RESEARCH@INTEL DAY, MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: At the Computer History Museum,
Intel Corp. unveiled over 70 futuristic projects and concepts underway in its labs in the areas of the environment, healthcare, visual computing, wireless mobility and more, reflecting areas where the company is investing some of its annual $6 billion in research.
Justin Rattner, CTO and Senior Fellow, outlined dramatic ways today's research investments will impact technology coming in the next five years, reshaping how people interact with computers and improve the environment.
Rattner said the company's priority of investing in research helps shape Intel's products and the industry at-large. For example, the dawn of the Intel Atom processor stemmed from a small project inside Intel's labs called "Snocone" that explored the feasibility of designing an ultra-low-power processor based on Intel architecture. Several technologies inside the company's Intel vPro processor technology for business platforms came from the labs as did 1990s research that helped create the Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection to the PC for music players, keyboards, video cameras, etc.
"Hundreds of researchers inside Intel, and our close work with other technology companies, scientists, universities and governments will bring dramatic change over the next five years," Rattner said. "The sampling of projects on display here, and the doubling of our R&D investment over the past 10 years, will speed scientific discovery, improve health care, better the environment, advance visual computing and bring a rich and wireless Internet experience from the device of your choice, anywhere in the world."
Visual computing, many cores will change computers
As future Intel chips scale from a few cores to many, the transition to mainstream parallel computing in which multiple computer tasks are handled simultaneously will result in an explosion of visual computing capabilities including life-like 3D environments, immediate, real-world analysis of video feeds and more natural ways for people to interact with their devices.
Intel, together with Neusoft, demonstrated a future car application with cameras as eyes and multi-core processor-based computers as the brain. Future cars will be able to much more accurately identify other vehicles and pedestrians that are getting too close and alert drivers or take its own safe actions to prevent accidents.
This type of visual computing requires much more computing power, and in turn poses parallel (multiple and simultaneous processor requests) programming challenges. The car demonstration took advantage of Intel's Ct programming research, a C/C++ language extension created in Intel's labs, which enabled the program to seamlessly scale from two to eight cores to conduct its accident prevention work without writing additional software code or compilers.
Technology advancing environment
Researchers are looking at ways to significantly improve the environment and energy efficiency of Intel-based products and systems with plans to continue improving a computer's performance but at dramatically reduced levels of power consumption and electricity needs. Intel researchers are exploring a new power management technique that could redefine the behavior and power management needs of future Intel-based computers.
The technique's technologies, collectively called " Platform Power Management," operate by continually monitoring changes in a computer's operation and intelligently reducing power, or turning off altogether, to portions of the system that are not in use such as the radio or USB ports. Early demonstrations of this work have shown power savings of more than 30 percent when a system is idle or lightly active.
In the next few years, Intel researchers anticipate to extend these advancements and demonstrate reductions in power consumption of 50 percent whether the computer is idle or in heavy use. Platform power management could someday benefit the full range of Intel products, from mobile Internet devices (MIDs) all the way to high-performance servers.
