Intel Developer Forum 2010 Day 2 Keynote Coverage

Day two of the Intel Developer’s Forum was kicked off with a couple of keynote addresses from Renee James, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel and Doug Davis, the Vice President and General Manager of the Embedded and Communications Group. The main focus of their talks revolved around Atom and the ecosystem surrounding it and other low-power Intel platforms.

Renee started off talking about some of the history of mobile PC and more specifically of tablets. She went on for a bit outlining the evolution of tablets and talking about the improvements in graphics, compute performance, touch interfaces, and manufacturing that enabled the current generation of mobile products. To help get her point across, Ms. James showed off one of the first tablet PC’s from 1989 that was on loan from the obsolete computer museum and contrasted it with a couple of current tablets and netbooks currently on the market.

Renee also talked about some of the software innovation Intel has been working on, including those from the Wind River Network acceleration platform that enabled parallel processing of packets to improve overall network throughput. A number of Intel’s other tools for ISV were also shown off, including Parallels Studio, which can be used for optimizing software for multi-core platforms.

Throughout her presentation, Ms. James brought a few partners and customers on stage to talk about some of the hardware and software innovations being worked on. She also talked about the “AppUp” program and some of the incentives for developers to embrace the program, which include prizes for developing apps for MeeGo and Windows. In fact, she even brought out Rick Vanner, developer of the netbook-targeted game “Goals!”, who was the grand prize winner of a Chevy Volt. His game was developed in about a week for the Windows platform and was ported over to MeeGo in just a few days using the developer tools Intel has made available.

Stephan Odepher was also brought out on stage to show off the Atom and MeeGo-based WeTab tablet PC. The WeTab features a custom interface that’s designed for easy thumb navigation and boasts of 16 second boot times and 1 second wake-from-standby times. A number of other devices featuring MeeGo were shown off as well, including settop boxes from Acer and Asus running Windows embedded with media center functionality. 

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