is working to create a foundation in which everyone can have a compelling experience on any computing device they choose.

If you are interested in getting more information on other keynotes of IDF Beijing and news that came out of the show click here.

As service providers meet the changing expectations from their customers, driven in many cases by retail OTT products, they’re looking for technology that provides great consumer experiences. This includes beautiful, visually-based user interfaces, the ability to add new services and applications like gaming, multi-screen usages including the ability to watch your pay TV on Ultrabook™ devices and all-in-one PCs, and a platform that allows rapid deployment. To address these needs, Intel will launch the Intel® Media Server Reference Design (MSRD) at TV Connect.

The MSRD is both a hardware and software design kit for OEMs and system integrators that allow them to quickly develop Intel-based set-top boxes and media servers. Intel has pre-integrated components such as a media engine, broadcast stacks, virtualization, and motion control technology so that validation testing time is reduced and time-to-market is accelerated. The MSRD is based on the Intel® Atom™ processor CE5300, a dual core Atom-based SOC that supports hyperthreading, virtualization, an advanced 3D/2D graphics engine, integrated power management, and a H.264 B-picture hardware encoder.

Intel is working with a number of companies to provide technologies to create the latest set-top boxes and media servers. The MSRD features Futarque’s DVB-T2/T/C broadcast and media sharing stacks, Videon Central’s aVia media engine, and includes Hillcrest Labs’ Freespace® Motion Engine™ software to enable a motion remote control.  Additionally, the hardware platform designed by Prodrive can quickly become production ready.  The MSRD will be available in April 2013 from Intel and through our distribution partner Videon Central.

If you’ll be at TV Connect in London, stop by booth 39 and see Intel!

Emerging Markets

Mobile adoption among emerging markets is poised to grow significantly in the coming years, which will connect new populations of people with mobile technologies for the first time. For many in emerging markets, a smartphone will serve as their first computer. Thus, the smartphone or tablet will likely be one device for a multitude of uses, including access to commerce or healthcare, banking, or unprecedented contact with distant family members.

Healthcare

Mobile health is growing at a rapid pace with the development of new apps, tools, and innovations that enable everything from accessing health metrics on the go to remote doctor visits. How are these new innovations saving lives and what are the implications for developing nations? Learn what thought leaders like including Pamela Goldberg, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, Kirsten Gagnaire of MAMA, and Arjen Swank of Text to Change, had to say about the evolution of mobile technology and healthcare.

Security

As mobile technology evolves, so do the risks and loopholes to our privacy and identity. With an expected 50 billion connected devices expected by 2020, managing an increasing range of tasks – from banking to personal photos to family memories and more – companies are developing a broad range of new technologies to keep mobile information safe. We spoke with Christopher Sellers of Mobeam, Fran Rosch of Symantec, Sam Guilaumé of Movea, Charles Walton of SecureKey, and Raj Samani of McAfee to discuss the future of mobile security, and what new technologies we can expect to help keep our data safe for both consumers and businesses.

Software Development in Africa

The Mobile Insights team learned from Erik Hersman, Managing Director and Co-Founder of iHub, and Renée James, EVP and GM of Intel Software and Services Group, that Africa has and always will be a mobile first continent.  To support the growth of mobile technology in the continent, Intel is working with iHub to foster growth of the software development community in Africa with targeted investments in mobile application development, university training and expansion of technology hubs. Check out what this means for mobile technology development in Africa.

Technology for All Ages

Simplifying the user experience is a key area of innovation and focus for mobile devices. By making devices that are easy-to-use, technology becomes ubiquitous to consumers of every generation – from the one year old using a tablet to watch cartoons to the grandmother using her smartphone to capture pictures of her grandkids. Learn more about what our thought leaders have to say about the prevalence of mobile technologies across all age groups.

You can also check out the Mobile Insights YouTube playlist for all of videos and follow us on Twitter @Intel to let us know what you think of #MobileInsights.

Our team sat down with Renee James, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group, Shiyou He, executive vice president of ZTE, Hermann Eul, co-vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, and Dean Elwood, founder and CEO of Voxygen.

After touch, it will not be long before we’ll commonly use facial recognition and gestures with our mobile devices.   Voice recognition will also become more common, allowing us new usages such as search through voice conversations the same way one would search through email today.

Check out the latest Mobile Insights to learn more about the new ways we’ll engage with mobile technology moving forward.

Be sure to come back tomorrow, when we’ll have more exciting insights on mobility and emerging markets.

You can also check out the Mobile Insights YouTube playlist for the latest videos posted and follow us on Twitter @Intel to let us know what you think of #MobileInsights at #MWC13.

A number of industry leaders attending the event pointed out that despite the rapid pace of innovation, mobile adoption is nascent and still in a growth phase. They strongly believe that the benefits of today’s innovations will bring benefits for generations to come.

In the first Mobile Insights episode from Mobile World Congress, we explore state of mobile adoption and what’s needed to drive large-scale consumer use across generations.  At the core of product adoption is building an intuitive, user experience that extends pre-existing human behaviors.  The episode features Mr. Wayne Chen, vice president of Lenovo’s Mobile Business Unit, Mr. Shiyou He, executive vice president of ZTE, Hermann Eul, co-vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, and Daniel Weisbeck, CMO of Netbiscuits.

In the video Hermann Eul and Mr. Shiyou He discussed the future of 4G networks, detailing the lifespan and peak of mobile networking. Despite popular belief, the maturation of mobile networks takes 20-25 years, so for example, 2G reached its peak in 2007 and 3G is expected to fully mature in 2016. According to these executives, 4G networks are expected to take the same trajectory – meaning consumes will benefit from 4G for years to come.

Be sure to check Mobile Insights YouTube for more insights from thought leaders describing how emerging mobile technologies are impacting businesses and everyday lives of people around the world.

If you’re on Twitter, follow us @Intel and share your #MobileInsights or what were the #MWC13 highlight for you.

If you are getting started with big data, Apache Hadoop is a framework that allows for distributed processing of large datasets across clusters of computers.

I am certain that many people are wondering why a semiconductor company is now providing a Hadoop distribution. There are a lot of answers to that question so let’s start at the top.

• Intel truly believes increased data from new sources at every scale has the potential to transform society – Lowering the costs of hardware platforms and technologies can enable this – At Intel we think of this as the “democratization of big data analysis.”
  
• Intel aims to enable the Apache Hadoop platform for the widest range of uses, enabling the ecosystem to build the next generation analytics solutions
• The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software is a 100% open source software product that delivers Hardware enhanced performance and security (via features like Intel® AES-NI™ and SSE to accelerate encryption, decryption, and compression operation by up to 14 times).
• The Intel Distribution is the only open source platform backed by a Fortune 100 company that is designed to enable ongoing innovation by the ecosystem of big data analytics ISVs and open source developers who value a reliable, secure, high performance distribution.
• With this distribution Intel is contributing to a number of open source projects relevant to big data such as enabling Hadoop and HDFS to fully utilize the advanced features of the Xeon™ processor, Intel SSD, and Intel 10GbE networking.
• Intel is contributing enhancements to enable granular access control and demand driven replication in Apache HBase to enhance security and scalability, optimizations to Apache Hive to enable federated queries and reduce latency. These and other open source contributions are available to the Hadoop ecosystem and all vendors.
• Intel is launching the Intel Manager for Apache Hadoop as a licensed software product that simplifies management and configurability.

The bottom line – Intel has always had a strong commitment to open source as shown by our contributions to the Linux kernel and Open Stack. Intel wants to see the Hadoop framework easily and widely adopted, as it believes the broad use of analytics, delivered at lower price points, can transform business and society, by turning big data into better insights.

Yes, there are other distributions of Hadoop available. Intel believes that as a leader in processor and hardware platforms, and with a broad ecosystem of partners from systems and software vendors to service providers, we can accelerate the adoption of Hadoop, and spur continued innovation on the framework, while providing great products that utilize all the technology Intel provides. We want to ensure continued broad access to a reliable open platform for next generation analytics. You can see evidence of this in the partners present at the IDH launch. SAP, SAS and Red Hat have announced partnerships along with others, and OEMs such as Cisco.

Didn’t think of Intel as a software company? Well now’s the time to learn how Intel invests in software!

The new Mobile Insights builds on “Intel 60 Second Insights,” a video series launched last year at MWC and through 2012 brought together a variety of perspectives from experts in entertainment, art, technology, business and culture to explain how always connected technologies are changing our lives. Interviews included Pandora’s Tim Westergren, fashion designer Anya Ayoung-Chee and Kate Swanborg of Dreamworks discussing mobility and innovation.

The series aims to bring an understanding for how the rapid evolution of mobile technologies is impacting healthcare, emerging markets, entertainment, and the daily lives of people. Mobile World Congress brings together the world’s leading mobile technology innovators, so Mobile Insights will focus on capturing the trends and visuals that will define the year ahead. Following MWC, the series will feature interviews with leading software developers, academia researchers, and executives from popular phone manufacturers.

Here are highlights from 60 Second Insights and what’s in store for the new Mobile Insights series:

Starting Monday, February 25, you can catch new episodes on the Mobile Insights YouTube playlist.

If you’re on Twitter, follow @Intel, #MobileInsights and #MWC13.

How are mobile technologies changing your area of expertise and your daily life?

It’s the Throughput

Of course, Wi-Fi networks don’t perform anywhere near these maximum data rates in the real world. Wireless networks are affected by all kinds of things—network overhead, user congestion, distance, obstacles, and interference. The number that really matters is throughput. This is the number that measures real-world performance because it takes into account all those bits eaten up by network overhead and environmental factors. Network overhead alone takes 30% to 50% off the top to maintain dependable operation and security. But network overhead and environmental factors are only part of the story. Wi-Fi networks are shared. The more users sharing a Wi-Fi Hotspot and the more traffic they generate, the slower the speed for all users.

Dual Band

Dual band uses both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi frequencies. 5 GHz delivers 5x the capacity of 2.4 GHz with less congestion and interference. Dual band Wi-Fi adapters offer you the flexibility to take advantage of 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks for more capacity to support today’s apps.

Choosing the Right Wi-Fi Adapter

The key things to remember when choosing the Wi-Fi adapter for a new system are:

Speed – Choose from 1×1, 2×2 or 3×3 streams. More streams mean faster speeds, which save time and enable large bandwidth apps like HD video streaming.
Coverage – More streams mean better coverage, giving you freedom to roam when accessing home, work, and public hotspots.
Reliability – More streams mean higher reliability and fewer interruptions from dropped connections.
Capacity – Dual band uses both 2.4 GHz (802.11bg) and 5 GHz (802.11a). 5GHz delivers 5x capacity of 2.4 GHz for less congestion and interference.

Check out the Intel® Wireless Product Selection Guide to find the right Wi-Fi adapter for the online experience you want.

Which Wi-Fi Adapter is Inside?

When shopping for new Ultrabook, Laptop, Convertible, Entertainment or Professional PC, check under the hood to see what adapter is installed. For Microsoft Windows 8 systems, you can find out how to what Wi-Fi adapter installed in the PC you’re considering here. For Microsoft Windows 7 systems, you can find out how to what Wi-Fi adapter installed in the PC you’re considering here.

Intel just launched the new Intel® Wireless: Your Wi-Fi, Your Way site on intel.com to help consumers make the right wireless choices. It tells the Connected Life story of how being smart about choosing the right Intel Wi-Fi product with Intel technologies like Intel® Wireless Display and Intel® Smart Connect Technology enables a richer, experiential connection for Ultrabook™ buyers. The new Intel Wireless Product Selection Guide helps consumers choose the right Intel Wi-Fi product to match the online experience they want based on a visual matrix of key Wi-Fi performance options and Intel features.

Experience the new Intel wireless site at: http://intel.com/wireless

There’s no question, in computing at least, mobile is still THE big mega trend that continues into 2013. As the case of the last year and surely continuing into the new year, we’ll see a ton of new mobile gadgets from phones to mobile desktops. Convertible is the hot new must-have design with tablets that have PC options and Ultrabooks that turn into tablets.

But, mobile is not purely defined as gadgets without wires. Rather, they are devices that truly take on characteristics people now demand, rooted in mobility like touch, instant-on in thin and light designs. And, they are smart – more and more applications and services that help devices work together and make daily tasks simpler (my personal favorite, my GPS and maps that knows where I am and what direction I’m facing!)

And speaking of touch, although it is becoming hugely popular and is certainly the next big thing in terms of how we interact with our devices, it’s just the beginning. Given our life experiences are defined by our senses — by what we see, hear and touch, Intel envisions these human senses to also be at the foundation of the computing experience moving forward. Intel is driving these capabilities across platforms starting now and well into the future, including speech recognition, and intuitive and immersive short-range gesture recognition. So we can imagine using smartphones to interact with and control an Ultrabook or desktop PC, or even track a person’s heart rate through technology that “sees” and analyzes the movement of a person’s cheeks.

Here’s a visual for what trends Intel predicts will be hot for mobile at CES and continuing into 2013:

Big Bets for CES 2013

According to Lea Hickman, Adobe vice president of product management, developers of mobile applications nowadays have to take into consideration all of the varying capabilities that every device has.  This is different compared to just a few years ago, when mobile application development was focused on the desktop, making it a streamlined and straightforward development process for software engineers because the desktop had set capabilities. Scott Kevdon, CEO of Urban Airship, also pointed out that the industry needs to “take advantage of the inherent nature of the device.” According to a recent State of Mobile Apps survey, 48-percent of respondents had plans to increase budgets for multiplatform development tools.

Although the requirements for building incredible apps have heightened, the early access developers receive into hardware capabilities remains limited – making it challenging for developers to realize the true potential for these applications.

According to both of our guests, to continue making progress and innovating in mobile applications, software engineers and application developers will need access to hardware capabilities earlier in the process. Only then will consumers receive amazing experiences that fully leverage the hardware technology.

Scott Kevdon says that while the first generation of mobile applications leveraged what was successful on the web and repurposed it for mobile devices, the next generation is now “taking advantage of the inherent nature of the device.” Applications must leverage the intent-driven technology of these devices, which know who the respective users are, where users are located at any moment, and the user preferences. This innovation and progress has led to new engagement opportunities for businesses and consumers as well as significant growth in mobile application development.  

To hear more about our guests’ insights on mobile technology, check out the rest of our 60 Second Insights  interviews.

So it’s that time of year again when you are looking for the perfect gift for your loved one. And who doesn’t love a shiny tech gadget wrapped nicely under the tree? This year, touch-enabled Ultrabook convertible and tablet devices offer a refreshing take on mobile computing and are proving themselves worthy of bringing some holiday cheer to anyone on your gift list.

Ultrabook convertible devices are putting a new twist – or for that matter a flip, turn or spin – on laptops and tablets this holiday season. Some of the ultrabooks blend the touch screen experience with full keyboards and the performance and responsiveness you associate with a premium computing experience. Essentially, they offer the functionality of a laptop and the touch-enabled experience of a tablet all rolled into one, sleek system.

Intel-based tablets are also in high demand this season. These thin, highly portable devices have all-day battery life and are easy to use with advanced touch screen capabilities. Perfect for the person looking to catch up with friends on a video chat, browse through the latest holiday photos on their social networks or finish up some last minute shopping, all while relaxing on the sofa.

With so many devices to choose from, here are a few you’ll want to make sure are on your list while shopping this holiday season:

Ultrabook Convertibles with Touch Screen Technology

Dell XPS Duo 12 Ultrabook

This Ultrabook convertible has an innovative flip hinge design, so the screen imitates a Ferris wheel and allows an easy transition from Ultrabook to tablet. When you’re busy running to and from holiday gatherings and celebrations, no need to worry about syncing all your information. With Intel Smart Connect Technology, your emails and social networks will seamlessly synchronize, keeping you connected even when the Dell XPS Duo 12 is in sleep mode.

Toshiba Satellite U925T Ultrabook

The Toshiba Satellite U925T slides into tablet mode… literally. From PC mode, the screen lays flat and then slides forward to convert to a tablet. This device is equipped with Intel Wireless Display technology for wirelessly streaming content to the large screen of a compatible TV, perfect for sharing holiday photos and videos with the whole family. 

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 Ultrabook

Featuring a 360-degree flip-and-fold design, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 Ultrabook device can be used as a notebook and then quickly transformed to enable a touchscreen tablet experience. Flip it into tablet mode to play games, fold into tent mode to watch classic holiday films, or use it in traditional laptop mode to get a head start on next year’s to-dos.

ASUS TaiChi Ultrabook

This unique convertible Ultrabook has two displays: an inside screen in the traditional “clamshell” PC mode as well as an external touch screen on the outside of the lid. When closed, this can act as a screen in tablet mode. When open, the external screen can operate independently or can be used simultaneously for a host of innovative new applications.

Tablets

ASUS Vivo Tab

Just want to snuggle up in bed, watch movies and maybe give vent to your long-buried artistic muse this holiday season? The Asus VivoTab lets you do all this and more. This tablet with Windows 8 comes equipped with a high-resolution widescreen display with color clarity that delivers an outstanding visual experience. It also supports the Wacom digitizer stylus that lets you create digital art and explore a new world of creative possibilities. With Intel’s latest file transfer technology, the VivoTab lets you seamlessly transfer all those precious holiday pictures between your tablet and other Windows devices.

Lenovo ThinkPad 2

The slim and lightweight ThinkPad 2 enables extreme mobility and with up to 10 hours battery life, it keeps going for as long as you need it to. Plus, with 3G/4G support, you can stay connected to colleagues, family and friends wherever you are. For the times when your friends or relatives are in town to visit you for the holidays the ThinkPad 2 keeps your information secure and away from snooping eyes, allowing you create a visitor ID for your guest or lets them log in with their own roaming Microsoft Profile.

Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T

Stylish, light and easy to take on-the-go for those long hours in the car on the way to the grandparents’ house for the holidays, the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T offers all-day battery life for continuous video play. With its lightweight design (just 3.26 lbs with the keyboard or only 1.65 lbs as a tablet) and option for either WiFi and/or 3G/4G (LTE) for wireless connectivity, you will stay connected wherever your travels take you. For the style conscious, it is available in a mystic blue color.

Dr. Albert Lin, National Geographic Channel Explorer, has made significant progress on his quest to discover one of the world’s most perplexing mysteries – the location of the tomb of Genghis Khan.  Dr. Lin’s new discoveries were documented in the cover story of the latest issue of Newsweek. 

As part of the ongoing 60 Second Insights program, we sat down with Dr. Lin earlier this year before his most recent discovery to discuss how he has used a variety of high-tech tools – from cloud computing to crowd sourced exploration to mobile drones – to locate one of the world’s ancient mysteries.

During our conversation with Dr. Lin, he discussed how connectivity and mobile technologies have provided access to new information, ideas and opportunities that were never before possible.  One of these opportunities is to apply new technologies to the science of exploration.

Dr. Lin has asked people around the world to help his team scan satellite images from Mongolia to help locate the smallest of clues that may act as archeological bread-crumbs leading to the tomb of Genghis Khan. By using cloud computing and other technologies combined with crowd sourced exploration, Dr. Lin is tapping into an army of so-called ‘Citizen Explorers’ who help create the Human Computation Network.

According to the Newsweek story, the team believes they are getting very close to finding Khan’s burial spot based on the recent discovery of what appears to be the foundation of a large structure that could be the tomb.    We can’t wait to learn more of Dr. Lin’s discovery and how he uses technology in the process!

Back in 2009, we began to notice that a certain sub-set of cloud workloads were far less dependent on high performance and more dependent on just performing a simple task at cloud scale.  Examples of these less processor-intensive workloads are serving up web pages and streaming content. These tasks, while not requiring high compute requirements, have to be executed at high scale, servicing potentially millions of customers.  For these special cases, we realized that we had to create new extreme low energy server designs that reduced the number of components used, shared resources among hundreds if not thousands of daughter cards/cartridges, and were integrated into a cluster design that contained many smaller, power-efficient processor cores.  By doing this could potentially produce an additive effect in power savings that would be directly proportional to the number of servers they deploy.

We called them “microservers” and we pioneered the segment.  We initially addressed this segment by lowering the power Intel Xeon processors from 45W in 2010 to 17W this year due to our 22nm process technology.   Meanwhile, we began validating Atom for specific servers and increasing the feature-set and quietly in the background we were working on our first server-focused SoCs.

Back in 2008 Intel outlined a plan to use our chip design expertise, factory capacity, advanced manufacturing techniques and the economics of Moore’s Law to usher in a new category of highly integrated, purpose-built and Web-savvy System on Chip (SoC) designs and products.  Think of this as the close integration of system components for a specific purpose, such as memory, input/output (I/O), graphics & video engines, and networking on one integrated circuit.  Mobile devices benefited from this integration of many customized silicon features that could deliver features far more efficiently than just the processor alone.  Servers could benefit too.  At that time we already had over 15 SoC projects underway internally and we added a new project for the data center.  By designing more complex systems onto smaller chips, we could scale the performance, functionality and software compatibility of Intel Architecture while controlling the overall power, cost and size requirements to better meet respective market needs.

Today we launched our 3rd generation of microserver processors with the Intel Atom S1200 product family. There are more than 20 low-power servers, storage, and networking systems being designed from Dell, HP, Huawei, Inspur, Quanta, Wiwynn, CETC, Supermicro, Accusys, Microsan, Qsan, and Qnap. This is the first low-power 64-bit dual-core SoC for these data center systems that is in production and shipping now to customers, drawing only 6W of power and delivering four threads with Intel Hyper-threading.  Our SoC also includes key server features like 64-bit support for optimal memory use, Error-correcting Code (ECC) memory support for higher reliability and Intel Virtualization technology for enhanced workload management.  We put in these features because it was important to help Cloud providers not only reduce space and power for specific workloads to cut costs, but we also wanted to help them maintain the reliability and software compatibility associated with server class products that they’ve become accustom to.  When cloud providers deploy Intel Atom processors based microservers – it just runs – no software porting required.

And we’re committed to continue to lead in the microserver platform.  In 2013 our next generation Intel Atom processors codenamed “Avoton” will extend our SoC capabilities using 3D Tri-gate 22nm transistors and lead in power consumption and performance.  Starting from 2014 onwards we will leap further ahead in energy efficiency and performance leadership with 14nm manufacturing technology for low-power Intel Xeon products followed by Intel Atom product lines after that.  Our roadmap for this segment has Intel very well positioned.

Nothing in business is more important than spending quality time listening to customers, because they help you see new trends.  New Intel Microservers.  Now Served.

To learn more, visit us at our newsroom.

We enjoy the convenience of our mobile phones, tablets and laptops every day in keeping in touch with our friends and families and accessing information.   In some parts of the world, mobile technology also plays a vital role in human empowerment and improving quality of lives.  In honoring Human Rights Day today, we are sharing insights from thought leaders in the non-profit sector from our 60 Second Insight program on how mobile technology makes a difference in people’s lives around the world.

Gender Equality

There is a mobile phone gender gap in low- to middle-income countries – according to Trina DasGupta, director of GSMA mWomen Program in a 60 Second Insight interview.  She pointed out that women are 21 percent less likely to own a mobile phone – an estimated gap of 300 million women. Programs like mWomen strive to close this gender gap by identifying culturally sensitive ways to reach women in these countries. For example, in some cultures, women are not able to enter stores that have all-male sales representatives, so mWomen has taken a critical look at the supply chain to pinpoint and reduce barriers, and raise technology accessibility among female populations.

According to mWomen research, mobile technology plays a significant role in human empowerment and life enhancement. Studies show that:

• Nine out of 10 women feel safer with a mobile phone
• 41 percent of women report having greater access to income generating opportunities

Giving Back

According to Premal Shah, President of Kiva, a non-profit organization committed to alleviating poverty through micro-lending, mobile technology has enabled humans to “do things, act on impulses to be the best version of ourselves in a way that we otherwise wouldn’t.” Thanks to philanthropic movements like Kiva, people across the globe can now connect with one another and have a level of transparency that didn’t exist a generation ago.

Through the use of mobile technology, a woman in a hut in Kenya can securely receive a microloan from a person in San Francisco, Calif. in a matter of seconds, and use it to purchase a cow to grow her business. The democratization and accessibility of capital enables that woman in Kenya and others across the world to make strides necessary to better her life and future, while empowering others to give back in ways that were once not possible.

Information and Innovation

Chris Locke, Managing Director of GSMA Development Fund, says that mobile technology now allows people to go beyond communication; they can also conduct transactions and access other services. This accessibility, coupled with touch capabilities, has been and will continue to be particularly empowering in emerging markets where literacy remains a barrier. According to Locke, being able to touch, swipe and use gestures is very critical in emerging countries. This will have significant impact on the GDP. One example is in Kenya, where there has been phenomenal innovation in mobile platforms to provide access to utilities, services, and information for the first time.

It wasn’t long ago that, when we wanted to share something – even music – we had to create a physical item (if you are +35 years old, you probably remember making ‘mix-tapes’ for your friends).  But today, much of what we work with is digitized and our ability to share things quickly and across tens or hundreds or thousands of people is easily done through the click of a button.  In this 60 Second Insights video, Adam Pisoni, co-founder and CTO of Yammer, discusses the nature of sharing and how the mobile device is the most natural way for us to share in the moment.   

In addition to our ability to use mobile devices to easily capture and share more data than ever, social networks have proliferated at the same time – creating an important avenue for people to share personal experiences, professional knowledge, photos, videos and much more. With the continued growth of mobile technologies like cell phones, tablets and other mobile computing devices, sharing can take place anytime, anywhere.

According to a recent Nielsen and NM Incite’s 2012 Social Media Report, consumers are spending 30 percent of their total online time on their mobile devices accessing social media sites. The report also found that the time being spent using social media on mobile apps and the mobile web increased 63 percent in 2012. 

In addition to Adam’s video, Bryan Srabian, Director of Social Media for the San Francisco Giants also shares how mobile devices are making baseball games more interactive for fans, and our own Tony Salvador provides some insight around this major shift to our culture.

How has mobile technology helped you share at work or with friends and families?

SMS-accessible information

In a 60 Second Insight interview, Kiva president Premal Shah discussed ways mHealth improves healthcare in countries like Kenya and Uganda where women can get neo-natal information and advice via mobile phones – advice that would likely not come if a healthcare provider had to travel two hours by moped to provide it. Mobile phones can also be used in programs like Integrated Health Information System through Mobile Telephony (IHISM), an Internet-based healthcare information service that accepts SMS messages from mobile devices and responds with personalized information about how to effectively prevent and manage chronic health conditions including HIV/AIDS. IHISM was developed by a team of computer scientists at the University of Botswana in partnership with Microsoft Research, and the service has resulted in better and more frequent treatment.

Education via Applications

Halle Tecco, CEO and co-founder of Rock Health, discussed the ways in which mobile software, such as applications, and hardware help people “manage their health and ultimately live a healthier life.” An example Halle gave is a device that sits on top of a mobile phone, turning it into a heart rate monitor. Another example of an organization using mobile software in this way is UNAIDS and its AIDSinfo iPad app, which  provides “immediate access to key country-by-country HIV data” to help policymakers, researchers and educators better understand the ways HIV infection is spread as well as to identify where treatment and support programs are needed.

Dialing Out

Despite the various and innovative smartphone capabilities, one of the leading uses of mobile technology in health management is simply dialing out. According to Discovery Tech, patients in South Africa can call doctors or national AIDS hotlines and receive text messages highlighting numbers to call for medicines and to arrange for testing. According to the research, many other countries are developing 24-hour health care phone systems. Trina Das Gupta, director of GSMA mWomen Program, says that in countries like Afghanistan where one out of two women die giving childbirth, having the ability to call a doctor rather than physically search for medical care can mean the difference between life and death.

Progress in mobile technology is revolutionizing the fight to “Getting to Zero,” the World AIDS Day goal of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS related deaths. Share your experiences in how mobile technology has improved you and your family healthcare situation and let us know if you have new ideas on how to use mobile technology in fighting diseases and improving quality of life.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980’s and early 90’s that we began seeing these devices “shrink” to 12 lbs. and evolve beyond the “brick” form factor; at that time portable computers and phones began gaining mainstream popularity. Many of us hold memories of these devices which became popularized by their use in films such like the 1987 hit Wall Street starring Michael Douglas as the now infamous Gordon Gekko.

Innovation in design has evolved drastically since these first mobile devices took hold.  In a short amount of time, they have become smaller, sleeker, more mobile, and drastically more powerful; eventually becoming what we see today.

But what’s next?  Despite the progress we’ve made over the years, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, and JJ Aguhob, Co-Founder of Viddy, argue that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in the mobile form factor revolution. The two reflect on what the phone may be in 20-30 years, what may come after the phone and how we will reflect on the amount of innovation that is coming our way.

Check out the 60 Second Insights videos featuring Jim and JJ to learn more about what these thought leaders believe is on the horizon for mobility and form factor.

What do you think?  Will phones and all of these devices go away?  Will they become something entirely unimagined?

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, a multi-mode Ultrabook convertible.

Manufacturers around the world are designing a range of  new devices for people  that are more stylish, significantly  thinner and lighter, last longer in between charges, turn instantly on and come with built in security features to protect users. There are more than 70 in market for holiday season around the world.

So, what’s specifically new this holiday for Ultrabook?

The Full Windows 8 Experience: Intel-based platforms together with Windows 8 together just work. What does that mean? Our Ultrabooks and tablets deliver a full range of new, amazing experiences with all your existing apps and devices because Intel Architecture uniquely runs the full version Windows 8. 

People will have access to the new user interface, start screen, live tiles and apps in the Windows store. And —  because it’s running on Intel — you can still use the applications you already own in the familiar desktop, like your favorite Microsoft office and applications for music, photos and work — not to mention peripherals like printers and scanners. It’s the best of both worlds.

The razor-thin Acer S7 Ultrabook, featuring an all-aluminum unibody design.

Touch: Some of the latest Ultrabooks now have touchscreens, and when combined with a touch-friendly redesign of Windows, users have more options at their fingertips. Our research shows people will find it faster, easier, intuitive, and fun. Touch transforms the computing experience from work to play.

In addition to the new touch-friendly user interface from Microsoft, touch capabilities are made possible thanks to the work of Intel and the device manufacturers to optimize their new line-up for a fast, fluid touch experience. 

2-in-1 devices that convert from PC to Tablet: Thanks to touch capabilities, device makers like ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba have gotten very creative in their designs. Why not have a full computing experience when you need to be productive and creative, and convert to a tablet when you want to watch a movie or play with a mobile app? Each company have found unique ways to do this differently. There are now computers that transform from clamshell to tablet mode via swivels, flips, ferris wheel-like turns, slides and more. Hard to imagine? Check out the pictures below to see a few of the devices in action.

The Dell XPS 12 Convertible Touch Ultrabook with a fluid flip-and-fold motion to transofrm from PC to tablet.

And no matter which style or design people decide are their favorites, the Ultrabook promise delivers:

Featuring an all-aluminum unibody design, the razor-thin Acer S7 Ultrabooks are exceptionally thin and light, yet resilient and durable. Depending on model, they are as thin as .47 inches and weigh as little as 2.29 pounds.

Thinner and Lighter:

When the Ultrabook first launched a year ago, it was common for these devices to measure 16 mm thick and weigh in at an average of three pounds. The newest crop of Ultrabooks has shrunk down to as slim as half an inch and as light as 875 grams.

Better Battery Life: Thanks to the combination of  3rd generation Intel® Core™ processors and Windows 8 power management features, the latest Ultrabook devices provide users with both stellar performance and great battery life – many systems lasting 8+ hours. With features like App Suspension, minimized applications will be suspended, preserving the device’s most recent charge.

Instant On: When living life on-the-go, it’s essential to have a device that is ready at a moment’s notice. The latest Ultrabooks are equipped with technology, like Intel® Rapid Start Technology, that enables your computer to wake from hibernation in less than seven seconds.

Which new Ultrabook is on your holiday list?

Close to our heart, naturally are those companies that are creating new opportunities and experiences based on the rapid evolution of technology, rise in mobile applications and the ability to build sustainable business models around these innovative ideas.

According to entrepreneur Jeff Solomon, every mobile phone user has an idea for an innovative mobile application or feature, so in a sense, each of these people potentially could become an entrepreneur. This rise and accessibility of technology has driven many to look at entrepreneurship as a career path, empowering people to innovate, think outside of the box and push their limits. According to Solomon, this is exactly what entrepreneurship is about – going beyond your comfort zone.

And this is just the beginning. JJ Aguhob, President and Co-Founder of Viddy, says that “technology in its current state, as cool as it is, is always evolving” and we’ll continue to see this “miniaturization of technology.”  Technology will continue to be a core part of people’s lives and the opportunities for application and technology entrepreneurs remain nascent and plentiful.

As a seasoned veteran of entrepreneurship, Solomon offers advice to aspiring technology and mobile application entrepreneurs:

• Think of creative ways to use mobile technology to solve life’s little problems.  No idea is too small.
• If you have an idea for an innovative feature for an app, approach that as one component of a larger product. Brainstorm ways to build a complete technology solution that has long-term business potential and provides a sustainable business model.

For more on entrepreneurship and the future of technology, check out our 60 Second Insights.

By Sanjay Natarajan, Vice President, Technology & Manufacturing Group and Director, Process Technology Integration

 

And Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow, Technology & Manufacturing Group, Director, Process Architecture and Integration

Lately, we often get asked: “Is process scaling coming to an end?” Since no one believes that process development will just end one fine day, a more nuanced version of this question is whether it is becoming technically impossible, or at least practically infeasible, to develop and deploy new processes roughly every two years as envisioned by Moore’s Law nearly 50 years ago.

Before we pull out our crystal ball to tackle this question, a little historical perspective is called for. The early days of process technologies were, in hindsight, a much simpler time. The basic architecture of the MOS transistor was static, and the path to developing a new process was clear and straightforward: scale the lateral dimensions, scale the vertical dimensions, scale the electric fields, and voila – a fabulous hat trick of smaller, lower-power, and faster transistors. Certainly inventions such as tip and halo implants, salicides, and nitrided gate oxides were required to solve problems along the way, but the basic architecture remained the same for many generations. (While we’re on the subject of inventions, let’s not forget about the interconnect stack, where copper interconnects and planarization were invented.)

The End of Scaling?
Even in this “heyday,” industry experts were predicting the end of scaling. Expert statements such as “Optical lithography will reach its limits in the range of 0.75-0.50 microns,” “Minimum geometries will saturate in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 microns,” “X-ray lithography will be needed below 1 micron,” “Copper interconnects will never work,” and “Scaling will end in about 10 years,” were made publicly, and all seem quaint in hindsight.

The 130nm technology node was perhaps the last true technology in this architecture. The early 1990s marked a seismic shift in our industry with Intel’s invention of uniaxial strained silicon in the 90nm generation. This change – marked by the use of epitaxially grown Silicon-Germanium in the PMOS source/drain – ushered in an era of major materials changes in addition to existing dimensional and electrical scaling. The 65nm node was the last node to utilize the workhorse of the industry, the SiON gate dielectric. Starting with 45nm, Intel made the switch to exotic Hafnium-based high-k dieletrics with complex sandwiches of interface films. Finally, the 22nm node heralded the end of the 50-year life of the planar MOS transistor with a move the 3D trigate transistors. Today’s state of the art resembles the late 1980s transistor about as much as a Ferrari resembles a horse-drawn carriage.

Not only have transistor structure and materials changed dramatically over the past decade, but the goal of transistor scaling has also changed. The 1980s and 1990s were an era where classical scaling provided significant improvements in transistor speed to enable microprocessor products with ever-higher operating frequencies. But we were paying the price of ever-higher power density and ever-higher leakage power in doing so. The 2000s ushered in an era where power-density limits and market demands for mobile computing changed the focus of transistor technology from increased performance to lower power. Today’s computing products, whether they are for high-performance servers or low-power cell phones, all place premiums on improved energy efficiency and lower leakage power. And the rise in interest in system-on-chip (SOC) products places increased importance on providing a wider range of devices on a single chip, from high-performance to ultra-low-leakage transistors.

Radical New Approaches Coming
This historical perspective is important, because it reminds us that the only constant in our industry is change (or, as Yogi Berra put it, “the future ain’t what it used to be”). In the future, radical new architectures may create another seismic shift when just improving on what we have ceases to work. Many potentially attractive options exist – tunnel FETs, BISFETs, Graphene-based FETs, and Spin-based FETs, just to name a few. All are being actively researched at leading semiconductor companies and consortia.

Another trend of growing importance is the tighter integration between process technology, product design, and product architecture. Over the past few generations, limitations in process scaling have led to design-rule constraints, which in turn have required greater co-optimization between design and process to maximize value. This trend is likely to continue and even grow in scope. The future will include novel process, design, and architecture integration such as 3D stacking (within a chip, not just TSV stacking) and new approaches to computation, such as process technology optimized for non-Boolean logic.

It’s entirely possible that the new process architectures of tomorrow will make today’s Ferrari look like a horse-drawn carriage. As we work to make that happen, this is a very exciting time for the semiconductor industry, and we look forward to another 50 years of Moore’s Law!

At this year’s IDF San Francisco, Intel will be talking about new advancements that we think will surprise and delight people today and in the near future. First, we are excited to announce that there are approximately 40 touch-enabled Ultrabook systems in the pipeline. These devices maintain what we have come to expect from Ultrabooks – they are ultra sleek, ultra responsive and more secure – but now transform the computing experience by giving people a new way to interact with their technology via touch, which will be best enjoyed with the upcoming launch of Windows 8. 

Convertible devices take touch to another level and offer the best of two worlds, providing a whole different approach to using an Ultrabook…or is it a tablet? Partners including Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba are all coming out with convertible systems this year, giving people more choice by transforming their systems into powerful touch tablet to touch Ultrabook in a clamshell form factor to traditional Ultrabook. 

We are also announcing a new line of low-power Intel® Core™ processors. This technology will significantly drive down power for our flagship product line, starting with our 4th generation Intel® Core™ processors due out next year. In his September 11 keynote, Intel EVP and Chief Product Officer David Perlmutter will talk more about this news and how Intel is able to achieve these new efficiency levels. 

Another exciting focus at IDF will be the big focus on giving computing devices human senses or the ability to naturally perceive intentions. Voice recognition and touch are just the beginning and in the future things like gestures, facial recognition, voice processing, cameras and sensors (among other things) will control your screen in more interactive, personalized fashion. Intel is taking specific actions to help enable hardware and software developers to drive perceptual computing into Intel platforms starting this year. Be sure to attend Perlmutter’s keynote for more information. 

On Wednesday, September 12, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group Renée James, will outline her vision for transparent computing – a world where computing devices and operating system environments no longer pose barriers to delivering truly robust user experiences. 

On Thursday September 13, Intel chief technology officer, Justin Rattner will cover the future of wireless computing during his keynote.  Specially, be prepared to see and learn more about the efforts to realize the ‘radio free Intel’ vision and the creation new technologies to get us there. 

There is still time to join us at IDF to learn about all of this news as well as see new technologies in action and learn from the experts. To attend IDF, visit the registration site and review the agenda to make sure you catch all of the sessions. You can also follow news from IDF at the Intel Newsroom.

In fact, according to a recent Mobile Etiquette survey commissioned by Intel and conducted by Ipsos, found that over eighty percent of adults responding wish people practiced better etiquette when using mobile devices in public.   

These executives observe that mobile etiquette mishaps are everywhere — whether it is sending emails late at night and creating a false sense of urgency, sharing too much information about others on social networks or simply speaking too loudly on a smartphone in the coffee shop. As technology continues to evolve, consumers are changing how they use their mobile devices in public, which in turn changes the ways that people stay connected to their friends and family.

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology.

What do you think?

For Intel, this is really exciting. Our investments in the eco-system for Ultrabooks have provided an important stimulant to drive innovation in computing. We’re excited about the additive effect this has had in the development of Ultrabook convertible designs and think it has tremendous potential to bring many of the best attributes of these platforms together. The Lenovo Yoga, Toshiba Satellite U925t , Sony VAIO™ Duo 11, ASUS TAICHI, and Dell XPS Duo 12 convertible Ultrabook are just a couple of examples of these beautiful devices. Why should you go for an Ultrabook convertible? Think of it as a device that gives you what you need premium, secure, powerful, productivity first, combined with with an excellent tablet option that gives you want in fun, lightweight design with cool apps.

Want more of a tablet for surfing and consuming online content, but nice to have PC or “creative mode” option? Check out the ASUS Vivo Tab, HP ENVY x2 and Samsung Series 5 Slate. These are all tablet convertibles – a consumption device with an intensified focus on battery life and portability. Intel has more than 20 Intel® Atom™-based tablets and convertibles running Windows 8 in the pipeline.

And let’s not forget touch for the traditional clamshell Ultrabooks and laptops. IFA attendees – and in a few short weeks consumers – are seeing how touch will enhance computing experiences: it’s so intuitive, even on a clamshell, that after just a few minutes it feels completely normal, in fact – preferred –  to reach out to the screen instead of grabbing the mouse or trackpad.

The real winner here is the consumer with more choices based on how they want to use their new device. These choice of devices give people a range of performance and flexibility to do everything people want, and maintain compatibility with millions of existing software titles and peripheral devices that people count on today.

Tomorrow when the doors open at IFA, Intel will show off 60 different Ultrabook models from a number of our partners. These systems are part of the next wave of devices powered by 3rd generation Intel® Core™ processors and enable more choices in style and design while delivering increased responsiveness, improved power efficiency, greater security and up to 2x better media and graphics over previous generations.

 If you’re at IFA, stop by our booth at Hall 23, Stand 103 to see the world’s largest showcase of Ultrabooks powered by Intel Core processors in convertible and clamshell designs, as well as and the latest tablet and convertible devices powered by Intel® Atom™ and Intel Core processors.

Today Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT)  – a technology company with specialized expertise in wireless charging - announced it will develop and deliver chipsets for Wireless Charging Technology by Intel. IDT’s product is important and new because it leads to a solution that isn’t limited to inductive charging and ‘smartphone on a charging mat’ usage.  Size and cost reductions are key to IDT’s solution, as is their differentiated “resonance wireless charging technology” that simplifies the way the PC charges the phone wirelessly. Intel is working with companies like IDT, peripheral vendors (from smartphone cases to printers and cameras), OEMs, and other ecosystem partners to deliver a cost-effective and simpler path to wireless charging.

Although we are not yet giving out timeframes for consumer products with WCT enabled, IDT has stated they will be delivering their full chipset solution for reference design work in early 2013. The ecosystem is already excited about this technology so we assume there will be a race to the finish line for sure.

Imagine, for example, this wireless charging solution in an Ultrabook of the future. How would it work? You are low on juice on your phone — you simply start the WCT detection software and place the smartphone close to your Ultrabook (about an inch or so). Coupling takes place between the two devices and energy begins to seamlessly and wirelessly flow from the Ultrabook to the smartphone. Within an hour, you have recharged your smartphone sufficiently to make it through the afternoon. No more wires or chargers.

Intel will be discussing specific plans and timelines at a later date, so stay tuned for more details on this innovation that’s one step closer from the labs to your home.

As this technology and the desire of accessing mobile content continues to grow, the way in which consumers interact with content through their mobile devices will evolve greatly and in exciting ways.

In Intel’s latest series of 60 Second Insights videos brings four different perspectives together to explore the idea of content – from creation, to consumption to interaction and sharing.

David Ginsberg of Intel discusses how big data, mobile devices and content consumption are culturally changing the way we view the sheer definition of “Ownership.”  Ginsberg adds, “as we become more connected with more devices the idea of ownership really begins to change.”

As ownership may be evolving, Kate Swanborg from DreamWorks Animation adds that the difference between creating content and consuming content seems to be taking a significant shift, “the distance between the creation of content and consumption of content is going away.”

Rounding out the content discussion, Matt Mills from Aurasma, and Gayle Weiswasser of Discovery Communications, provided their take on how we are engaging with and sharing mobile content in a variety of new and different ways.

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music, and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from various industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology. To date, the 60 Second Insights videos have focused on everything from how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation to the security and privacy risks associated mobile device use.

 For more 60 Second Insights, check out our latest videos discussing societal changes, innovation, and collaboration.

Education experts and industry leaders agree that technology continues to have a significant impact on education.  Intel’s latest  60 Second Insights  videos feature Mike Bridge from PASCO Scientific, Din Hieman of BrainPOP, Jim Bowler from Adaptive Curriculum, and George Yaghmour of LEGO Education focusing on the learning benefits of mobile technology in the classroom, and how education technology like mobile apps and e-textbooks are making positive changes in education a reality.  “Technology and new devices have provided a whole new way of teaching,” Jim Bowler stated.  For example, “Science today uses modern technology, computers and sensors — everything is a technology based approach.  Learning can now be — not just anywhere — but everywhere and all the time,” observes Mike Bridge. 

In a recent 60 Second Insights interview, Patrik Regardh of Ericsson, talks about how mobile technology is impacting education from an industry point-of-view.  “Information and technology have brought us to the point where we can see that the core concept of what it means to be well-educated has changed.  It is shifting from educating to learning, making it much more of a personal experience. We can see different facets of learning, which is more tailored or geared toward the way which your brain works.”

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music, and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from various industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology. To date, the 60 Second Insights videos have focused on everything from how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation to the security and privacy risks associated mobile device use.

 Mike Bridge, PASCO Scientific

Din Heiman, COO & GM, BrainPOP

Jim Bowler, CEO, Adaptive Curriculum

George Yaghmour, LEGO Education

Executives including Dr. K. Venkatesh Prasad from Ford, Dr. Albert Lin of National Geographic Explorer, David Ginsberg from Insights and Market Research at Intel, and Tony Salvador from the Experience Insights Lab at Intel, discuss the future of the cloud and how it will continue to improve society as it becomes more universal. 

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music, and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from various industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology.  To date, the 60 Second Insights videos have focused on everything from how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation to the security and privacy risks associated mobile device use.

Innovation drives productivity and is the foundation of economic growth. For the past 25 or so years, both research and innovation has been driven by massive amounts of computing power in the form of personal workstations and clusters of servers called supercomputers. It’s allowed scientists to unravel the mysteries of the human genome, driving the economics of sequencing down to the level where you can now affordably get your own genome sequenced. On a broader scale, it’s allowed countless engineers to use digital prototyping, shaving cost and time-to-market of products in virtually every industry. Looking to the future, with the continuum of “data-information-knowledge” becoming an essential tool for digitally enabled knowledge economies around the world, the applications and need for supercomputing makes the past look the proverbial tip of the iceberg. 

Today, with the announcement of Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessors, we’re going to accelerate the pace of these discoveries and innovations. Intel® Xeon Phi products extend the Intel® Xeon® brand – found in over 70% of the world’s supercomputers (see TOP500) – by providing the programmability of the Intel Xeon processor architecture to an emerging class of highly parallel applications that benefit from processors containing a large number of cores and threads. Lots of technical talk there, but let me put this into human terms. While the vast majority of software applications are best suited to Intel® Xeon® processors, these highly parallel applications benefit from a bunch of mathematical calculations performed at once. For example, if you’re trying to accurately track a weather storm, the more accurately you can predict the movement of each molecule of the storm in relation to every other molecule, the more accurate the prediction. This is what we call a “highly parallel application”. 

For the past 2 years we’ve been working with software developers from leading research institutes and private companies around the world on early silicon of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors to accelerate their highly parallel applications. As I look at the type of research they conduct, it stirs the imagination and makes we wonder “What if?” What if these institutes and companies had 1000x the computer power they do today? What could they do with that amount of computing power? Could scientists at the DEEP Exascale project in Europe, who work on brain simulation, find a breakthrough discovery that cures Alzheimer’s Disease? Could Fraunhofer Institute researchers – who are doing full, high-definition, photo realistic rendering of objects – make physical prototyping obsolete? Could the cellular research that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) conducts lead to sustainable food production that’s free of disease? These breakthroughs are inevitable. Our mission is to deliver the computing power to make them happen faster.  

Last November, we demonstrated our first silicon of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, code named “Knights Corner”. It produced an astounding teraflop of performance in a processor the size of your thumb, setting the industry on notice of the potential of many core architectures and providing a clear path of how we’ll get to the Petascale and Exascale era. This is the same amount of performance as the number 1 supercomputer on the TOP500 list in 1997, dubbed ASCI Red. ASCI Red used thousands of processors and filled a room with cabinets to produce the same amount of performance. Knights Corner quickly got the nickname of “Supercomputer on a Chip”. 

But any computer is tool. And a tool is useless unless the user can knows how to use it and the millions of lines of software code that institutes and companies have developed over the past 25+ years run on it. That’s the programmability aspect of the Intel Xeon Phi product family. It’s Intel Architecture. The codes that run on Intel Xeon processors today will run on Intel Xeon Phi products, carrying forward years of software development. 

At the International Supercomputing Conference kicking off today in Hamburg, Germany, the first supercomputer with the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor made the TOP500 list. It’s aptly named “Discovery”. And we’ll be in production with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors later this year. As we move into 2013 and beyond, we’ll see it in the hands of researchers, scientists, and engineers around the world. And the pace of discovery and innovation will be greatly accelerated.

60 Second Insights focus on everything from how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation to the security and privacy risks associated mobile device use. This newest set of executive interviews feature Dr. K. Venkatesh Prasad from Ford, Trina DasGupta of the GSMA Development Fund, Premal Shah from Kiva, and Halle Tecco of Rock Health discussing connected health and the ways mobile devices can improve healthcare services for both patients and medical professionals. 

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music, and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology.

It’s hard to believe that one year ago Sean Maloney was on stage at this same event, talking about this new and very important charter. Initial systems were introduced starting in October 2011, there are 21 Ultrabook devices in the market today, and momentum is growing with more than 110 designs in the pipeline (and more coming). Perhaps from an outside perspective, this might appear to have been an easy shift, but it was anything but. We worked with customers, partners and suppliers around the world to re-think and re-design virtually every major component that makes up an Ultrabook. 

We can’t wait for everyone to see the next wave of systems based on the 3rd generation Intel Core processors (previously code named “Ivy Bridge”), many of which will be unveiled at Computex next week. These devices will raise the bar for what people expect from their computing experiences. 

Intel engineers have lowered average power for improved battery life and advanced the security features to help keep personal information safe. New Ultrabooks will deliver impressive 3D graphics that will have 2X performance gains in media and graphics on our 17W Ultra processors (gen over gen). 

Additionally, there will be more choice in style with a variety of both traditional but sleek and ultrathin clamshell designs as well as new convertible systems which means that the device can change physical form based on how you want to use it – in laptop or tablet mode. You can also expect to hear more about touch and the new convertible designs that will begin to appear in the market later in 2012. Today, we are tracking around 30 touch-enabled systems, of which 10 are convertibles and those numbers continue to grow. 

We’ve also upped the specifications that we use to define a 3rd gen Intel Core-based Ultrabook device. Here are just a couple of new benefits we think will surprise and delight people in their everyday uses:

• Thin designs
• Ultrabook devices must be 18mm or less in thickness for systems with displays less than 14 inches and 21mm or less for systems with displays 14 inches or more; some current systems are much thinner.
• Responsive
• All 3rd generation Intel Core Ultrabook devices wake in a flash – going from a very deep sleep state (S4) to full use (keyboard interaction) in less than 7 seconds and wake from “sleep” mode even faster. Additionally, they must be responsive while active, meaning they will load and run favorite applications quickly.
• Extended battery life
• Ultrabook devices must offer at least 5 hours of battery life, with many meeting the recommended level of 8 hours plus in even the sleekest form factors.
• Security enabled
• Anti-Theft technology is a hardware-based technology that makes it possible to lock down an Ultrabook system if it’s lost or stolen and helps secure sensitive information stored on the device’s hard drive.
• Ultrabook™ systems come enabled with Intel® Identity Protection technology to provide a more secure online experience for activities like shopping, banking or gaming online. It uses chip-level authentication similar to hardware tokens and is widely regarded by security experts as a more secure approach than software-only authentication.
• Fast I/O
• Ultrabook devices based on 3rd generation Intel Core must have either USB 3 or Thunderbolt technology to enable incredibly fast transfer capabilities.
• Processor
• Powered by the Intel Core processor family for Ultrabook. 

For a visual look at the Ultrabook requirements, check out the Ultrabook Experience infographic.

On June 5, Tom Kilroy, Intel senior vice president and general manager, Sales and Marketing Group, will deliver the opening keynote in Taiwan at Computex 2012 where he’ll make the announcement and also describe how the company is innovating to deliver superior experiences across a range of mobile devices.

Tune in to the webcast streaming June 4 at 11 p.m. PT (2 p.m. local time in Taiwan) on the Intel Facebook page. The presentation will also be archived in the Intel Newsroom.

So how has the Internet and collaborative environments such as hackerspaces affecting modern innovation? And has traditional lab research faded away? What are the drivers of innovation? These questions and more are addressed in 60 Second Insights executive interviews focused on innovation and how it’s changing our everyday lives. Thought leaders from David Ginsberg of Intel, Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks Animation, Brett Weinstein of United Talent Agency, and Patrick Regardh of Ericsson are featured. 

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology. 

Other recent topics include security, devices and societal changes. Stay tuned for more executive interviews in the coming weeks.

To date, 60 Second Insights have focused on everything from how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation to what people are looking for in their devices and the future of mobile devices from a design and functionality perspective. This newest set of executive perspectives focuses on how companies are taking security and privacy into consideration, what consumers should think about when using their devices from a security perspective and the future of regulating data to ensure that it is protected. 

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music and more. Viewers get a glimpse of how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology. 

The newest executive perspectives feature Chris Gilbert from Ubiquisys, Gary Davis of McAfee, James Anderson of Mastercard and Prith Banerjee of HP Labs. Stay tuned for more executive perspectives in the coming weeks.

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music and more. Viewers get a quick glimpse of how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology.

Check out the videos that showcase executive opinions on mobility devices: what people are looking for in their device, the future of mobile devices and how the overall category of devices is shifting and changing.

The videos feature Tony Salvador from Intel, Prith Banerjee of HP, Jim Kovach of CrowdOptic and Lucas Buick from Hipstamatic. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

Today, much of the exploring, connecting, and sharing we do with each other online—the experiences we enjoy—happens in the cloud. Whether people are entering letters into a search engine and receiving thousands of relevant results in a fraction of a second, taking an audio sample of a song and getting the lyrics in real time, or receiving personalized recommendations based on previous online purchases, they are in the cloud.

Tomorrow, search will evolve from text to full video search with the ability to identify faces and support voice recognition. Consumers’ shopping experiences will be more immersive and customized to their location and preferences. Everyone will have richer media and interactive social media experiences. This is all part of the brighter outlook for the cloud.

By 2015—just three years from now—more than 3 billion people and 15 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, based on Intel estimates. Over the same time period, the amount of data traveling over the Internet will grow by 33 percent annually, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year, or more than 3 times the amount in 2011.  Each connected user will generate over 4 gigabytes of data traffic every day—the equivalent of a four-hour high-definition movie.  This will increase the amount of data that needs to be stored by almost 50 percent per year.  In order to meet this growth, the worldwide number of cloud servers is expected to more than triple by 2015. 

To capitalize on these new opportunities, the industry will face challenges in scaling data center infrastructure to meet the unprecedented demand for computing, storage, and network bandwidth.  Intel can help.  Our new Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family is designed to address these challenges by enabling IT organizations to seamlessly scale their infrastructures for future needs.   

Building on the technology that has made Intel the standard in 9 out of 10 cloud servers today, the Intel Xeon processor E5 family addresses the incredible growth of connected users, devices, and data traffic in the cloud. The new processors deliver record-breaking performance, exceptional energy efficiency, breakthrough I/O innovation, and built-in security features. These processors are not only at the heart of servers and workstations, but also the next generation of storage and communication systems from system vendors across the globe.

Starting today, we expect an all-star lineup of manufacturers—including Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Quanta, SGI, Supermicro, Unisys, and ZT Systems—to announce hundreds of systems powered by the Intel Xeon processor E5 family. Many of the world’s largest cloud data centers are already using these platforms.  We saw an unprecedented demand for the initial orders of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family—20 times bigger than for the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series that launched in 2009.  Today, countless users around the world searched, socialized, and shopped on sites powered by Intel Xeon E5 processors.

Our efforts to make the cloud work for business and bring a brighter outlook to the cloud don’t end with optimized technology. We’re simultaneously working to help companies deploy clouds faster and offer agile services. In one example of these efforts, we developed the Intel Cloud Builder’s program, which currently offers more than 60 real, deployable solutions documented as reference architectures from more than 50 of today’s leading solution providers. These architectures give businesses a starting point to get up and running quickly.

We also helped establish the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), an organization of more than 300 global IT leaders who are defining requirements and usages for the cloud of tomorrow, focusing on standards and interoperability that will take things to the next level. This alliance is driving vendors to bring to market solutions that address today’s top challenges around secure cloud federation, virtual machine interoperability, better management, and cloud services transparency. The ODCA is forecasting an acceleration of $50 billion of cloud services and a saving of $25 billion in total annual IT spend within five years through the demands it is making on the industry. Clearly, the cloud is at the top of the CIO agenda.

And we’re just getting started. We see a bright outlook for the cloud, and we are giving businesses a clear vision of what’s ahead.

To learn more, visit us at www.intel.com/cloud.

But accordingly to some bright minds that we talked to in the past couple of weeks, we are only now embarking upon the start of an amazing journey.

Intel is launching a new video series titled 60 Second Insights  that brings together thought leaders from all walks of life to discuss how the next generation of mobile devices will impact themselves, their peers and their industry in, you guessed it, sixty seconds.

60 Second Insights looks at how advances in mobile technology and consumer mobile device usage models affect a wide variety of industries, including art, business, culture, social networking, exploration, design, photography, film, music and more. Viewers will be treated to an inside look at how thought leaders from a variety of industries and backgrounds leverage mobile technology to innovate and ultimately impact consumers’ lives and the ways in which they use technology.

Our first series of videos focuses on how mobility impacts society and spurs innovation and features Tim Westergren, Pandora; Dr. Albert Lin, National Geographic Channel explorer and Anya Ayoung-Chee, fashion designer and winner of the Project Runway, among others.  

Here are some of the videos:

Future 60 Second Insights program topics will focus on the role of mobility in society, culture and business; why humans crave mobility; does technology enable more freedom; how does technology change our values; and business now and then. To help guide the conversation, we also are looking to you for input on upcoming conversations you are also most interested in having on the 60 Second Insights website.

Videos will be available via a specific 60 Second Insights playlist on the Intel Newsroom. Each week, we’ll have new videos added to the 60 Second Insights playlist with a new topic, so if you have any suggestions for topics or featured thought leaders, please sound off below.  We look forward to seeing you on 60 Second Insights!

In another nod to Intel, The Linley Group noted that the initial prototype for the “Analysts’ Choice Award for Best Technology of 2011” – Micron’s Hybrid Memory Cube – was developed in collaboration with Intel Labs researchers, who paired the cube with an extremely energy efficient, high-bandwidth memory interface. This type of 3D memory stacking was envisioned in Intel’s Tera-scale research program more than five years ago (see AnandTech’s 2007 article) as a key capability to feed data to many-core chips as core counts scale from 10s to 100s.

And dubbing 2011 “Intel’s Innovative Year,” the January 23, 2012 Microprocessor Report mentions other noteworthy Intel 2011 technologies:

• Intel Tri-gate transistors – the first non-planar transistors in the industry in production, and likely several years ahead of Intel’s competitors. Under development for over a decade, tri-gate transistors provide an unprecedented combination of performance and energy efficiency. They usher in the next era of Moore’s Law and open the door to a new generation of innovations across a broad spectrum of products. Tri-gate transistors will first appear in Intel’s soon-to-be-launched 22nm Ivy Bridge processors.

• The Intel® AVX2 instruction set (for the upcoming Haswell processor) and its potential to dramatically accelerate Floating Point (FP) intensive workloads. Intel AVX2 will improve performance with wider vectors, new extensible syntax, and rich functionality in areas such as image, audio/video processing, scientific simulations, financial analytics and 3D modeling and analysis

• Thunderbolt™ Technology, with origins in Intel Labs, was developed to address the challenge of moving ever-growing amounts of data in and around Intel Platforms. Already deployed across Apple’s line of computers, this technology will also be available on Windows-based Ultrabooks later in 2012, similar to those demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year.

• Near-Threshold Voltage (NTV) technology, which could enable processors to reach 5-10x the energy-efficiency of what’s possible today through creative circuit techniques that allow chips to run at much lower voltages than previously possible. Intel CTO Justin Rattner demonstrated how this could even enable solar-powered processors, an inspiring concept especially as digital intelligence is embedded into more and more everyday devices and sensors in our environment. For high-performance applications, NTV could enable chips composed of many (eventually 100s to 1000s) of low-voltage cores packing a collective performance per watt that far exceeds today’s technology. 

But you might want to take just a minute or two to reflect on what goes into the manufacturing of that microprocessor you could never do without. Here at Intel we talk about our transistors a lot. We have an army of PhDs working on how to make them more powerful and more energy-efficient every couple of years. But once they’ve done their magic, and design engineers have developed products to make the best use of those transistors, how does that translate to what you care about – the products you love?

That’s where Intel’s manufacturing powerhouse comes in. Those tiny little microprocessors, the “brains” inside your favorite products, get pumped out of nine Intel production fabrication facilities or “fabs” around the world that are running 24 hours, seven days a week.

Intel’s fabs are some of the most technically advanced manufacturing facilities in the world; as complex as the chips that get made inside them. And we are constantly looking at ways to improve them, to develop and manufacture leading-edge chips more cost-effectively. Over the past year, Intel broke ground on two new fabs, “D1X,” a development fab in Oregon, and “Fab 42” in Arizona, which will allow us to do exactly that. Recently Industry Analyst Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research and Financial Times West Coast Tech Correspondent Chris Nuttall visited the Arizona Fab 42 construction site. See their articles for their perspectives and photographs from their tours (Note: you may need to register on each site to view articles):

• “The Cooks Tour: Intel Fab 42” by G. Dan Hutcheson

• “Intel’s Chip Plans Bloom in the Desert” by Chris Nuttall

And to get a better understanding of the scope of this construction project, check out some of the numbers. First of all, Intel is using the largest land-based crane in the world – one that can pick up and place massive roof trusses that weigh approximately 300 tons each. The crane is so large it had to be delivered on trucks to the site in pieces – approximately 250 truck loads in total.

Additionally, Fab 42 will require 24,000 tons of steel rebar and 21,000 tons of structural steel. And to make room for the fab, 875,000 cubic yards of dirt had to be excavated. When all is said and done, approximately 10.5 million man hours will be required to complete the project.

Pretty cool, right? So next time you pick up your smartphone, tablet, or Ultrabook; remember that Intel is here, with our fabs humming away day and night to make sure the next generation of microprocessors will be ready for future products that you’re going to love!

To help you along with your shopping here are four must-have devices that have been topping this year’s wish lists:

Ultrabook Devices

For the on-the-go power-user in your life, consider an Ultrabook device, a new category of no-compromise computers that deliver best-in-class performance and are ultra-responsive in thin, light and sexy designs. Inspired by Intel, Ultrabook systems are incredibly quick to respond and are available from a number of manufacturers. They are a must-have gift for those looking for a new computing experience.

Netbooks

Netbooks are basic web-connected companions perfect for those of us who want to take our music, video and entertainment on-the-go. These Intel Atom processor powered devices come in compact designs and have long-lasting battery life. The Samsung NC215S is one of the world’s first solar-powered netbook, making it the perfect gadget for your “green” family members. The Asus Eee PC X101 is another lightweight, low-cost option and is the choice for someone looking for basic features like Web browsing, viewing photos and videos and basic content creation.

Tablets

Another popular gift this year is the tablet, which offers Internet browsing, casual gaming and e-reading with the touch of a finger. For a rich multimedia, multi-touch experience, consider the ViewSonic ViewPad 10. As an additional bonus, this tablet supports both the Google Android and Windows operating systems.

Hybrids

Another popular up- and-coming device category is called “hybrids.” These offer productivity and play in one device, combining the touch of a tablet with the familiarity of a PC. The classmate PC also powered by the Intel Atom processor is an excellent kid-friendly gift choice. Rugged designs instantly convert from clamshell to touch-optimized tablet mode, giving students expanded flexibility inside and outside the classroom.

For more ideas here are a couple other tech-related gift guides with excellent suggestions:

http://reviews.cnet.com/holiday-gift-guide/

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GadgetGuide/

Cloud computing makes these experiences possible. Cloud computing is powered by large data centers and delivers services and content to a consumer device seamlessly and quickly. To understand why the demand for servers, networking and storage to support cloud computing is insatiable, just look at some of the numbers. Today 20% of the 7 billion people on the planet, about 1.5B people, are connected to the internet creating, consuming and collaborating with each other. 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute – that’s equivalent to 160,000 feature films uploaded every week. Today, up to 200M tweets a day occur on Twitter, and 7.5B photos are uploaded each month. By 2015, another billion people will be connected, the number of devices will increase to 15 billion, the amount of internet traffic supporting content will increase 10X, and the services industry for cloud computing will reach $176B.

I’m proud of the role Intel is playing as an enabler for cloud computing technology. We have delivered successive generations of technology that increase performance and improve security while managing power consumption. Intel is honored to have won the business powering leading search engines, social media sites, e-commerce, gaming and other cloud services. As a result, 9 out of every 10 cloud servers today run on Intel technology and for every 600 smartphones or 122 tablets that are brought online, we estimate another server is added. Intel is also working to accelerate the industry growth and enable more companies to deliver great cloud computing experiences. We helped establish the Open Data Center Alliance, an organization of over 300 global IT leaders who are defining requirements and usages for cloud computing based on standards and interoperability in the cloud. Their goal is to accelerate $50B of cloud services and save $25B in total annual IT spend within 5 years. To make it easier for companies to deploy cloud computing infrastructure, Intel developed a program called the Intel Cloud Builder’s program where there are currently over 50 real deployable solutions documented as reference architectures from the industry’s leading solution providers.

And we’re just getting started. It’s what gets my team and me excited everyday as captured in this short 60 second video that recently aired on Discovery Channel’s Curiosity show.

We are right now developing the technologies that will enable a new generation of experiences that we will one day take for granted but once never thought possible. Search will evolve from text to full video search with the ability to identify faces and support voice recognition. Your shopping experiences will be more immersive and customized to your location and preferences. You’ll have richer media and interactive social media experiences. Intel’s goal is to connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth, and we are creating the underlying technology to make this happen – bringing new ways to explore, share and connect with each other – as securely, privately and efficiently as possible. We’re making the cloud work for you. Visit Intel’s Cloud Computing Solutions page to learn more.

Welcome! I’ve been blogging about research progress towards making compound semiconductors mainstream and talking about both challenges and opportunities. Three IEDM 2011 papers show the latest progress so in this installment I’ll talk about the papers and how they relate to our challenges.

First as a reminder, unlike silicon, a compound semiconductor is made up of two or more elements, indium, gallium and arsenic for example (InGaAs). The key advantage of these materials is high charge mobility. Mobility is a measure of how easily you can move charges within the material with application of an electric field. Higher mobility can produce faster devices and/or devices that require much less power. Using two or more elements means more opportunity to tune the materials for performance or optical properties but also makes the challenge of fabricating wafers and processing much more complicated. Today, compound semiconductors are used in smaller scale applications where their special properties outweigh the added costs. Our goal is to take advantage of the vastly larger spending on silicon infrastructure and put it to use fabricating compound semiconductor devices.

Let’s look at how a generic transistor behaves over a range of control voltages in figure 1. On the left I’ve plotted the current on a linear scale while on the right I’ve used a logarithmic scale. Since a modern transistor can have a current ratio in the range 10,000 to 100,000, you can see why it is tough to see both on the same scale. The plot on left is best to understand how the device turns on while the right shows what happens as the device turns off. In the real world, better on state performance leads to higher switching speeds and thus more potential computations per second. Better off state means the stand-by state doesn’t run down your battery.

Fig 1: Device behavior can be plotted on a linear scale to examine turn-on behavior or on a logarithmic scale to examine turn-off behavior.

A physically short device has lower internal resistance so typically turns on faster but also is harder to completely turn off, thus it can have a poorer on-off ratio. Device engineers use multiple figures of merit but for this blog I will only focus on subthreshold swing (SS). SS is defined as the amount of voltage required to swing the off current by a factor of 10x and it is the inverse of the subthreshold slope shown in figure 1. An ideal device at room temperature will have SS=60mV per decade. Extra leakage paths and low coupling will raise SS and a poor device might have SS>150 for short dimensions. It doesn’t seem like much but that difference can lead to orders of magnitude difference in leakage power.

We have been working to optimize our compound semiconductor devices to both reduce parasitic effects and to increase the coupling by creating a trigate structure. In the first IEDM 2011 paper we show that an optimized III-V trigate device can have a much better SS than the equivalent planar device at short dimensions. A trigate device out performs in SS even with a trigate fin width of 30nm versus the 10nm thin body planar device. We are not yet at a point to claim both better and smaller compared with the best silicon trigate but we’re now one step closer.

In my last blog I talked about how a tunnel FET (TFET) might perform better under lower operating voltages because it has a steeper current cutoff (fig 2). In other words SS is lower, though in the case of a TFET it is not a straight line on a log scale.

Fig 2: Two modeled InAs double gate TFET configurations show very different turn-off behavior compared to the scaled CMOS device.

Our second IEDM paper is experimental work on III-V tunnel FET (TFET) devices. We show that we can achieve lower SS over part of the voltage range compared to the same thin body planar and for some of the operating range achieve steeper than 60 for SS. Again we’re not yet able to claim better than silicon but one step closer.

Fig 3. Cross-section of a single gate III-V tunnel FET. Gate is formed down the left side of the structure.

Our final paper which is unrelated to the other two looks at potential manufacturing techniques. Forming these devices requires precise growth of multiple crystalline layers using different materials. Most of our work to date has used Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) which excels at fine control but has a very slow rate of deposition. We are currently evaluating Metallorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) as an alternative and we report that we can achieve equivalent mobility. Given that it is both faster and potentially opens up choices for selective deposition, this work establishes viability of MOVPE for the future.

Wrapping up, integration and optimization is about controlling many small details. It takes very few impurities to create leakage paths and as we move to very small dimensions, optimizing the design of the structure and the engineering of the interfaces becomes critical. We have years of practice on silicon so even when a non-silicon material starts out with an inherent advantage, a lot of invention is required to catch up. Research is continuing in order to make compound semiconductors with superior power-performance compared to the best silicon can offer today.

References:

1. Electrostatics Improvement in 3-D Tri-gate Over Ultra-Thin Body Planar InGaAs Quantum Well Field Effect Transistors with High-K Gate Dielectric and Scaled Gate-to-Drain/Gate-to-Source Separation, M. Radosavljevic et al., IEDM 2011.
2. Fabrication, Characterization, and Physics of III-V Heterojunction Tunneling Field Effect Transistors (H-TFET) for Steep Sub-Threshold Swing, G. Dewey et al., IEDM 2011.
3. MOVPE III-V Material Growth on Silicon Substrates and its Comparison to MBE for Future High Performance and Low Power Logic Applications, N. Mukherjee et al. IEDM 2011.

A very good survey paper of III-V opportunities and challenges:

Nanometre-scale electronics with III-V compound semiconductors, Jes

I recently took on a new role that put me in closer touch with countries where technology in education has moved high up on the political agenda. Not all that long ago, governments were asking, “Why should we do this?” and “How do we do this?” Today, a number of countries are recognizing that ensuring that every student has access to computer and the internet is a key to being economically competitive — locally, regionally and globally. These countries are pioneers in ensuring all young people have ubiquitous the ability to develop 21st century skills at an early age.

My new role has given me a deeper understanding of some of the challenges of making a technical infrastructure work seamlessly in lots of different environments. And seamless is important, because you’re not going to get great use of technology in schools unless teachers and students have real access that’s real easy.

But easy is hard. It’s not just about adding technology on top of what you already do. It’s about changing school cultural and teachers’ behavior. It means thinking about instruction in transformative ways to keep pace with the information age. In an ideal world, you’d change the entire educational system at once. You’d deploy computers along with amazing new digital resources, new learning standards, revised testing methods, new approaches to teacher professional development. In the real world — and especially the developing world — you can’t let perfect get in the way of good enough. The leading countries are not letting the goal of perfect hold them back from making progress.

Here’s one thing I’ve observed: When you see large deployments of netbooks in schools, you often find visionary leaders driving those projects. For example, consider Alicia Bañuelos from the Universidad de La Punta in San Luis, Argentina. Alicia is an important leader in the state of San Luis’s effort to provide a netbook to every student in their province. It has taken tremendous effort for this poor rural state to give each student access to a device and the internet and one that Alicia acknowledges has sometime fallen short of ideal. “It’s not going to be perfect. But the only way I know to bootstrap my struggling rural economy into the information age and become globally competitive is through a strong workforce and a great infrastructure to the Internet. It’s worth me taking the risk to make it happen.”

Deployments like these points to a promising trend: Affordable netbooks based on our Intel® Atom™ architecture are opening up a whole new opportunity for governments to invest in another segment of education. Until recently, many countries focused more on integrating technology in higher education and secondary schools, with an emphasis on job skills training and workforce development. Today, affordability of technology and the performance of Atom-based netbooks allow even countries with limited budgets to consider the transformative potential of technology in primary grades. Countries like Macedonia, Georgia and Portugal are not just putting technology into schools but also looking at broadband connectivity to the internet, digitizing their curriculum, and training their teachers to fully take advantage of the devices in schools.

There is a common theme in our conversations with governments around the world. They know that to compete in an information economy, they need to start developing a knowledge-based citizenry much earlier. Our students have to be able to learn how to learn, to think critically and to collaborate across cultures. Having those skills — and the opportunity to practice them — is particularly important in developing countries, where students often leave the education system at younger ages.

• Read more about Intel’s deployments of netbooks in education on Intel’s website.

• Policymakers seeking to create a technology plan for their school system can download a free e-book to help with their planning at the Tech & Learning Website.

• Educators considering the move to a 1:1 computing model can find resources to help at the K-12 Computing Blueprint.

With the rise of cloud computing and the explosion of mobile data, we are facing an unsustainable rise in power use: data centers today are estimated to consume about 1.5% of the world’s energy power, resulting in an annual cost of $27 billion according to IDC. The way things are going, these numbers could double by 2014.

But why are datacenters using up so much energy? Well the rise of the smartphone and tablets, the mobile revolution, is driving the cloud revolution, which in turn is fueling incredible demand for Intel Xeon processor based servers, Intel’s loveliest, juiciest (and most expensive) Intel Architecture chips.

But the chips themselves can’t be drinking $27 billion worth of juice? That would be an enormous bar tab. No, the datacenters of today are inefficient and frankly a bit ’20th century’.

They spend about 40-50% of their energy use on things like cooling, and another big chunk on things like UPS (uninterruptable power supplies), and only about a 1/3 of the electricity delivered to the datacenter actually makes it into the server, where the lovely Xeon processors gently cajole the electrons into production.

The datacenter is a factory, a factory for computing. So any energy that doesn’t go into the server, is WASTED.

This is why Intel has created a guide to building servers that can run at higher temperatures. higher temperatures mean no air conditioning, and no air-conditioning means MUCH lower electricity bills – OR MORE INTEL XEON BASED SERVERS! (Which is my preferred option). You can also choose to cool using fresh air (from the outside) instead of using air conditioners. Using an economizer (a big fan) can save some serious money.

We also have a small number of uber-elite-boffins that help governments and very very large customers design better, more efficient datacenters. They then write up their experiences in the form of white papers so everyone else can benefit from their massive experience. My buddy Leif Nielsen is just such a guy, a Datacenter Architect – see some of the white papers he has worked on with Korea Telecom and a Vietnamese datacenter in Danang.

Higher Ambient datacenters or HTA datacenters can run at 81°F [27°C] or higher – we even have a customer that is running one at 122°F [50°C], but 81°F [27°C] to 104°F [40°C] seems to be the fashion these days.

Remember, higher temperatures = less cooling = lower energy usage.

HTA Examples :

• • Facebook retooled its Santa Clara, CA data center to operate at 81°F [27°C]. Their annual energy bill fell by $229,000 and the company earned a $294,761 energy rebate from the federal government .
• • Intel’s New Mexico Proof of Concept data center included 900 production servers with a 100 percent air exchange at up to 92°F [33°C] with no humidity control and minimal air filtration. This generated an estimated 67 percent power savings, equal to savings of $2.87 million in a 10MW DC .
• • Yahoo’s Computing “Coop” is a data center that operates without chillers, and requires water for cooling for only a handful of days each year (an estimated PUE 1.08). A 100 percent natural air flow results in an average of less than 1 percent of the buildings’ total energy consumption used for cooling .

Another way of saving costs is to get rid of the UPS. They are massive banks of batteries that the datacenter will use should the power from the street fail. But they are expensive and take up a LOT of room. So, let’s get rid of them.

Isn’t this fun? We just got rid of the air conditioners, and now we are getting rid of the UPS’s too. Together those items typically use up as much space as all the servers in the datacenter. So getting rid of them frees up space and energy for (yep, you guessed it) MORE SERVERS!

But what happens if the power fails? No worries – Intel to the rescue again. Future servers will have batteries INSIDE the servers, just like a laptop does. If the power fails, the servers can use a technology called ‘Intel Node Manager’ to automagically switch to the internal battery and if you like, turn to a lower power setting, just like your laptop does when you pull the plug out.

But Node Manager can do much more, like a car that monitors your fuel efficiency and reports your MPG’s back to you, Node Manager can monitor your electricity usage, for individual servers, racks, rows of racks, or even entire datacenters! But unlike your car, you can use Node Manager to IMPOSE a particular power state on your servers if you so wish. You can even save about 30% of your power using Node Manager without sacrificing performance. Read more about how BMW, Baidu, Oracle and China Telecom are using Node Manager here and here.

So, how do you save $2.16 Billion with just a flick of your wrist? Well easy. Just convince all the IT managers in the world to raise the temperature of their datacenters by just 5C. Turn up that thermostat.

This would result in:

• • $2.16 billion in immediate annual power savings .
• • Eight percent decrease in worldwide data center power consumption .
• • 24.3 billion kWh saved. Roughly equivalent to more than a month of total energy consumption by Spain, South Africa, Australia or Taiwan .
• • A CO2 reduction equivalent to 1.7 Million metric tons of CO2; this is the same as carbon
  sequestered by 43 million tree seedlings grown for 10 years .

Intel IT uses a lot of these techniques to make our own datacenters (we have 91) more efficient.

Want to know more? Go to our new Datacenter Efficiency website at www.intel.com/go/datacenterefficiency

It’s a little disconcerting to watch myself in the video – but especially given the survey results – the message is really important. Our daily decisions really DO make a difference and Intel and others in the industry are working hard to make that impact more visible and to make energy-saving behavior much easier. In our house we monitor our energy use real-time instead of waiting for the utility bill to come way after the fact and wondering what caused it to be so high. Amazing how much a little feedback changes actions – that fan doesn’t need to be on. Turn off the television as you leave the room. It’s only October, we don’t need the central heat on yet!
And now we’re extending that feedback mechanism into the office environment, where we don’t even see the electricity bill. As we make it obvious to people how much energy they’re using – and how they compare to their co-workers we believe behavior will change. We first started focusing on office energy as part of working with industry on hyper-efficient commercial buildings that generate as much or more energy than they consume over the course of a year. In that setting, plug-loads and occupant behavior become critical.
Of course being Intel, we’re also very interested in how technology can make it easier to save energy – concepts as simple as automatically turning off everything that doesn’t need to be on when you leave your home and as complex as having buildings that understand individual environmental preferences and adjust the temperature in a meeting room for greatest comfort and productivity.
We’re just beginning to make energy personal – and would love your suggestions on other needed personal energy innovations.

^{*These are among the findings from a report S.C. Johnson released yesterday, “The Environment: Public Attitudes and Individual Behavior — A Twenty-Year Evolution.” It follows S.C. Johnson’s 1990 report, “The Environment: Public Attitudes and Individual Behavior,” the predecessor of the Green Gauge consumer survey, which S.C. Johnson called the world’s longest-running survey of consumers’ green attitudes.}

Until recently, when it came to exposure from online fraud, most people only worried about the protection of their online financial accounts. These accounts have been big targets for fraud as evidence by the thousands of phishing sites produced each month targeting financial institutions. While the threat of a compromised account can be a huge concern for the general consumer, liability in security incidents has traditionally landed on financial institutions, which are expected to protect their customers.

Today, though, responsibility is less clear. Fraudsters have found that by leveraging trust between online parties they can proliferate malware an incredibly fast rate. As people accumulate hundreds of trusted “friends” on social networking sites, fraudsters are targeting these accounts to spread malware downloads and send spam or targeted phishing emails. Moreover, with mass storage now readily available through consumer email service providers, more people are keeping valuable private information in their inboxes (think: mortgage applications!), which can provide data to fraudsters to perform identity theft. Throw in online gaming with millions of dollars of value in virtual goods and it is easy to see why fraud is booming.

The problem is: usernames and passwords (especially weak passwords and ones used at multiple accounts) do not provide ample protection. They are being phished, socially engineered, guessed or stolen at astonishing rates- to the point where most people have had or know someone who has had an account hijacked and used for malicious intent. What is needed is a way to more clearly tie a user’s identity to a trusted device, much as credit cards with personal photos provide an extra way to identify you when the card is presented to a retailer.

One popular way businesses do this today is to use physical, “two factor authentication” tokens. These are credit card-sized devices that combine something you know, your username and password, with something you have, a randomly generated code created in the token, that you input at a site to gain access. The tokens are used by many Fortune 500 companies to give employees, partners and vendors access to corporate network resources. The trouble with this approach is that there is a certain level of expense involved to maintain the system, and if the algorithms behind the tokens are ever compromised, it can take months to recode and replace them.

To address these challenges, Intel worked with other industry thought leaders to embed two-factor authentication in computer chip hardware, a security approach that promises to be more seamless for end users and more cost effective for organizations. This new technology is called Intel® Identity Protection Technology (IPT) Here’s how it works: Built into select 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor-based PCs, IPT eliminates the need to memorize a code or attach a security device to your computer. When you access an Intel IPT-integrated web site you will be prompted to “register” your PC at that site.. On subsequent logins, you simply enter your user name and password and behind the scenes the PC generates a unique six digit code which gets validated by the website. Intel IPT’s smart technology makes this process simpler and more secure, changing your code at regular intervals before your account can be hacked. If you’re away from your PC, the web site can also offer an alternative method for authenticating users (such as SMS one-time password codes sent to registered phones or pre-determined knowledge based questions). For the end user, this whole process is very fast, easy and frictionless.

For a demo of the IPT experience, go HERE.

The great news is that OEMs started shipping IPT-enabled consumer desktops and laptops in June, and more than a dozen are now available, offering people and Web sites an integrated way of protecting access to online accounts. In addition, more than 1,000 Web sites now support IPT-enabled computers, and Intel is actively working with partners to expand that number.

For more information, please go to www.ipt.intel.com.

And that’s just one of the cool features you’ll find on Cisco’s recently introduced Cius, the first business-class, collaboration tablet and desktop phone. The Cius is based on an Intel Atom processor, takes advantage of Android, and combines secure voice, video, collaboration, desktop virtualization and custom (and controllable) apps all in one. The device also works seamlessly with Cisco WebEx, Cisco Quad, and of course my favorite, HD video interoperability with Cisco TelePresence.

It makes sense that Intel and Cisco would work together on this true business class tablet given our respective long-standing experience in Enterprise computing. Cisco has done a really nice job with this device, and what has me truly excited is what this first enterprise-centric tablet means to the high-tech industry and Intel.

Up to now, enterprises have had to mostly choose from consumer-driven tablets. For those who work in institutions or vertical segments like healthcare, finance, manufacturing, hospitality, retail and education – now there’s a choice. The Cius has a specific focus: the enterprise. It speeds collaboration and productivity, not just content consumption. It lets us every day consumers have a great tablet experience, with access to Android applications, while meeting the requirements of enterprise IT, such as device and application security and manageability.

Net-net, the Cisco’s entry into this segment is good news for CIOs and IT managers who want to provide employees with some more mobile freedom, but in a way that’s integrated into a company’s infrastructure and controllable in terms of apps and network access. Cius offers us an upgrade to business class – well done, Cisco!

• Tablets: Tablets are the “it” gadget this season, and make perfect sense for a college student. They’re light-weight and are incredibly portable. Their sleek, stylish design and touch-screen interface appeal to college students used to a touch screen phone.

Even if your college-age child already has a netbook or laptop he’ll be taking to school, a tablet can be a useful addition to his technological toolbox. Tablets like the ViewSonic ViewPad, which uses the Intel Atom processor , provide convenience, speed and the ability to integrate and communicate with other popular handheld electronics. The ViewSonic runs Windows 7 and Microsoft applications, and you can run Android on top with fun Android applications.

• Smart TV: Your kid will be the envy of all of their dorm mates with a smart TV system as it takes the entertainment experience to a whole new level. Devices like Boxee Box, allow you to watch shows, films and Internet content on your TV, using an included HDMI cable and your wireless or Ethernet Internet connection. The device allows users to play on their TV virtually any media they can play on their computer, including video, music or photos.

• Netbook: For times when a keyboard may be more convenient than a tablet, but you still don’t want to lug a full-size laptop, netbooks offer convenient, reliable Internet access. The hottest thing in operating systems is Google’s Chrome, and the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, powered by a dual-core Intel Atom processor, is one of the options for Chromebook (the other option is from Acer). The combination of leading-edge processing speeds, the flexibility and convenience of a netbook, along with Chrome’s browsing power, gives users access to more than 10,000 online applications, including popular games and productivity apps.

Another noteworthy netbook is the Asus Eee PC X101, which includes a solid-state drive (SSD) and a three-cell battery that make it thinner and ligther than other netbooks on the market.

• GPS: If your student is unfamiliar with their college town, a GPS can be a saving grace. They can find their way easily to the grocery store to stock up on important items like ramen noodles and Easy Mac, and other local supply stores, restaurants and more.

• Digital camera: College is a time to make memories and friendships that last a lifetime, so what is more necessary than a digital camera. Also, a digital camera can come in handy for various school projects that require visuals and media.

Here are two other good back to school gadget lists that provide more options worthy to consider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-back-to-school-gadgets-2011-8
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/18-essential-back-to-school-gadgets-20100728/

In case you didn’t catch it, one of the more interesting recent disclosures related to this happened at Computex last month in Taiwan. Intel’s Sean Maloney and Mooly Eden provided further details on the significant changes Intel is making to the Intel Core processor roadmap to enable a new mainstream line of mobile computers, called Ultrabook. This new breed of devices will combine best in class performance, responsiveness and security in thin and light, elegant form factors. Eventually you’ll think of an Ultrabook as a tablet when you want it, a PC when you need it. This is an historic change that we believe will redefine the computing experience. We’ve been mapping out these changes over the past several months and they aren’t trivial. They will impact the physical shape and capabilities of personal computing devices and require substantial changes to the way Intel and its partners design, produce and market devices and their components. Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said in our most recent earnings announcement that he’s pleased with the industry response and customer commitments around this new product category. Sean and Mooly explained that Ultrabooks will arrive in phases. Phase 1 was kicked off when Intel introduced its latest Ultra-Low Voltage 2nd Generation Intel Core processors in June that will bring new systems to shelves this holiday season. Phase 2 centers around the next generation Intel microarchitecture code name Ivy Bridge processors scheduled for availability in systems in the first half of 2012. Laptops based on Ivy Bridge will bring improved power efficiency, smart visual performance, increased responsiveness and enhanced security. Faster I/O such as USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt technologies are also part of Intel’s ongoing work to drive the PC platform forward. Intel microarchitecture code name Haswell is the third phase toward accelerating the Ultrabook and reinventing the capabilities of the laptop in ultra thin and light, responsive and secure designs. With Haswell, Intel will transform the computing experience with more power efficient processors that allow a more dynamic experience in insanely sleek systems.
In late 2011, you’ll begin to see systems that offer: 

• Thin/light designs
• Less than 21 mm thick – some much thinner than even that.
• Ultra-fast start up
• Intel Rapid Start Technology gets your system up and running faster from even the deepest sleep, saving time and battery life.
• PC wakes up almost instantly – Quick access to your data and applications
• Extended battery life
• Ultrabooks will offer 5 hours of battery life even in the sleekest form factors with some systems delivering 8 hours or more for all-day usage.
• Security enabled
• Bios/Firmware enabled to expose hardware features for Intel Anti-Theft Technology and Intel Identity Protection Technology

Intel has a strong track record in delivering innovation and growth in computing by employing our core assets of architecture, engineering, and manufacturing leadership. We transitioned to multimedia instructions with Pentium in 1995 and the mobile PC market with Centrino in 2003. We are confident we have the right set of technologies to influence a major change once again.

Here’s the thing: We are totally jazzed about all of this. It’s a good time to be working in this industry and it’s awesome time to be working at Intel. It’s also a fantastic time to be a user of technology – never before have we had so many choices of devices to suit our personal needs and lifestyles. If you think today’s variety of computing devices is exciting, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Speaking of which, what new features, designs or experiences would you like to see from your future mobile device? Would it look much like the laptops or tablets of today or would it be something completely different? What would you call it? We’d like to hear from you!

Powering many of the intelligent devices in these market segments are technology solutions from Intel’s Embedded and Communications Group (ECG), led by Ton Steenman, vice president and general manager.

Recently I traveled to San Francisco with Steenman to meet with a small group of reporters and discuss the success and growth opportunity for Intel’s embedded business.

With over $1 billion dollars in annual revenue, Steenman predicts sales to grow at a rate of over 25 percent per year over the next three years – a rate faster than the embedded market overall. Much of this growth he attributed to design wins secured over the last few years that are just now coming to fruition due to the long lead time for devices hitting the market in the embedded space.

Steenman also believes that working directly with leading brands to discover challenges the various market segments are facing, Intel is able to showcase the innovative ways in which technology can be integrated to develop a compelling solution to solve their business problems. A terrific example of this model coming to life is the adiVERSE virtual footwear wall developed with adidas. Using Intel technology adiVERSE allows adidas to offer shoppers their entire shoe collection within the confines of a traditional retail wall space. View the demo here.

Additionally, by offering a scalable product line from the low power Intel Atom processor family, to the Intel Coreand Intel Xeon families, the embedded group is able to meet the wide range of needs. Though Intel Core and Intel Xeon represent over 40 percent of the group’s sales today, Steenman predicts the Intel Atom processor becoming 50 percent of volume growth within the next five years.

Enabling innovation in this space from intelligent farm tractors and autonomous robots, the Intel Atom processor has quickly become the fastest ramping product in Intel’s embedded history with over 5,400 design engagements – over 60 percent of those being conversions from a different architecture.

By bringing these innovative products and technology to the marketplace Intel’s embedded solutions aim to enrich our lives by putting intelligence into billions of devices that can be connected, secured and managed – creating a world embedded with innovation. So tell me, how could innovative Intel technology help you in your everyday life?

This year, you may want to go the gadget route, and buy Dad one of the sleek new tablets recently made available. If you are considering a technology upgrade for your Dad, a tablet will be a good option, especially for Dads that do a lot of travelling for work.

There are a number of tablet options out there, something that is portable, reliable and offers all of the functionality (or as much as possible) of the PC is the way to go. Here are the two finalists in my own Father’s Day gift hunt, both powered by the latest Intel Atom processor:

• Fujitsu STYLISTIC Q550 Slate PC – this new tablet is great for business travelers and offers the portability of a tablet with the functionality of a business-focused device. Users aren’t just limited to viewing content, but can also create and share their projects and updates easily. The choice of using either a pen or multi-touch gives users options that are most comfortable to them, and it also runs Windows which makes it easily compatible with other devices.

• Motion CL900 Tablet PC – the name of this tablet’s game is rugged. Yes it has the functionality of many other tablets out there, but how many others can say they were designed to withstand a drop from the back of a truck, table or workbench? Like the Stylistic above, the Motion CL900 also has the option to use a pen, or touch, and can run for 8 hours on a single charge. The Intel Atom processor provides good balance in terms of power consumption and the ability to run multiple applications at once.

Giving a tablet to your Dad also increases his opportunity to brag – whenever someone asks about his tablet or whether he likes it or not, he could mention it’s a Father’s Day gift from his family. An additional bonus to all the capabilities the tablets above offer.

Today television viewers have a range of choices when it comes to their smart TV options. Intel is helping deliver these new consumer experiences through an array of consumer electronic devices throughout the home.

There is a wide range of Internet-capable, interactive devices that help bring an expanded breadth of content to consumers. Whether it’s Sony’s Internet TV or a Logitech Revue, both powered by Google TV software, or a companion box like the Boxee Box by D-link, Freebox Revolution by Free Telecom or Cubovision by Telecom Italia, viewers can choose the device that best fits their needs.

The latest option for consumers, currently in market trials in Augusta, Georgia, is Comcast’s Xfinity TV offering.

Comcast Xfinity HD subscribers in Augusta have started using a new set-top box, developed by Pace and powered by the Intel® CE media processor. By integrating Intel’s CE media processor, viewers enjoy can expanded features and access to rich content such as movies and music, apps, “made-for-TV” websites, social networking and more intuitive Internet-enabled search to discover and access an array of information and entertainment.

Devices such as the Comcast set-top box also provide a more personalized, customized viewing experience. Whether it is recommendations on new shows to record, or localized weather forecasts, there’s always something there to keep the viewer engaged and coming back for more.

Intel is already seeing great success abroad in the Smart TV market through products such as the Freebox Revolution in France and Cubovision from Telecom Italia. This newest offering from Comcast showcases a growing demand for Smart TV devices within the U.S.

Smart TV products require hefty processing power in order to seamlessly switch between tasks and avoid disruption to the easy-to-use TV experience we’ve all become accustomed to. As the demand for more interactive, feature rich and connected viewing grows, Intel believes its CE media processors are poised to deliver the optimal experience. To view Comcast’s newest Intel-powered smart TV offering, check out the demo from the 2011 Cable Show.

Welcome to part two of the fifth installment! I’ve been blogging about research progress towards making compound semiconductors mainstream and talking about both challenges and opportunities. See last installment and links to the others.

In the last blog, I talked about optimizing materials to get higher mobility and optimizing the structure to get to better coupling. Still a third optimization direction is to look at different types of device operation, particularly as we try to make very small devices. Look once again at the devices shown in figure 1.

Fig 1: Generic diagram of QWFET structure compared with MOS

These are P-channel devices with source (input) and drain (output) made of complementary N-type materials. When no voltage is applied, only leakage current flows, and when the gate voltage is high enough the channel inverts and becomes conductive.

Figure 2 shows the three possible optimization directions: materials, coupling, architecture.

Fig 2: A device can be optimized for performance in multiple ways: better materials to improve charge mobility, improved field coupling, and different (better?) modes of operation.

In the first example, JAM is a junction-less accumulation mode device [Ref. 1]. It consists of a uniformly doped single block of material, for example all N-channel. The gate structure is oppositely doped, for example P-type in order to make the device normally off. As the gate voltage is increased, it offsets the built-in field from the gate doping and allows the device to turn on. The promise of this device is lower electric field (with the potential for improved mobility due to reduced surface scattering) and potentially better scaling.

In the second example, the traditional semiconductor source and drain regions are replaced with metals which place the ends of the channel at different voltage points [Ref. 2]. The promise is very low contact resistance to the channel and immunity to some sources of variation. The challenge with metal source-drain devices is that the metals (one for the N device and one for the P device) must have tuned work-functions to place them at the right reference level. That becomes a significant materials challenge.

The third example, the tunneling field effect transistor (TFET) is the subject of a modeling paper presented at the June 2011 VLSI Symposium in Kyoto, Japan [Ref. 3]. Unlike a conventional device, a TFET has an undoped channel and source/drain regions of opposite polarity (Fig. 3). In a conventional device, the gate voltage lowers the barrier to produce a conductive channel. In a tunnel FET, conduction occurs by tunneling between the valence (bottom curve, fig. 3) and conduction (top curve, fig. 3) band barrier and flow is modulated by the width of the barrier and the presence of entry and exit states. It turns out that conduction in this device can be a very steep function of the applied voltage meaning the device can turn on and off with a much smaller voltage swing compared with conventional CMOS.

Fig 3: A TFET operates by tunneling between the barrier formed by the valence and conduction bands and current flow is modulated by the width of the barrier and the presence of entry and exit states.

There is no free lunch here though. The bands have to be very precisely placed with respect to one another to create the correct tunneling behavior and a choice of different compound semiconductor materials allows us freedom to move the bands to the desired points. Still at the small dimensions considered here, we are strongly in the realm of quantum mechnical behavior, and the precise band position is a function of channel dimensions. We used a simulator that models the coupling behavior of individual atoms in order to correctly model the device and then explored how to optimize the behavior. This is more efficient than building a hundred different variations and measuring to see which one works best.

Fig 4: Two possible InAs double gate TFET configurations differing in placement of the drain region compared with scaled CMOS.

In the case of the blue curve, there is high band to band tunneling even when the device is supposed to be off and this device is much worse than conventional CMOS. For the red curve, further optimization has reduced the off current while preserving the steep turn-on. As you can see the red curve turns on faster than the conventional CMOS device and has better performance for voltages below 0.3V while above that threshold, conventional CMOS is better. We might use a device like this in a product as part of an always on sensor/detector. When something interesting happens this circuit wakes up the rest of the device to do something requiring higher performance. It would have substantially better power-performance in this regime; we are estimating 8x better.

We are in the process of building variations of TFET devices and are working to demonstrate they work as well as predicted. Then this becomes one of the many choices we have to make to optimize our future transistor technology.

Ref. 1: JAM, J.P Colinge (Tyndall), Nature Nanotechnology, 2010

Ref. 2: Metal S/D, Larson (Spinnaker) TED 2006

Ref. 3: “Comparison of Performance, Switching Energy and Process Variations for the TFET and MOSFET in Logic,” Intel, VLSI Symposium 2011

Welcome to the fifth installment! I’ve been blogging about research progress towards making compound semiconductors mainstream and talking about both challenges and opportunities. See: last installment and links to the others.

In the last blog I hinted that our list of challenges was only a starting point and so in this installment I’ll give some explanation about other considerations. First as a reminder, unlike silicon, a compound semiconductor is made up of two or more elements, indium, gallium and arsenic for example (InGaAs). The key advantage of these materials is high charge mobility. Mobility is a measure of how easily you can move charges within the material with application of an electric field. Higher mobility can produce faster devices and/or devices that require much less power. Using two or more elements means more opportunity to tune the materials for performance or optical properties but also makes the challenge of fabricating wafers and processing much more complicated. Today, compound semiconductors are used in smaller scale applications where their special properties outweigh the added costs. Our goal is to take advantage of the vastly larger spending on silicon infrastructure and put it to use fabricating compound semiconductor devices.

Here’s a diagram comparing a compound semiconductor quantum well (QW) device on left with a conventional silicon device on the right. In this cartoon the challenge becomes how to fabricate that very thin QW layer and to integrate all the materials in a compatible manner.

Fig 1: Generic diagram of QWFET structure compared with MOS

Past research work has shown that we can integrate the materials and get very high performing devices but so far we can make still smaller devices with conventional silicon. Generally speaking to make very small devices that also perform well, you need to decrease leakage paths that limit your ability to turn off the device and minimize resistance when the device is on. So for the moment, assume the fabrication challenges of the blue QW in figure 1 are solved and focus on what else is required.

One aspect is the ability to couple the electric field of the gate (G) to the channel (QW). Tight coupling can be achieved by effectively moving the gate closer to the channel (high k dielectrics), thinning the channel (fully depleted devices), or add additional gates (finFET’s and other multi-gate devices including trigate). Here’s a cartoon to illustrate these three directions.

Fig 2: Tighter coupling can be achieved by moving the gate closer, limiting the channel thickness, or adding electric field from more than one side.

And here are some actual structures showing optimization by adding extra directional control, partially fabricated to make it easier to visualize.

Fig 3: A tall thin fin of Indium Gallium Arsenide with a capping layer, an equivalent fin structure with gate added, and finally an individual nanowire made from Germanium. The control gate(s) can be on either side of the fin for left two or wrapped around the wire for third case.

In the left hand fin, adding a gate (center) will mean the channel sees the electric field from two sides while in the right hand wire, the gate would surround the channel on all sides. The latter, gate all around (GAA), represents the highest possible coupling for a given gate dielectric but is of course the hardest to build. These can get quite complicated in three dimensions as illustrated in Fig 4.

Along the horizontal axis we have:

1. Ultra thin body (UTB) on silicon on insulator (SOI) which corresponds to middle diagram of fig. 2. Gate control is from just the top.
2. Fins which correspond to right hand side of fig. 2. Gate control is from two sides or two sides and top.
3. Wires which have gate control from all sides.

Fig 4: A device can be optimized for performance in multiple ways: better materials to improve charge mobility, improved field coupling.

You may have noticed a big white space on fig. 4. That third direction will be the subject of the next blog and is yet another reason that compound semiconductors are interesting.

Some the present-day snapshots included Intel’s new Z68 Express )desktop chipset, Intel® Smart Response Technology, and All-in-One (AIO) PCs. All these technologies show that innovation is still driving the desktop PC forward, delivering more performance, more responsiveness, and new form-factors.

Mooly also talked about how Intel’s design process is quietly undergoing a major transformation inside the company. He described the period leading up to this as a “kind of identity crisis.” Designs were once driven almost exclusively by engineering requirements, but current and future designs are being driven by the experience and usage models the design team wants to deliver. Design teams that formerly consisted of engineers and architects, now include a wide array of team members including anthropologists and psychologists who now guide the product design process.

Attendees also got more detail about the new Ultrabook™ platform Intel announced at the show. This emerging new breed of no-compromise computers will increasingly combine best-in-class performance, improved responsiveness and security in thin, elegant form factors. These systems promise to be ultra-thin, ultra-secure and ultra-responsive. And Mooly added a fourth “ultra”: ultra-amazing. But this isn’t just a postcard from the future. Mooly showed off several first-generation Ultrabooks, including the ASUS* UX21, the Samsung* Series 9, and the Lenovo* U300.

Mooly concluded by challenging the industry to join Intel in revolutionizing the PC yet again. Throughout the PC’s history, technologies like CD-ROM, Centrino and wireless networking, as well as the Intel Core™ 2 Duo Processor represented major changes in what PCs could do for people. As we look ahead to the next two years and beyond, we see many exciting changes on the horizon to bring amazing experiences into sleek form factors that will redefine what we think of as a PC.

During the keynote, Sean covered a wide range of cool technologies that Intel is working on to provide consumers in the near future – from smartphones, tablets, netbooks to enabling the Cloud which will rapidly expand with the growing number of mobile devices connecting to the Internet.

One of the important new developments that Sean talked about was the introduction of the “Ultrabook”, an emerging new breed of no-compromise computers, which will increasingly combine the best-in-class performance, improved responsiveness and security in thin, elegant form factors.

To top this, Sean was even ‘shrunk’ to a nanometer level while explaining to the audience how the latest the development of the latest 22nm silicon technology translates into benefits for consumer. Click here to watch the full keynote if you couldn’t make it to Taiwan.

Other highlights of Sean’s keynote include Michael Angiulo, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows planning for Hardware & PC Ecosystem, who joined Sean on stage to discuss the latest developments of Windows 7 on Intel Technology, and Jonney Shih, Chairman of ASUS showcased the company’s first sleek Ultrabook – the ASUS UX21.

Stay tuned for more updates from Computex in the next couple of days!

Sean Maloney, Executive Vice President of Intel showcasing the first ASUS Ultrabook with Jonney Shih, Chairman of ASUS at Computex 2011.

Here are a few reasons to consider taking an ultramobile device on your vacation this summer:

• With the ability to jump online, you’ll have access to updated road maps and information on places of interest nearby. You’ll also have no problem searching for places to eat, or making last minute hotel reservations. It’s never been easier to plan on the fly when you’re on vacation.

• Edit and organize your photos with ease on your computer while your memories are still fresh during the trip.

• In addition to devices being easy to transport, you can also save on space you might otherwise dedicate to DVDs, CDs and games by storing them on the device itself. Slim form factors also make it easy to set up in your back seat to keep your kids entertained with a movie, and tablets’ ability to use Flash makes it easy.

• With a larger screen and longer battery life, you can read myriad newspapers, magazines and books on the go.

• You can also play your favorite games like Angry Birds and Downhill Snowboard or watch animations and other media content that run on Flash.

Thanks in part to the small size of the Intel Atom processor, netbooks and tablets have become more portable, faster, sleeker and more lightweight. If you’re looking for a netbook or tablet to accompany you on your next trip, consider these options:

Dell Inspiron Duo: This computer’s unique 10-inch HD touchscreen monitor can be mounted within a fold-out keyboard, or docked at an audio station – making it a great device for storing and playing music, as well as an easily adjustable video player. It also switches from a clamshell form to a tablet slate, simply by flipping the screen

Asus Eee PC 1015PE (Seashell): With a built-in 3G Bluetooth connection, mobile surfing is easy with the Seashell. The computer comes with an additional 500 GB of Web storage, making it easy to maintain access to all the media you’ll need during your trip.

Samsung Slider 7 Series: The Slider 7 Series features a keyboard that slides out from behind the screen if you would rather type than use the touch screen.

ExoPC Slate: It’s hard to find a mobile device with a sleeker design than the ExoPC Slate. The 9-inch screen is perfect for watching movies, or poring through your favorite e-book.

Do you have some interesting stories of using the computer on the road? Share stories or tips of how computers make traveling easier here.

• Jr. FLL is for grades K-3 (Ages 6-9) and introduces kids to science and technology by using LEGO® bricks and LEGO WeDo robotics sets to build a motorized model that meets a specific challenge.
• FLL – FIRST LEGO League – is for grades 4-8 (Ages 9-14) and immerses kids in real-world science and technology challenges. Teams build LEGO-based robots (using LEGO Mindstorms kits) and develop research projects.
• FTC – FIRST Tech Challenge – is for grades 9-12 (Ages 14-18) and is designed for those who want to compete head-to-head using a sports model. Teams of up to 10 students are responsible for designing, building, and programming their robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams.
• FRC – FIRST Robotics Competition – is for grades 9-12 (Ages 14-18) and combines the excitement of a sports competition with the rigors of science and technology. Under strict rules, limited resources, and time limits, teams of 25 students or more are challenged to raise funds, design a team “brand,” hone teamwork skills, and build and program a robot to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors. As close to real world engineering as you can without being a real engineer!

The real goal here isn’t really a robotics competition…the goal is to inspire kids about science and technology and show them science can be fun and cool…and very in-line with Intel and Intel Learning Series…robotics is a vehicle to do that. FIRST does a fantastic job of doing that – let me take you on the journey I had at the competition.

Intel is actually a supplier and a sponsor for FIRST. Our Intel powered classmate PCs have been the recommended standard for the driver stations in the FRC league, will be bundled as a standard for FLL and Jr. FLL for the upcoming season and we will also see them show up soon in the FTC league. Additionally, Intel and Intel employees donate their time and money sponsoring, mentoring, and coaching teams…and it is really fun to get involved! These kids are doing some amazing things!

So I arrive at the Edward Jones Dome – home of the Rams – and register for the event. As a sponsor, we are invited as a special guest – which gives me some nice perks, like unfettered access to the pit and competition floor and well as some great networking opportunities…unfortunately I am not here JUST for fun – I do have work to do and that means meetings…8^) But I am there early and my first meeting isn’t for a few hours so I explore a bit.

As I walk through the pit area, which is broken down by league, I realize it is really where the teams have a “home base” and can work on and tweak their robots…they also have practice areas for them to run through testing a real match. I stroll through the different zones and see some amazing work! These robots are cool, complex, and truly “engineered” -I realize these kids are really the future engineers of our society and they are made up of all kinds of different people.

After I amaze myself with the work in the pit area, I stumble upon the Dome arena where the competitions are going on. Right now they are running the qualification matches for the finals in the next couple days. The FRC league is having their robots pick up and construct FIRST logos with blow up shapes and then they have to launch a “runner” robot up a pole. They do this by working together with three teams on each side. The first part of the match is totally autonomous and the robot has to hang a single orange circle all by itself. Some don’t (usually rookie teams) and some even look for others dropped ones to hang two! Pretty neat. Then they operate in a tele-operated mode where the driver uses his classmate PC controller and remotes their robots to finish the mission…truly amazing engineering here. In the FTC matches they have the same autonomous/tele-operated modes and also work in teams…they have to pick up and place batons in small carts. Also balancing on ramps is extra points. FLL is running missions as bio-engineers having the fix broken bones, place a pacemaker, and inject a syringe. The tasks each group has to do is really imaginative and challenging.

What I took away from this was these kids are doing real engineering because they are given a very challenging task that they have to complete with a limited budget, not enough time – real world time constraints, and  having to effectively work as a team! This is a great place to find future employees!!! The second thing I took away – and was rather surprised by – was the number of girls participating! It was so cool to see all girl teams and mixed teams…girls getting a bigger interest in science is very cool! The last general observation I had was that “Geeks” (which I am one of) rule here!!! Everyone was being themselves and were superstars! They dressed up in funky costumes that showed team spirit, they all out had a fun time in an environment that promoted that being a geek is totally cool – which it is! Even Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas was here (and recent Intel employee!). He saw FIRST and called Dean Kamen up to see how to get involved…see Will.i.am is a big tinkerer and loves robots and LEGOs and technology! I also heard the Dean asked him to help make FIRST and technology cool and Will.i.am said – “Dean, FIRST is already COOL – I will help make it LOUD!!!” That he did, him and the Black Eyed Peas treated us to a concert Friday night that was part of a special being filmed where Will.i.am and other artists will show that FIRST and Science is cool – look for it on ABC August 14th at 7:00pm!
I also had the chance to talk with a bunch of teams – here are some cool things I talked about with a couple of notable teams:

The first team was an FTC team from Folsom, CA – where I live. This team, the PHEONIXTRIX (FTC Team 3509) is a very cool team. The coach, Rathish (A good friend and fellow Intel employee), has really done amazing things with this team. He has his team mentor younger teams, reach out to the community and does things to promote science in schools. In addition, his team was also picked by the Director of FTC league (Ken Johnson) to help build a robot for Will.i.am and also got to go to his studio train him how to drive it. They even did a video about their adventure with Will.i.am and played it during the concert…it was really cool!
The other team was an FRC team and is from Portland, OR named Trout Lake (Team 3711). This team had an interesting story – they come from a school of seventy students! They worked VERY hard to get here – they were the only Rookie team in the Galileo Division to qualify as a regional winner (Oregon Regionals). It was a tough ride to get here – alot of rookie mistakes, but their hard work payed off as some other teams noticed them and partnered with them, they were able to pull off winning the regionals. To get to the championships, they had to pay their own way by collecting scrap metal – 40,000 pounds of it! But they made it and did well! Good job!

So – I know this is a lot of detail, but to me, this was a really exciting event that I am glad Intel is involved with – both from the product side and also the coaching and mentoring side! I think it is important to support more types of these things as part of our kid’s education. Some of the data I heard form one of my meetings with the FIRST team was that kids that participate on a FIRST team are 3 times more likey to go to college and 2 times more likely to major in a technology/engineering major! This is GREAT ROI…so my mission for you is to go out and figure out how to get more involved in FIRST – from coaching a team, being a mentor, to getting a FIRST team setup in your kid’s school! Help me get more technology integrated into kid’s education and schools!!!

In closing, everybody always looks up for sports figures and entertainers – sometimes I wonder why – well, for the sake of America, we need our youth to start looking up to other role models – scientists and engineers! We have lost our innovation edge and we need it back…this is just the first step!

This speed of development and innovation will help push Intel ahead of the pack in the tablet market. Today, the dialogue around tablets is focused on battery life – for good reason. The newly launched Atom Z670 (codenamed “Oak Trail”) provides up-to all day battery life1 – but as Intel begins this acceleration, battery life will quickly become a moot point. What was “all-day” will become all week or even all month battery life. Once this happens, Intel believes the key differentiation in tablets and other connected devices will be found in the features that are integrated into the silicon, and pure performance which enables a range of consumer benefits. This traditionally has been, and continues to be, Intel’s strength.

This industry is in the early stages of development, and has yet to realize its full potential. We believe that what lies ahead is far greater than what we’ve seen so far. With the launch of the Atom Z670 processor this week, we showcased a variety of new tablet innovations, including the Razer Switchblade gaming device, which incorporates a multi-touch screen with a dynamic keyboard that adapts and changes with the games being played.

Once was only for consumers, tablets are also finding their way into the workplace more and more. Traditional vertical businesses like healthcare are using tablets to help increase efficiency, improve productivity and save time. Motion Computing’s mobile clinical assistant is one such example of how tablets allow medical staff to directly input data into patients’ electronic files and avoid paper charting.

In the future, tablets may not even look like they do today. Other “hybrid-like” devices will offer consumers the choice of designs that flip, swivel, spin and slide providing both touch-screen and keyboard interfaces.

With so many new, innovative uses, and designs in store for tablets and other companion devices, one thing is clear: Intel’s current and future technologies will play a key role in the tablet market segment today and in the future.

What do you want from your next tablet?

1Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance.

The first “connected” TV and Blu-ray players appeared in 2008 and, from the outset, they merely offered basic and limited content portals. They couldn’t do more because the processors inside a TV were designed to process images; they were never intended to run the software or apps we use on the Internet. So the “connected TV” was – and still is – slow, complicated and limited in its capacity to drive change.

Smart TV disrupts things, however, sporting fully capable browsers which flawlessly present the Internet videos and applications that we use daily. It enables genuinely new interactive and Internet-centric television experiences.

Immediate benefits of having fully Internet-capable TVs go far beyond being able to browse the web. Of course there are apps, games and huge social networking implications – and I’ll cover these in future blogs. Hugely significant though, is that media conglomerates no longer determine which content will and will not be available on our TV sets. No longer confined to schedules, we can watch on demand.

Smart TV introduces a virtuous circle, which gives consumers a lot more freedom and choice, whilst also enablingcontent creators to reach new, global audiences.

Would be script-writers, playwrights, experts, comedians and a lot of other talent is entering the fray and producing innovative content for emerging audiences. We saw the dawn of this activity a couple of years ago with Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible which according to a great blog on Forbes.com “[took] six days, no budget and a lot of talent. Out came millions of viewers, brisk sales, and an Emmy”. There are others too, like The Guild and Web Therapy.

Now that we are free to watch such content on our TV sets, the creative floodgates have been opened. Check out the Laugh Factory or the Onion News Network for example (preferably from your smart TV!) These content creators are now able to directly reach huge audiences, niche or otherwise, on a global scale without having to worry about whether they’ll be able to sell their content to a TV network in order for it to get viewed. See what Black Eyed Peas frontman has to say about it in this interview with will.i.am.

Smart TV also enables an entire new line of independent broadcasters. Revision 3 calls itself “the leading television network for the internet generation”. smibs.tv has just materialised “for people with a passion”… there are many others. Finally the .tv domain can live up to its destiny (sorry, Tuvaluans!)

Content publishing is no longer in the hands of a select few. As more and more viewers have the means to easily watch Internet programming on the TV, more innovative broadcasts will emerge.

And the more content that exists, the easier it will be for smart TVs to bring you content tailored to your preferences… so they’ll keep getting smarter.

I was recently reading a Mashable article on HOW TO: Create a World-Class Online Community for Your Business. The post is referencing a recent whitepaper published by Telligent. The article puts a strong stake in the ground – “Name the companies that set the standards for social media use in business. Nothing coming to mind immediately? Me neither.” It is a very provocative statement. I think fellow practitioners would all agree that we haven’t crossed the chasm yet. However, I think there are a lot of solid examples of businesses that have the right ingredients to “bake the cake.”

I went back in time to August 2007 and reviewed a promo video that Bob Duffy, Josh Hilliker and I did for the launch of Open Port, Intel’s first external online community. I was expecting to hear what we spoke about to be “so 2007″. I was surprised to discover that our philosophy and approach still holds true today. So after 3-1/2 years, is world class status that far away? This article draws out something I have been saying for years – the technology is about 25% of the challenges, the other 75% is behavior & social science.

• Identify Business Objectives: I couldn’t agree with this more. I remember speaking with a senior VP of HR at a Fortune 100 company about social media use. He was perplexed with how the CEO’s internal blog is being leveraged. I asked the question – “What were you trying to achieve with the CEO blog?” It turns out they didn’t have a specific objective – it was the “trend” and they jumped on it. Just because the mountain is there doesn’t mean you have to climb it. For all of our external communities, we require a solid definition of how the community is incorporated into customer engagement strategies, org’s objectives and how success will be measured. This is no guarantee, but it does ensure we aren’t climbing the mountain just because it was there.

• Emphasize Being Personal: Way back in August 2007 with the launch of Open Port, we spoke about authenticity. Communities are made of people. Our most vibrant internal and external communities are a testament to this. For example, internally we have had huge success leveraging social tools to create virtual communities of practice. The Learning Community of Practice has connected employees across the globe who lead learning efforts inside Intel. Best practices are shared, new connections made and even a virtual conference was held.

• Create a culture of belonging: *The Intel Support Community is designed to enable customers to resolve issues, share best practices and discuss emerging trends. The critical hinge pen is the encouragement of peer to peer sharing. In a very short period of time, this community hit a milestone of 10,000 posts!

• Be a Source of Relevant Content: This has been a core belief of Intel’s since the beginning of social media. It is a solid pillar of our marketing efforts and our internal collaboration. With the information overload in full force and employees citing challenges with finding information & people to do their job – quickly finding relevant content is key to the user experience. We are taking this a step further by not only ensuring that content created is value-add; but also improving ways that one may find that information faster. This recognizes another industry shift occurring. The discovery of information is not just occurring via search engines, but evolving via social sharing from within your network. We are creating ways for curated content to surface that is personalized to the user’s needs.

• Leverage Wisdom of the Crowd: We have great examples of this pillar. One that is a stand out is an internal impromptu leveraging of employee wisdom. An employee posted a blog to solicit money saving ideas for Intel. It was called “Every Coin Counts.” The response was overwhelming and resulted in hundreds of money-saving ideas.

• Highlight Influential Members & Reward Members: This is a gap, but I am working to change that. On the external side of social media, I am partnering with our Social Media Center of Excellence and across community managers to create a member “reputation & recognition” system. In my mind this is a robust program that must be careful built & managed. It goes well beyond baked in algorithms in a community platform. Stay tuned- 2011 should be a big year for finally launching this effort

• Establish & Enforce Guidelines: Intel was one of the first to establish guidelines) for both our internal and external communities. They are simple, easy to comprehend, align to Intel culture. There are more “do’s” than “don’ts”. We are strong believers in addressing guidelines and governance before you head too far down the social media road. It ensures risks are mitigated and that communities are set up for health, wellness and success.

• Give Members Privileges: A highly successful community that the average public doesn’t see is our community for Intel’s Channel Partners. It is a membership program with associated privileges – access to information, Intel subject experts & executives plus a very cool place for ideation- (channel partners recommend what products Intel should develop).

Our journey is not over. If it was as easy as installing software and going on auto-pilot; I would have been out of a job years ago. Are we world class? Likely not. But I am confident we have the very important ingredients to bake a beautiful cake.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/02/building_world_class_communiti/feed/ 7 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/chipset_design_flaw/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/chipset_design_flaw/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:43:47 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/chipset_design_flaw/ Read more >]]> By now some of you may have heard that Intel representatives announced the discovery of a potential issue in one of the companion chipsets to the Intel® 2nd Generation Core™ processors, code named “Sandy Bridge.” Because Intel is committed to providing our customers products of the highest quality, we have proactively identified the affected part, stopped shipment of the product, and have begun to manufacture a new version of the support chip which will resolve this issue.

This issue only affects the Intel® 2nd Generation Core™ i5 and Core™ i7 quad core based systems that have been shipping since January 9th, 2011. If you believe your PC may contain the affected part please follow the instructions below.

How do I know if my PC contains the affected part?

If you purchased your system before January 9th, 2011 you do not need to do anything else.

I’ve confirmed that my PC contains the part affected in this announcement. What should I do next?

If you believe you may be affected by this issue, please contact your place of purchase or your PC manufacturer. Intel is working with our PC manufacturing partners on a warranty return solution.

What is the specific technical problem identified?

The parts that contain this potential problem includes the Intel® 6 Series (and the Intel® C200 Series Chipset). In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives. This issue does not affect the processor but only affects the supporting chipsets. Intel has implemented a silicon fix to this problem.

Where might I find more information about this issue?

Intel is committed to communicating openly with our valued customers and partners regarding this issue. To better respond to your questions, we have implemented a live chat feature on our Intel Customer Support page. You are also encouraged to contact your PC Manufacturer for more information on any warranty return process.

We will post more information here as it becomes available.

UPDATE:

We have posted a new page to help you identify whether your chipset may be affected by this issue. Please follow the instructions on this page to determine the next steps you should take.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/chipset_design_flaw/feed/ 85 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/as_i_reflect_on_my/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/as_i_reflect_on_my/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:12:32 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/as_i_reflect_on_my/ Read more >]]> Ah, CES. While I am not fully recovered from the 14+ hour days on my feet, I have had some time to reflect on the show and how Intel is developing technology that helps customers deliver really cool, new devices unique and innovative in their design, as well as useful.

The general CES media buzz, I’m sure you’ve all heard, is how 2011 will be “the year of the tablet.” Wandering the CES show floor this year, I can see how that conclusion was made – until I got to the Intel booth. While I knew I would see many new and upcoming tablets and netbooks powered by the Intel(r) Atom(tm) processor, what I was truly impressed with was the section of companion devices combining the best of both the netbook and tablet worlds.

While many reporters featured several devices in “first look” reviews, what I didn’t see were stories that examine the possibility of convergence and a new class of products that can fit nicely between the categories of tablets and netbooks.

These innovative Atom-based products are being called everything from “convertibles” and “sliders,” to “switchblades.” Some clam or flip, others slide or swivel. What they have in common is each brings some of the best elements of the netbook (tactile QWERTY keyboard) and tablet (beautiful screens for consuming content) together in one device. One example is the Samsung TX100 slider announced at CES. Another demonstrated in the Intel booth was the Dell Inspiron(tm) duo. When people see this convertible swivel from a netbook to a tablet, they are blown away! Another was a CES “Best of Show” winner for People’s Voice, the compact Razer Switchblade Concept, described as a “breakthrough portable gaming device model” for gaming on the go.

After seeing these amazing devices in the booth, I thought it’d be fun to hit the street at CES to get a feel for what consumers think about them, specifically the new Inspiron duo from Dell. In the words of one of the testers, “this is just awesome.” These reactions made me realize that it’s not about a “one shoe size fits all” approach and there is no reason that we should have to choose between our precious keyboards and full high-resolution screens for watching our favorite TV shows or playing Angry Birds in HD.

What do you think about these new form factors and the idea that netbooks and tablets may converge over time? I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, check out the video to see some of the reactions.

There has been a lot of chatter over the past several months around smart TV and the future of your television. If you aren’t familiar, smart TV is a category of products that combine traditional television content with Internet and personal content. They add TV-optimized browsing, interactive search, and personalized applications to your TV experience.

Intel has been involved since the beginning to get this exciting phenomenon off the ground. Our line of system-on-chip Atom processors, which combine PC capabilities with dedicated hardware, video and audio processing purpose-built for the CE industry, is the foundation for a significant number of smart TV products. For example, in October, Sony and Logitech debuted the first smart TV devices featuring Google TV with Sony’s integrated DTV’s and Blu-Ray players and Logitech’s Revue  set-top box all powered by the Intel Atom Processor CE4100 family. Then, in November, D-Link launched their new Boxee Box, also powered by the CE4100 series. Since then we’ve seen a range of reviews and opinions as well as a lot of questions on how this thing called “smart TV” works and where it’s headed.

One of the biggest questions around smart TV has been the availability of content. Any new and innovative technology will have impacts on how the industry works; smart TV and the TV industry are no exception. For example, when DVD players were introduced into the marketplace, there was a frenzy in the industry and then a settling as a new business model, selling DVD’s, came into play. As the industry learns more about smart TV and its unique capabilities, we expect positive and healthy changes will be made to the business model of TV industry, including new ways to access the content from networks. But it is important to remember that smart TV products like Google TV and Boxee are designed to integrate with your existing cable or satellite services.

We should also point out that smart TV is about more than just getting traditional TV content. We’re seeing the rise of some really innovative and cool smart TV-optimized content from innovators like Revision 3, the Laugh Factory, the Onion News Network, and lots of others. These innovators are leading the charge in exploring new business models for monetizing great video content. They are finding that Smart TVs provide the ideal platform for catering to diverse audience interests on the screen they love to go to for entertainment.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week in Vegas we saw a lot of the pieces to the smart TV puzzle start come together with a number of exciting announcements from across the smart TV market.

Boxee announced a deal with CBS that will give Boxee users the ability to purchase full episodes from CBS starting later this year. We are also seeing many networks license their content to Internet video subscription services, like Netflix, that are available on Google TV.

We also saw new smart TV products from players like ViewSonic and Iomega. Like the existing Google TV and Boxee products, these new devices support rich media, Adobe Flash video and animation, on-demand gaming, and interactive TV applications that complement broadcast TV with Internet-based content and services.

Another piece to the smart TV puzzle came in the news from industry service providers like Free and Telecom Italia. Companies like Free are providing really great examples of how service providers are bringing their own smart TV experience to the market, showing that smart TV is not just a retail phenomenon, but a real tangible category of products we’ll be seeing for a long time to come. These service providers’ devices are bringing innovative services like gaming and video conferencing to your TV screen.

Smart TV will enhance the TV experience and industry partners are starting to work together to bring amazing new content and experiences for consumers. There will be a range of devices for consumers to choose from in order to make it right for them and have a much more personalized television experience; they can get what they want, when they want, and how they want it. There is a lot of innovation to come for this category and Intel is excited to see where it all ends up.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/smart_tv_where_its_heading_in/feed/ 1 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/geo_social_ces_winners_and_los/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/geo_social_ces_winners_and_los/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:28:27 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/geo_social_ces_winners_and_los/ Read more >]]> The 2011 Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas saw a new dimension of mobile and smart phone device usage by attendees. Not only were these devices on display on the show floor, but many exhibitors asked their guests to “check-in” into their booths with popular geo social tools like Foursquare, Gowalla, Scvngr or Facebook Places. Some social-savvy attendees simply checked in on their own to extend their CES attendence to the social web.

At the Intel booth, we designed an app that aggregated and tracked social conversations, content and discussions, including Geo Social check-ins from all booths at this year’s CES. This app is one of the most advanced web apps Intel has ever created using pure HTML 5 and CSS3, developed with the help from our friends at Jess3.

As the data poured in, we were able to to create a wide angle-view of all social activity at CES. We shared this view with our event attendees, displayed the data in our guests areas, our executive conference rooms and social media backstage.

The numbers below give the total number of check-ins during CES 2011 and, according to our data, the relative standing of how each exhibitor faired. They include all checkins during CES using Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places presented in total.

- 10,133 Total Checkins at CES 2011

- Blackberry: 2422

- Sony: 1573

- Intel: 1343

- NBC Uni: 353

- Sharp: 291

- Toshiba: 150

- Samsung: 130

- Shuttle: 125

- Panasonic: 121

- TI DLP: 101

- All others Sub ~100

This is meant to serve as a guide. Any discrepancies are a result of: A limited sample set (official venues or multiple venues), profanity within shouts, and an editorialized list of booths based on their immediate popularity.

What could this mean? Geo-social programs can be a great way to increase engagement and participation. And… teams need to ensure that their booth is properly named, easy to find in the geo-social tool and an integrated piece of the offline and online strategies.

Here’s me demonstrating the #CESLivesocial visuialization technology at CES:

There seems to be something wired into the human psyche that makes us want to play – and to play games in particular. Games deliver the satisfaction of solving a puzzle, the adrenaline rush of competition, or just a simple diversion in our day. They allow us to get wound up or unwind depending on the occasion. They give us opportunity for interacting socially. The original Olympics even put games ahead of political and military rivalry.

Games come in many different forms – riddles, puzzles, board games, card games, raffles, races, all manner of sports. My youngest son always wants me to play games with him – generally of the Mille Bornes, mancala, Battleship, MasterMind variety. All of my children play sports – soccer, baseball, volleyball. My wife likes logic puzzles. I am a mild sudoku addict myself. I also like to watch games on TV – this shows that games stir us at a deep enough level that we can enjoy them even if we are just spectators participating vicariously. If you haven’t found a type of game to suit you, you probably haven’t looked hard enough.

Games have an interesting tendency to push technology or at least ride on its coattails. The mathematics of probability owe some debt to our penchant for gambling – we want to know how likely some outcome is and whether we should believe the coin/die is fair. Chess evolved to play-by-mail and with clocks. In the early history of automobiles and aviation, technology and racing are intextricably intertwined – competition driving an “arms race” of innovation. Before that some element of genetics is tied up in the breeding of race horses. In sports the impact of technology on the game play itself is unmistakable – better balls, shoes, clubs, rackets, artificial playing fields, instant replay, … as well as in larger benefits/issues – such as physical therapy, surgical repairs of various types, and unfortunately steroid use. A large part of the revenue stream and fan base for sports no longer depends on the fan attending the event in person; rather, we remotely celebratesor mourn our team’s fortunes – by radio in earlier decades and now on TV and internet forums. Game shows were some of the first television programs and the last decade has seen a whole new genre of “reality TV” shows which have some element of competition involved. I’m sure with a little reflection you could probably think of a dozen other ways that technology and games/competition have spurred one another along.

But I would contend that gaming experience has been most dramatically impacted in the last 30 years by the microchip as a vehicle to create games as software. Note: when I speak about computers and computer games here I am using a very broad definition – interactive entertainment mediated by a microprocessor. This includes handheld gaming devices, games on consoles in the home, web or cloud based games running on a server but experienced on any device, as well as games running locally on phone/tablet/laptop/desktop.

Computers let us play games alone that previously required a human opponent to be collocated with us who wanted to play at the same time – either allowing us to play against the computer or against other human players anywhere in the world.

In some cases, computer games mimic the mechanics of games from the “real world” (like Blackjack or Risk) – with the added benefit that the computer keeps track of the rules, keeps score, doesn’t require a lot of room for cards/boards, etc.

In others games, they let us play alone they offer novel experiences not available to us in the real world (fantasy and sci-fi settings) or let us experiment in ways that are not safe/cost effective in the real world (flight simulators). Computer games let us “save” a scenario and replay it to explore different choices and outcomes. Computer games let us be bold in situations where our natural instinct for self preservation inhibit our ability to function optimally (racing, combat).

A single computing device can play a wide variety of different games – simply by loading them as software. This offers a compactness/flexibility that physical games can’t match.

In short, gaming matters to us as humans because interactivity engages us into the experience. Unlike books or movies, games are a form of entertainment that lets us participate and impact what happens next. Computer games offer a huge variety of such interactive experiences.

Not surprisingly, computer based gaming is big business. The handheld and home consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Wii, Sony PlayStation and PSP, Microsoft Xbox have a large ecosystem. Apple’s success with the iPhone is at least partly due to the large number of game apps that developers built for it – transforming the smart phone from a utilitarian communication/productivity device to something that provides portable fun. On the PC, games like World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, Call of Duty: Black Ops have millions of players and generate many millions of dollars in business – and they are only the tip of the iceberg.

Since Intel is a major technology company, some natural questions follow:

1) What types of games are popular/growing? What are the trends in computer based gaming? In light of this, what types of hardware and software capabilities are required from the central processing unit (CPU)? from graphics?

2) Intel recently launched new processors with built-in graphics for notebooks and desktops. How well do they align to the trends above?

3) Intel has an excellent reputation for fast CPUs, power efficiency, reliable chipsets, and good execution to roadmaps. In contrast, Intel’s previous “integrated graphics” have a less than stellar reputation for compatibility and performance in games. Is that low reputation deserved? If so, why is that and what is Intel doing to correct the underlying issues?

In a word: Is Intel serious about gaming and, particularly, is Intel going to deliver good gaming experiences with its Intel HD Graphics?

In the next several weeks I plan to walk through my view of computer games and answer the questions above. I hope that you will come along with me on the journeyand share your feedback and thoughts (both positive and negative). I welcome the challenge…like any good gamer!

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/play_time_-_why_games_matter/feed/ 2 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/visibly_smart_features_inside/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/visibly_smart_features_inside/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:35:43 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/visibly_smart_features_inside/ Read more >]]> Whenever something new comes out, it always helps to “see” what it is and “see” how it works for me to really get a good understanding. That’s exactly what happened over the past few months leading up to the release of the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™processor family.

Whenever I heard, “this is new,” or “this is amazing” or “people will love this,” I asked our experts to show me what they meant, and from that we created this “Visibly Smart” video.

These new chips will be found in more than 500 PCs and laptops this year. They are unlike any other processor Intel has launched and here’s why:

Great visual experiences: Intel refers to the 2nd generation Core processor family as “Visibly Smart.” What this means is that by building the visual and graphics capabilities into the processor itself, and enabling processing performance that adapts (or boosts) to meet your needs, PC experiences will change in a way that is obvious for you and me to see. Our computer will be more responsive and look better, in other words – visibly smarter performance for watching 3D Blue Ray movies and HD videos, viewing high quality photos and playing games.

New features don’t compromise power and battery: While the new processors dramatically improve our PC experience and you may think that better visuals automatically mean shorter battery life, this is not the case with the new Core processor family. The new chips are more efficient and enable longer battery lives thanks to the new Intel Turbo Boost 2.0technology that increases performance when needed then quickly pulls drops down to idle in order to get the job done and save as much energy consumption as possible.

Special Access to HD Movies on my PC: Intel has announced, Intel Insider, that is powered by the new processors. Intel Insider will give access to full HD (1080dp) movies on a PC that weren’t available before. Now you can get new releases in HD on the same day at DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Since I take my PC with me everywhere I go, this means I can watch new movies anytime, anywhere and wirelessly.

Intel Quick Sync: This hardware built into the technology eliminates the time you’d spend waiting when editing and sharing videos. For example, a four-minute HD video can now convert a PC file to transfer to an iPod in just 16 seconds that same video use to take 4 minutes.

Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) 2.0: I was especially excited to hear about advances made to Intel Wireless Display(also called WiDi) which has become a popular item in my household. With Wireless Display 2.0, me and my family can now benefit from 1080p HD and content protection when we beam premium HD content from our laptop screen to the TV. I found this particularly useful over the holidays when my sister wanted to show off her recent vacation photos.

At CES, Intel highlighted these new features, services and partnerships that are helping 2nd Generation Intel Core processors bring us better visual computing experience. How will you put these new visibly smart features to work in your life?

Now we at Intel like Charlie, we are fans and he does an important job of keeping the industry on its toes. He has been a big proponent of Linux use and follows our work in this field closely. But he has been somewhat unfair this time.

Charlie’s main source of frustration is that his current distro of Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) doesn’t support Sandybridge, and therefore delivered a terrible experience. One would naturally assume, just like Charlie did, that Intel need only plop down some nice fresh drivers and voila: A pleasant Sandybridge experience on Linux.

Unfortunately this is where the complex reality somewhat gets in the way, and here is the situation as I understand it:

You see, the graphics subsystem in Linux is actually a complex web of interdependencies and all the related components all have to be updated for a new graphics hardware to work. The Linux software components called ‘Mesa’, the kernel, ‘libdrm’, ‘cairo’, ‘libva’ and ‘x86-video-intel’ are all the parts that have to be updated and released into the wild for this all to work. This isn’t unusual, it is just the way it is.

Now, some of you may say: ‘But AMD and Nvidia drivers are easily updatable’. Well yes and no. It is true that in certain cases, you can update some parts of those systems, but they rely on closed-sourced code maintained only by those companies and not the Linux community – and updating a single component can affect the rest of the system. This is not wrong, nor it is right; it is a choice. Although it is a far cry from the open source ideal of Linux. Although this blog isn’t meant to be a open vs closed argument. I do have to say that some of these companies are also pursuing open source efforts, and they have the same issues we do in this regard. That said, there have been complaints about the lack for drivers for other hardware vendors too.

So the rub is this: You will have to wait for the new distribution of your flavour of Linux, and although Intel has some influence over this (as we do contribute to Linux in a significant way), we can by no means control release dates.

But don’t take my word for any of this, there is a conversation about this topic on the Real World Tech Forums right now, and even Linus Torvalds himself is dishing out advice. He describes how to compile the components yourself (as the source code is available).

When will the new distro releases be available? We hope it is soon. Linus says: ‘more like “April 2011″. Before that, you’ll have to find things like daily builds or do your own’.

So although we want Linux Sandybridge support to be available today, unless you are a hardcore user happy to compile his or her own components, you will have to wait a little while. I can’t give you a date, but you can bet we are doing everything in our power to make that date sooner rather than later.

Our engineers have been working hard to make sure that running Linux on Sandybridge will be an absolute joy.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/sandybridge_on_linux_-_it_will/feed/ 16 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:27:02 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/ Read more >]]> There has been some confusion online about Intel Insider. So here are the facts:

Is it DRM?

There have been stories describing Intel Insider as a ‘DRM’ technology. DRM means ‘Digital Rights Management’ and is used to control the use of digital media by controlling access, and preventing the ability to copy media such as movies. This means that if you pay only a rental fee, your service provider decides when and for how long you will be able to view your movie. Or if you buy a film it will let you keep and view it forever, but not copy it and share it with your friends, or burn it onto a DVD, mass produce it and sell it on the streets.

Now there are opponents and proponents of DRM, and I am not going to get into a discussion about the pros and cons of DRM in this blog. Also, DRM means a lot of different things to different people. So what is Intel Insider?

What it is:

Intel Insider is a feature that enables consumers to enjoy premium Hollywood feature films streamed to their PC in high quality 1080P high definition. Currently this service does not exist because the movie studios are concerned about protecting their content, and making sure that it cannot be stolen or used illegally. So Intel created Intel insider, an extra layer of content protection. Think of it as an armoured truck carrying the movie from the Internet to your display, it keeps the data safe from pirates, but still lets you enjoy your legally acquired movie in the best possible quality. This technology is built into the new Intel chips and will become even more important once wireless display technology like Intel’s WiDi become more popular, as it would prevent pirates from stealing movies remotely just by snooping the airwaves. WiDi enables you to wirelessly beam video to your big screen TV easily and in HD.

Intel has a lot of these kinds of technologies that keep data safe. For example our chips include AES-NI, a technology that speeds up encryption and decryption of data and improves performance when you access secure websites like your online banking system. This keeps your credit card numbers safe.

Modern PC’s with components from chip makers such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia already support another feature called ‘HDCP’ or High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection – a system that keeps the contents of media such as Blu-Ray movies secure between the Blu-Ray player or PC and your big screen TV.

Intel Insider does not restrict anything you do today (or will do tomorrow) on your PC, it doesn’t touch your content, it doesn’t interfere with playback, no matter what the source, with the single exception of Intel Insider supported services. All it does it add access to these new services.

This New York Times story discusses what Intel Insider and similar technologies can bring to the sofa dweller.

But why stop at just movies, could this technology bring a myriad of services to the PC?

UPDATE

Wow, strong feelings in the comments. I made some edits to the blog to help steer comments – looking forward to the opinions – and I wanted to add a couple of points to clear up some confusion:

There seem to be a some people commenting who disagree with the very premise of DRM and content protection on a philosophical level. Those those people I say that there is no way this technology is being forced upon you – if you don’t want to use the Insider feature, there is no need to, just avoid the services that use it. It does not affect your own personal content in any way.

There are however consumer who will appreciate the ability to stream HD premium movies earlier than they would otherwise be able to, and at a better quality level. Those people have the choice to use Insider compatible services.

I would also remind you that all the current chipmakers support HDCP, which is a content protection protocol used by Blu-Ray and is supported by Blu-Ray players, Intel, nVidia, AMD, and even the PS3.

UPDATE 2 (so set some facts straight)

The technology known as Intel Insider does one thing and one thing only. It protects movies delivered from service providers that are specifically using Intel Insider to protect their content. It has to be enabled on the service provider side. Consumers with Intel Insider enabled PCs will have access to content in higher resolution (1080P) and potentially earlier release.

Intel Insider in no way affects any other new or existing media. It does not matter if you buy from iTunes, use home movies, or buy from a CD store, rip from vinyl, or from an 8-track, or bit-torrent. Intel Insider will not touch it.

Intel Insider does not require any additional hardware such as dongles, cables, TV’s or receiver boxes.

The only people that will be negatively affected are those who wish to pirate content from services that support Intel Insider.

Intel Insider will not stop you from playing, manipulating or ripping optical media such as a DVD or Blu-ray disk (but those technologies have separate existing safeguards). Intel Insider does not affect P2P services.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/feed/ 145 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/12/wow_2010_is_over_2011/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/12/wow_2010_is_over_2011/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:37:43 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/12/wow_2010_is_over_2011/ Read more >]]> Wow, 2010 is over. 2011 is on the way. Coming off the year, I went out and talked to CTOJustin Rattner, CIO Diane Bryantand others about whatthey think would be the top technology trends for 2011. While a bit slanted toward Intel (shocker), here’s a list of their thoughts and a couple of mine.I’ve added a couple of others from prominent industry analysts as well. But, most importantly, what are yours?

Smart TV Experience Gets Real – Expect a large number of TV, cable and other consumer electronics companies to join Comcast, Free,Sony, Logitech, Boxee and Cisco to jump into the smart TV and video market.By the end of 2011, these companies should be able to gauge the consumer acceptance of smart TV – does it sizzle or fizzle?

Tablet Mania, “Hybrid-ization” -Tablet computing, in a multitude of form factor and operating systems, will inundate the market.Expect to also see hybrid tablet/netbook products as an Intel-based Dell prototype unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum or the new 11-inch Macbook Air that looks and feels like a combination of the best of netbooks with the best of tablets.

Even Stronger Laptop Sales- Laptops sales will continue with strong growth thanks to Intel’s upcoming 2011 Intel® Core™ processors that add a multitude of new HD and graphics-related features for consumers including wireless display to beam content to TVs. With improved business-class capabilities like Intel Anti-Theft Technology, IT spending on server, PC and laptop upgrades should also increase.

PCs, Smart Devices Gain Senses: Context Aware, Perceptual Computing - Consumers are bound to fall in love with the first wave of context aware or perceptual computers that leverage hard and soft sensor technologies. For example, a mobile device called the Personal Vacation Assistant uses context-aware computing technologies to help get the most out of the travel experience. The portable device uses “hard sensors” (cameras that recognize objects and GPS-based information) and “soft sensors” (information that travelers input into the device such as calendar and cuisine preferences) to make on-the-spot recommendations for sights to see, places to eat and more.

Smart Signage – Interactive, “Minority Report” movie-like digital signs will become widely accepted, featuring new modes of interaction, including face and gesture recognition.

Consumer Revolution On Energy, Environment – Consumers will go from talking about managing their energy consumption to actually doing it with a variety of home energy management devices and services becoming available.

Securer Security – As IT requirements change rapidly due to an increasingly complex threat landscape and new usage models, including clouds and numerous CE devices connecting to the Internet, security will remain one of the highest priorities for the IT industry. Over the next year, the industry will focus on foundational capabilities for infrastructure protection and maintaining both personal and business secrets. The Intel® Core™ vPro™ processors, Intel’s proposedMcAfee acquisition and numerous projects inside and around Intel silicon chips will play roles here. We also expect consumers will have to become smarter about their online identify (e.g. their facebook accounts, what photos they are sharing, Twitter account)

The “Consumerization” of IT- 2011 will mark the point where we see a blurring of consumer devices and enterprise devices.We saw it in 2010 with iPhones and Droid phones brought inside the corporate firewall.Employees will want to use their personal solutions for work productivity and employers will want to augment the corporate environment with the devices to drive productivity. Virtualization, anti-theft technology, remote management and security will contribute here.

Sunny Forecast For Cloud, Virtualized Computing- The enterprise cloud will take off as more cloud-based services are recast for business use, including social networking. With most large corporations plowing through the virtualization of their respective environment in 2010, next year will also see build-out of internal cloud solutions.In addition, cloud-based rendering will be done in the cloud and streamed over broadband networks to devices with modest graphics horsepower.

Auto Tech – With sophisticated technologies acting as central nervous systems in today’s cars, new in-vehicle technologies are attracting tremendous interest whether it’s new entertainment features, hands-free voice control of smart phones, other safety technologies or driver functions performed automatically by the vehicle. Check out a cool video.

And Finally…Moore’s Law Thrives – New innovations and manufacturing techniques will continue to defy the skeptics who claim Moore’s Law is dead.This means that in the coming years, as billions of new devices acquire computing capability and Internet connectivity, they will be substantially higher performing with more features embedded in silicon, while also dramatically cutting power consumption and extending battery life.

Here are also links to other interesting 2011 tech trend predictions from Gartner, IDC and Forrester.

What are yours?

Enforcing Moore’s Law through Technology Research

Enforcing Moore’s Law through Technology Research – Part 2

Enforcing Moore’s Law through Technology Research – Part 3

In this blog, I’ll update the progress and give a look ahead to some of the upcoming research projects.

First as a reminder, unlike silicon, a compound semiconductor is made up of two or more elements, indium, gallium and arsenic for example (InGaAs). Using two or more elements means more opportunity to tune the materials for performance or optical properties but also makes the challenge of fabricating wafers and processing much more complicated.

Today, compound semiconductors are used in smaller scale applications where their special properties outweigh the added costs. Our goal is to take advantage of the vastly larger spending on silicon infrastructure and put it to use fabricating compound semiconductor devices. I gave five individual challenges which needed to be solved in order to allow broader use of compound semiconductor technology and we are working both internally as well as with external groups such as universities to make progress on this list.

1. Build compound semiconductor devices on silicon substrates. That would allow us to reuse the highly refined silicon infrastructure including 300mm wafers and down the road gives us the option of integrating a few specialized devices with a sea of silicon devices.

Today we are able to grow a wide variety of III-V quantum wells (the regions where electrical switching occurs) on top of silicon substrates. Our technique involves creating a graded buffer layer which gradually changes the lattice spacing, traps dislocations, and finally prepares a high quality barrier layer under the quantum well. You can see an example here from IEDM 2007: http://www.intel.com/technology/IEDM2007/III-V_paper.htm.

At this year’s upcoming IEDM 2010, we will report using similartechniques to grow a Ge channel quantum well device on top of silicon [Ref 1]. Our focus has been on both growing the tool box to allow wider choices for materials and on looking ahead to which methods will scale best for manufacturing.

2.

Find a suitable high K gate dielectric. Due to the different surface,the silicon high K solution won’t work as is but we can leverage knowledge we gained to help guide us.

Here also the key is choice of materials and specific application techniques. Last year we reported high k dielectric results with InGaAs;this year we report on a different high k material system on Ge. Both results show a possible path forward and both also illustrate key sensitivities associated with transitions between different materials.

Reducing the equivalent trapped charge at the interfaces is the only way to achieve high performance devices and in both cases the key was the choice of a particular transition layer instead of putting the high k directly on the channel material.

3.

Build a high performance PMOS device to go with the existing NMOS. This is needed to have power efficient CMOS logic though some special circuits can get by with just one type.

Here’s where the focus on germanium comes in. Germanium is not a III-V material but rather a group IV material like silicon. The first transistors were based on germanium but were replaced by silicon in large measure because silicon oxide is a very good gate dielectric.

Germanium though has superior mobility and if one could create a good gate dielectric then a much higher performance P channel device could be created. A key result in our paper is showing higher performance for a Ge QW than the strained InSb QW that we reported in 2008, narrowing the gap between the very high performance N channel III-V and a possible P channel device to complement it.

4. Build enhancement devices. Most existing work is based on depletion mode where you apply a voltage to shut them off. Power efficiency demands that those devices be normally off.

Here we have shown we can adjust the operation of the device by varying geometry and that we can suppress parallel conduction channels through the barrier layers. Those adjustments allow enhancement mode operation.

5. Make them small enough to compete with silicon transistor densities. If we stop at integrating only a few specialized devices then this is not needed but then we also won’t reap the full benefit of the technology.

A quantum well field effect device (QWFET) is created with a very thin (~10nm) high-mobility layer sandwiched between two high resistance barriers. Because the quantum well is undoped and its interfaces are smooth, scattering is suppressed, and charges can move very quickly.

Fig 1: Generic diagram of QWFET structure compared with MOS

Past research work has shown that the gate can be made very short

(left to right dimension in this figure) for both silicon and III-V’s

but at very short distances it becomes harder to turn the device off. To

cope with this problem, you need to move the gate closer to the channel

(high k dielectrics), thin the channel (fully depleted devices), or add

additional gates on the opposite side (finFETs and other multi-gate

devices). The second paper coming at IEDM 2010 covers work on building

and characterizing a non-planar, multi-gate III-V device [Ref 2].

Without pre-publishing the data, the device does indeed behave as

expected, having better short channel performance as measured by

subthreshold swing.

While expected, nevertheless this is an important result. A quantum

well device depends on confinement to create high mobility. When you

reduce the dimensions of the device in other directions, it is not clear

how the charge transport will change. We still have work to do to make

the devices still smaller to explore this behavior. Here is an example

of a fin where the channel width is smaller than the quantum well. We

don’t yet know how this will behave as a device.

Fig 2: A tall thin fin of Indium Gallium Arsenide.

Recapping the challenge list, we have made substantial progress on

all of the basic material integration challenges (items 1-4) and have

started to make progress on density (item 5). We are generally on track

to where we expected to be today.

While our list of challenges we made in 2006 was a useful starting

point we can now list many other areas which require further work before

we can predict the timing for roadmap intercept and this includes

determining where the circuit benefit is high enough to pay for the

complexity of integration. This option needs to be weighed against other

implementations and extensions of silicon to choose the best technology

at each generation.

Ref. 1: High Mobility Strained Germanium Quantum Well Field Effect

Transistor as the P-Channel Device Option for Low Power (Vcc=0.5V) III-V

CMOS Architecture, R. Pillarisetty, B. Chu-Kung, S. Corcoran, G. Dewey,

J. Kavalieros, H. Kennel, R. Kotlyar, V. Le, D. Lionberger, M. Metz, N.

Mukherjee, J. Nah, W. Rachmady, M. Radosavljevic, U. Shah, S. Taft, H.

Then, N. Zelick, and R. Chau.

Ref 2: Non-Planar, Multi-Gate InGaAs Quantum Well Field Effect

Transistors with High-K Gate Dielectric and Ultra-Scaled

Gate-to-Drain/Gate-to-Source Separation for Low Power Logic

Applications, M. Radosavljevic, G. Dewey, J.M. Fastenau, J. Kavalieros, R. Kotlyar, B. Chu-Kung, W. K. Liu,

D. Lubyshev, M. Metz, K. Millard, N. Mukherjee, L. Pan, R.

Pillarisetty, W. Rachmady, U. Shah, R. Chau, Intel Corporation, IQE,

Inc.

As many of you know, Intel enjoys a multi-year lead on manufacturing and process technology. Our factories or “fabs” are our prized possession. In fact, we just recently announced another $6-8 billion multi-year investment in manufacturing in the US alone. As Senior VP Brian Krzanich told CNET, we now have line of sight to 22, 15, 11 and 8 nanometers, with first 22nm products expected to be in production in the second half of 2011. Mind you, a nanometer measures in at one billionth of a meter. These days, more than 10 million transistors can fit in the period at the end of this sentence, and we can now make chips the size of a fingernail that have about one billion transistors inside them.

Being ahead and relentlessly pursuing Moore’s Law means smaller and lower-power Intel® Atom®, Core® and Xeon® chips about every two years. Yet these chips will still increase performance and provide more chip ‘real-estate’ to add features such as graphics or virtualization inside. But the advantage isn’t just a time-to-market one. We are also increasingly adding unique features to our manufacturing capability, such as our 2007 Hafnium-based high-k, metal gate technology, which created a new formula for reducing current leakage, and thus power consumption, of transistors. We’ve shipped more than 500 million chips with high-k, and we’ll be on our third generation of that technology when we begin producing 22 nm processors.

With Achronix, we are selectively offering access to our 22 nm fabs. For perspective, this deal would only make up a tiny amount of our overall capacity, significantly less than one percent, and is not currently viewed as financially material to Intel’s earnings. But it’s still an important endeavor for us that we’re committed to deliver on. I can tell you the folks over at Achronix are very excited about the opportunity and the expected performance boosts they will see in their Intel manufactured products. We are too.

So what say you? Assuming Intel (and our customers) can find alignment to benefit and profit from a relationship like this, what’s your view of opening up our manufacturing doors to others? Let us know.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/a_minute_on_manufacturing_acce/feed/ 5 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/idf_classmate_photo_update/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/idf_classmate_photo_update/#comments Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:48:04 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/idf_classmate_photo_update/ Read more >]]> I promised in my last blog to add some more details on IDF and to post some pictures and videos of some of the classmate activities that our classmate PC kids were doing…well, here it is. Recently at IDF, I had the pleasure of seeing firsthand 8 fourth graders from a local elementary school chat with reporters; complete school lessons in math, science and art, take pictures and videos, and write and draw on the newest version of the Intel-powered convertible classmate PC.

What truly struck me was how interactive and engaging the learning process has become with technology incorporated into the classroom, and how kids are learning in brand new ways with the classmate PC by their side. The kids learned about polygons by taking pictures with the built-in classmate PC camera and then using ArtRage to identify various polygons they see in day-to-day life. What a great way to show how fun math can be. What was really cool was to watch them become little reporters and how they approached the other press reporters in the hall and actually interviewed them – so cool!

I want to share with you some classmate PC highlights, including photos and videos of them in action at IDF.

Students from a local elementary school interview journalists from Spain using the built in webcam on their classmate PC.

A fourth grader from a local elementary school uses the handwriting recognition to share at IDF 2010.

Fourth graders from a local elementary school use a Ken-a-Vision/Pasco Microscope to look at colors on a printed page to see what other colors make them look the way they do.

Using ArtRage and their classmate PCs students from a local elementary school showed their artistic side at IDF.

We used a classmate PC paired with a Pasco sensor to learn about graphing. Tools like this help to bring learning to life, making it interesting, fun and exciting. That is me with one of the students doing the “So You Think You Can Graph” game using software and sensors from PASCO  scientific. The kids had a blast competing with each other while at the same time learning about graphing!

Here is the link to The Video.

Smart TV integrates broadcast TV, the Internet and Apps on one screen, and there are multiple ways to get the experience. The upcoming new Sony Internet TV line, which will be introduced October 12th, has Google TV built right in. Logitech has an innovative and simple approach for those of us who own HD TVs already. Their plan is to add an Atom processor-based ‘buddy’ box, called the Logitech Revue, to your existing television, and still leverage the Google TV platform. Both products will be available soon at stores like Best Buy.

There are tons of other smart TV product options, too. The recently announced Boxee Box by D-Link D-Link is a video playback device that can also stream content from the Internet and/or stored data at your home. Back in March, Intel and Telecom Italia announced a Meego software-based collaboration around making multimedia content consumption broader and easier by combining WebTV, video on demand and web-based services for home entertainment. I could go on, Technicolor and Amino also have TV-related products. All these devices are powered by the Atom processor. Even Cisco introduced an in-home video conferencing product “Umi,” that uses an HD TV and camera to make video calls that is also based on our chips.

So you have a handful of products poised to deliver the smart TV experience- HD TVs; buddy boxes, Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes from cable and telecom companies.

So why is the Atom processor powering all of these products?

I thought Vincent Dureau, head of Google TV, said it best to Forbes: “this is a step from 500 channels to infinite channels.”

Now, think about how processor intensive running multiple applications, websites, video and everything else you do on a TV or computer is. The Atom CE4100 allows you to easily switch between broadcast and internet sources, or view both simultaneously giving you the performance you want when you’re chugging through that stuff. And think of the various standards that are out there in the Internet world, not just the controversy over who will support Adobe flash, but literally hundreds of different tech standards for computing, televising, browsing, viewing, communicating, gaming, et al. You need a chip design that already runs the Internet – that’s Intel architecture or ‘x86.’ And of course that chip needs to be small, sleek and energy efficient.

Here are just a few of the features of the Atom CE4100, our first Atom based System-on-Chip that brings Internet content and services to HD TVs, Blu-ray players, advanced set-top boxes and much more. The SoC includes a display processor, graphics processor, video display controller, transport processor, a security processor and general I/O including SATA-300 and USB 2.0. It also -

- Supports Internet and broadcast applications on one chip, and has the processing power and audio/video components necessary to run rich media applications with 3-D graphics;

- Is manufactured on Intel’s state of the art technology, including 45 nanometer process technology with high-k metal gate technology included;

- Offers speeds up to 1.2GHz;

- Is based on Intel architecture, meaning it can run the tens of millions of “x86″ software that is the foundation of Internet computing. Also backward compatible to Intel’s CE 3100 chip;

- Includes Intel® Precision View Technology, a display processing engine to support high-definition picture quality;

- Adds Intel® Media Play Technology for seamless switching between content sources

- Supports hardware decode of up to two 1080p video streams and advanced 3-D graphics and audio standards. Also adds hardware decode for MPEG4 video that is ready for DivX* Home Theater 3.0 certification;

- Integrates a NAND flash controller;

- Supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory;

- Includes 512K L2 cache (a memory reservoir).

As I said a while back, we are just at the forefront of incredible innovation the TV and now computing industry has underway. Sony and Logitech’s products are very cool. I hope they and others share what’s in store for future iterations soon, too.

Oh, and we have some pretty cool Atom-based SoC products on tap, too.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/smart_tv_-_have_it_your_way/feed/ 1 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/video_intels_home_dashboard/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/video_intels_home_dashboard/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:34:22 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/10/video_intels_home_dashboard/ Read more >]]> Recently my colleague Ryan Parker, the director of energy for Intel’s Embedded and Communications Group, had an opportunity to meet with CBS Interactive producer Sumi Das to demonstrate Intel’s Home Dashboard demo for a video segment. Watch as he explains how the Intel Atom processor can make managing your home energy usage as easy as flipping a switch.

Below are some behind-the-scenes pictures from the broadcast shoot.

Part of the news at IDF was about a new clamshell classmate PC design. The new design includes a number of updates:

• Improved ruggedness: the new design can be dropped from a kid’s standard (up to 70cm) and even land on a corner without damage. This has already been a handy feature for my 4-year old.
• Day-long battery life: With more than 8 hours on a charge allows students to work all day long.
• Water -resistant keyboard: protects against accidental spills. It takes half a juice box and keeps on computing (up to 100cc). We all know that spills happen, so this is a great feature with kids.
• Improved antimicrobial coating: protects kids from bacteria, mold, mildew, fungi, algae and yeast
• And the design shares a similar design language with the convertible classmate PC!

Another piece of exciting news that I wanted to give more details on that we unveiled at IDF was the new Intel Learning Series  Education Channel on the  Intel AppUp Center. Consumers can browse and buy software for classmate PCs directly from the AppUp Center customizing the 1:1 learning experience to their needs. Each student can get the tools to succeed that they need. So a kid who is struggling in math can download an app to help while his friend can get an app for English and grammar. Education can be totally customized to the needs of the individual. All the apps are designed to work seamlessly on classmate PCs.

The latest cool news is that respected text book manufacturer, McGraw-Hill is selling the McGraw-Hill Companion Touch bundled with their curriculum content programs, based on the new convertible classmate PC reference design. We showed off some of this content at the IDF press showcase! The awesome thing about this announcement is that it is seeding the shift from physical text books to truly interactive eLearning in a classroom! No longer do our students have to be bored reading a plain textbook or even that same textbook rendered electronically in an eReader – they can now get excited about full interactive content that exercises all the learning modes; Visual, Auditory, and Experiential!  More details on this will be detailed in an upcoming blog of mine on eLearning…keep an eye out for that!

Lastly, we had some kids from a local school come to IDF for the day to demo classmate PC for attendees and media. I’ll post some photos and videos and share them soon! Keep an eye out for some special interviews we’ll post to the Inspire site too!

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/09/classmate_pc_updates_from_idf/feed/ 0 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/09/sandy_bridge_unboxing/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/09/sandy_bridge_unboxing/#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:38:17 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/09/sandy_bridge_unboxing/ Read more >]]> Dadi Perlmutter (VP and GM of the Intel Architecture Group) detailed features for our upcoming 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor family (Sandy Bridge) for laptops and PCs… Spolier: more energy efficient and a visually stunning experience.

The chips are expected to be in production later this year with new laptops and PCs available starting in early 2011.

These new improvements are achieved via a new “ring” architecture that allows the built-in processor graphics engine to share resources such as cache, or a memory reservoir, with the processor’s core to increase a device’s computing and graphics performance while maintaining energy efficiency.

Intel’s new processor graphics delivers enhanced visual features focused on the areas where most users are computing today: HD video, 3-D, mainstream gaming, multi-tasking and online socializing and multimedia.

Check out Steve Smith, vice president and director of PC Client Operations Intel Corporation.

@bryanrhoads

The cool thing about this approach is that it also applies to other projects as well, whether it’s the implementation of social listening software or rolling out a new fleet of PCs or Servers in order to drive down costs.

Phase 1: Grassroots (“G”)

Every great idea begins somewhere. And some people are more likely than others to teeter on the cutting edge of new ideas. When Intel first began dabbling in social media, thankfully it was these forward thinking early adopters who embraced the new tools and technologies way before the company was ready. Since many of the social tools out there are free, it was inexpensive and easy for folks like Josh Bancroft, Bob Duffy, Bryan Rhoads, and Ken Kaplan to sign up and try them out. They didn’t wait for anyone to tell them to do it…they saw an opportunity and jumped in.

Not everyone possesses a natural proclivity to be first to discover something. Personally I thought Foursquare was dumb until my colleagues tried it out and showed me the value of the platform to users and brands. But all too frequently companies don’t value the contribution these folks make.

These grass roots early adopters are the same folks in firms or IT departments who constantly consume articles, blog posts, discussions, and Tweets–anything that helps them stay on top of new things–to learn about the latest applications or technologies that will take their business to the next level. It’s important that executives embrace the grassroots, early adopters among us and challenge them to test their ideas to truly comprehend their value.

Phase 2: Results-Testing/Pilots (“R”)

Most of the greatest new software implementations, web projects, or social media programs began as an idea that went out for a test drive. It is in this test–or pilot–phase when the driver checks to see how things would work in the real world and learn what results to expect if the project were to be implemented in full. This pilot or testing phase is critical to determine the value of technology or platforms and then demonstrate that value to others.

When creating pilot programs to test the business value of new technologies it is important to choose a limited group of participants to serve as a microcosm of the environment so the learnings can be more easily digested. There will also be less disruption to existing processes and infrastructure if the project fails. And don’t worry if it does fail; plenty of projects don’t emerge from pilot because the potential value was overshadowed by the cost of the project.

To optimize learnings in this phase it is critical that the objectives you hope to achieve are clearly articulated up front. This provides more data points to test whether the goals were accomplished. And make sure to measure the results. There is no greater show-stopper than when you can’t deliver measurable results to executives when sharing the outcomes of your test or pilot.

Phase 3: Operationalize (“O”)

Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence–my team–was implemented as a result of Intel’s desire to “operationalize” social media best practices across the company. Our charter, and that of many other centers of excellence, is to help pave the way for others at Intel to engage in and leverage social media on the company’s behalf. We put together guidelines, training, invest in tools, share best practices, and help social marketing programs scale across business units and geographies.

This phase is probably the most difficult because it’s all about process, documentation, planning, and many things that social butterflies and idea junkies don’t find terribly fun. But in order to maximize investment of resources these guard rails are important to help scale ideas to broader groups. And if your supporting efforts are successful, your project will be too. One of my favorite sayings at Intel: “Don’t judge your success by what you personally accomplish but by how many people buy in to your idea.”

Phase 4: Wide-Scale Adoption (“W”)

Ahhh, this last phase is the holy grail–that of widespread adoption. It is at this stage when ideas have been tested; shored up by proper infrastructure, investment, and executive support; and rolled out to a broader audience. Many elements of Intel’s social media program, like our training program and our listening efforts, have reached this phase of the adoption curve. And some are still in testing mode. It’s highly unlikely that every program you are driving will be on the same curve and time schedule. But isn’t that what makes working at a large company interesting?

Many executives fear social media and larger technology investments simply because they believe those efforts will jump from the “G” – grassroots phase to this phase of widespread adoption. But if you help your stakeholders around you understand the process by which you plan to roll out individual programs, their fears are often assuaged.

So the next time you want to roll out a new software platform, open a new Twitter account, or invest in a fleet of money-saving Xeon servers, simply plot out your plan and follow this model. You’re at least guaranteed to get attention if the not mass adoption we all strive to reach.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/08/how_to_sell_your_boss_on_socia/feed/ 0 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/08/how_i_switched_to_an_ssd_with/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/08/how_i_switched_to_an_ssd_with/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:53:10 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/08/how_i_switched_to_an_ssd_with/ Read more >]]> A lot of great tools exist to help clone drives. Acronis, Ghost, and many other examples are available for the user to do an easy and clean copy of their system from one drive to another. But when I got my first-gen Intel X25-M SSD, I had two real problems: A) I didn’t want to spend any additional money, and B) I wanted to overprovision my SSD since it didn’t support TRIM. So, hooking both drives up to my system, I turned to the internet for a lot of instruction (and frustration), and tools in order to accomplish these two goals.

dd – A Linux cloning tool
“dd” isn’t a cloning tool like the ones I mentioned before, there’s no pretty interface, and it’s possible to mess up and erase your entire drive. Part of what you’re paying for with the other solutions are ease-of-use and peace-of-mind, but with my entire hard drive already backed up on my NAS, I forwent those options in favor of free.

First was a choice of Linux distributions to use. Ease of making it install on a USB and be bootable, and inclusion of the tools that I needed, were the two things I looked for in this step. “dd” comes with nearly every distribution, so I focused on a tool that could help me with the over-provisioning, as well. GParted is a GNOME-based partition tool, which has its own distribution housed on sourceforge.net. Following GParted’s instructions on making a bootable USB key, and with the tool UNetbootin, I had a system that I could now perform my cloning in. The short version of the instructions is this: download the GParted ISO and UNetbootin. Run UNetbootin, choosing your downloaded ISO as the distribution, and let it do its magic.

Preparing for cloning
The SSD I was moving to and the hard disk I already had were both 160GB. Normally for cloning, this is the perfect scenario: no changes are needed to move the data. However, as I said before, I wanted to overprovision my SSD (giving it extra never-used space to serve as a swap area, keeping performance of non-TRIM drives at their peak). Since I was doing that, I made sure I had less than 140GB on my disk drive to leave me enough room for over-provisioning.

Although GParted is able to move data around when it resizes partitions, it’s recommended to choose the safer option and defragment your drive first, lessening the risk of any data issues. Using Windows Disk Defragmenter, I made sure all or most of the data was in the first 140GB of the drive.

Although GParted is able to move data around when it resizes partitions, it’s recommended to choose the safer option and defragment your drive first, lessening the risk of any data issues. Using Windows defragmentation tool, I made sure all or most of the data was in the first 140GB of the drive. The next step I did was to resize the drive of the original partition to 140GB. This was the first opportunity to use the Linux environment, and the tools I set up earlier. Launching the GParted live USB, and choosing the default options (yes, I want to use English, yes, please boot me right into GParted), I was presented with little rectangles representing my two drives. At this point, it’s good to note which is which. Using the “Label” of my drive, I could easily verify in the software that my hard drive was listed under /dev/sda1, and my SSD under /dev/sda2. Now, to drag the slider until the partition was just under 140,000,000 bytes, and apply the new partition size. No hitches, no problems, everything went great. The cloning This is the easiest part, but the one where one small mistake can wipe out your entire drive. So fair warning, make sure what you’re doing is right, don’t just trust me, read the help, and good luck!
Rookie mistake 1: cloning the whole drive. I told you I was over-provisioning the drive, which means leaving a portion empty. When I first copied my drive with dd, I just simply copied one whole drive over onto the other. After it was done, being a NAND technology guy, I realized I had made a huge mistake. An empty bit on a hard drive has zeroes. An empty bit on a flash drive has ones. Since I had copied the empty section on the end of my drive over to the SDD, I had programmed zeroes across the end of the drive. Instead of leaving it empty, I filled it entirely. To fix that, I had to go through and secure-erase the entire drive with a different tool, one I won’t cover here since you hopefully won’t be making the same mistake. So now for the correct version of what I should have done, copying one drive over to the other. During partitioning, I had already confirmed which drive was which, so now it was just validating my command. For dd, “if” is the input file, my original drive, which I already confirmed was /dev/sda1. “of” is output file, the new drive, /dev/sda2. Not to repeat mistakes, I set options for only 140GB of data transfer, meaning I had to use some simple arithmatic. 140,000,000 bytes (how much of the drive I want to fill) divided by 4096 (the byte size I chose in the dd command “bs”). That means I want to write 4k bytes 34,180 times. My final command was this:
dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=4096 count=34180 of=/dev/sda2 Now the moment of truth: running the command, letting it finish, swapping the drives, and rebooting. After all of this was done, I swapped the drives, and success! A successfully cloned, over-provisioned, brand new SSD in my system.

]]> http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/08/how_i_switched_to_an_ssd_with/feed/ 0 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/07/buying_an_ssd_-_what_should_yo/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/07/buying_an_ssd_-_what_should_yo/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:15:06 +0000 http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/07/buying_an_ssd_-_what_should_yo/ Read more >]]> So you’ve decided to buy an SSD (or solid-state drive)! Good for you. Very suave. SSDs have been the latest craze among PC owners seeking to enhance the overall performance and user experience of their current PCs. PC owners are attracted to the SSD’s promise of faster data access, lower power consumption, ruggedness, and its complete operational silence as compared to the rotating magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) typically used today.

Just as SSDs have increased in popularity, so have the number of SSD providers and brands. There are easily more than 20 SSD providers offering a variety of form factors, capacities, system interfaces, and performance ratings, all targeted to specific platforms and specific markets. But how do you navigate through the perplexities of making the right choice and making sure you spend your money wisely? As you start shopping, whether you prefer checking out retail boxes at a local electronics store or looking at e-tailer offerings, what do you need to know and what features and merits should you rely on to make your purchase? Allow me the opportunity to help!

Know the Key Ingredients

Are all SSD’s the same? No. Just as with cars, the components and ingredients that go into making an SSD have a drastic effect on the end-product. While the following items will not necessarily make it onto an SSD’s retail box or on an e-tailer’s product description, you need to be familiar with the key ingredients that make up an SSD in order to make an informed purchase: the NAND memory components, the interface and memory controller, and the managing firmware of the SSD. These ingredients will determine the SSD’s capabilities and its performance. So, when you start shopping, do so with the knowledge that not all SSDs are created equal.

Decide on Capacity

Assuming you already know what you plan to do with your SSD, whether you want to use it in a dual-drive configuration or as an HDD replacement, you have to decide on a capacity. If your plan is to use the SSD in a dual-drive configuration (as a boot or OS drive), then you’ll do well to get an SSD with at least 40GB of storage, like the Intel® X25-V SATA SSD. This way, you’ll have adequate capacity for the Microsoft Windows 7 OS, a good chunk of your current applications, frequently used files, and the page file. You can then use your HDD to store your data files.

If you are replacing your old HDD, then you need to know two things: how much storage you really need, and how much money you’re willing to spend. Obviously, if you choose a larger capacity, you’ll need to be willing to spend some more cash.

Be aware of the Physical Dimensions of the Drive Currently Installed in your System

After you decide what capacity you need for your system, you should check whether or not your machine requires the standard 9.5 mm-thickness drive. Most SSDs are 7mm thick, so if yours requires the standard 9.5 mm, make sure your SSD comes with a spacer ring that increases its size.

Research the SSD’s Performance

SSDs are all about performance. This performance is typically specified by how well the SSD can access its data randomly or sequentially. Because certain data is inherently sequential (photos, music, and movies) and other data types are inherently random (applications, system log files, and OS files), there are different specifications for accessing each type of data. The random data read and write access performance is typically specified in IOPS (input/output operations per second). You should look for an SSD that has high IOPS for random data access performance – this will ensure that you have fast application launch times, faster user file access, and faster systems boots. Such advantages greatly enhance the user experience and limit how often you’ll see the dreaded “hourglass”. So what’s a “good” IOPS rating for random read performance? You should aim for a drive that can randomly read 4 Kbytes of data at a rate of up to 35,000 IOPS. Think about an SSD reading data in 4Kbyte chunks — the same way a cargo ship carries a specified payload back and forth between destination ports. A good random write specification is in the range of 6,500 to 9,000 IOPS at a minimum.

The sequential data read and write access performance is typically specified in MB/s (megabytes per second), which is a fitting way to measure sequential streams of data (as opposed to a random stream). Sequential read and write performance typically has less of a noticeable effect on performance. Sequential data access is limited by bus interfaces, protocols, devices such as USB 2.0, MPEG video and audio, and DVD optical devices. Such interfaces are limited by throughput capabilities and protocol specifications, so exceeding the sequential platform requirement does not necessarily enhance the user experience. So what kind of sequential performance should you look for when buying an SSD? A good sequential read performance is 250 MB/s. A 70MB/s to 100MB/s sequential write performance is adequate for most uses.

Know the SSD’s Power Consumption

There may be SSDs on the market that advertise higher random and sequential performance numbers, but that may be at the expense of power consumption. If you plan on buying an SSD for use in a laptop, you want an SSD that operates efficiently. This means an SSD that provides you with PC-caliber performance with the right balance of power conservation. You should look for an SSD with an idle power of ~75 mW (milliwatts) and a typical active power of ~150 mW with a peak power usage of 2.5 watts.

Check for TRIM Support

But what if you don’t want to spend the time browsing the web for specific statistics? What are the most important features to consider when buying an SSD? You’d really kick yourself if you bought one that didn’t support the TRIM command. This feature is important because it allows the OS to inform the SSD which data blocks are no longer needed and can truly be deleted. The TRIM feature essentially allows the SSD to do its background “house cleaning” in preparation to store new data. If an SSD does not have this feature, the SSD’s read and write performance can be severely hindered – it will essentially be trying to move in and clean house all at once. Not fun! Most new drives do in fact support the TRIM command, but this is one feature you’ll want to research before shopping.

Look for Warranty and Support Options

Finally, make sure the manufacturer of the SSD you choose provides a three-year warranty and on-line software tools that keep your SSD running at its best. Intel® X25-M, X25-E, or X25-V SATA SSD would all be smart and sophisticated choices. Good luck shopping, and don’t forget to check out Intel SSDs at Best Buy! Feel free to leave comments or questions.