IDF Fall 2000 Day 1

Intel Labs Press Event

The final IDF event we have attended thus far was an Intel Labs press event demo session. This session demoed some of Intel's prototype technology. While none of what we saw was final or committed to be produced, we did get to see some interesting stuff.

First off, Intel had a demonstration of computer vision technology. Although still relatively simple, the technology did allow the computer software (a game in this case) to interpret the movements of a human via an Intel web cam. In the demo, this basically allowed for the user to move his hands and the computer to follow, enabling a quick game of Simon says. Neat, but still very basic.

The next item of interest was a wireless pen demo. This technology allowed for the user to use a standard piece of paper along with a special pen and ultrasound receiver to capture notes onto a connected computer. Not only did the software allow for sketching, it also provided character recognition. Unfortunately, we were unable to try this feature of the pen as the character recognition currently only worked with Chinese characters.

The final demo of interest was what Intel called the "Voice Portal demo." This software solution allows for seamless voice recognition over a standard phone. The demo had both spoken real time stock quotes (with the user speaking the company name and the system responding with a detailed stock summary) as well as an automated e-mail system. This software allowed for the user to call in, check e-mail (with the computer reading back the e-mail over the phone), and respond to any e-mail all using voice recognition. Pretty neat, considering that Intel has plans for using such a technology with mobile phones, enabling you to "type" an e-mail while driving your car.

AMD

The next place we went after browsing through the Intel Labs press event actually took us out of the San Jose convention center. We had a short meeting with the people from AMD, where they went over their product roadmap with us, as well as spoke to us a bit more about their x86-64 architecture that we wrote about last week in our x86-64 Review.

AMD had nothing new to say regarding their upcoming products and basically rehashed the information that we already knew: the DDR 760 chipset will be arriving before the end of this year; the dual chip 760MP will be demonstrated in October; and the Athlon and Duron cores will soon find their way into laptops.

One thing that we did get a chance to talk about was their recently announced x86-64 Linux support. Announced last week at LinuxWorld, it seems that AMD's x86-64 architecture will have quite a few of supporters in the Linux community, meaning that the transition into 64-bit processing in the Linux server market (which consists of 10-20% of the total server market) will go quite smooth. AMD was quick to point out that in addition to Linux, many other server operating systems will support x86-64, with no names being released yet.

Final thoughts

As our first day of IDF comes to a close, we were able to get a bit of insight into not only Intel's processor future but also into the future of many other technologies. From Intel to AMD to Silicon Image, it seems that the number of people demonstrating new technology in San Jose is quite impressive. Look for further IDF coverage to continue throughout the forum.