IDF Day 2: Mobility, Silverthorne, Moorestown

Day 2 at this year’s IDF began with a mobility keynote hosted by Intel’s David “Dadi” Perlmutter and Anand Chandrasekher.  The keynote was broken up into two parts; the first focused on notebooks and Intel’s mobile platforms as a whole and the second focused on “ultra mobility” featuring a number of UMPCs and MIDs.

Dadi began the discussion with talk of old barriers to mobility and how Intel has broken through many of them with the Centrino platform.  He then said that as old barriers fell, new barriers presented themselves and reaffirmed Intel’s commitment to mobility.  Dadi spoke of Intel’s intention to increase the performance of integrated graphics and media playback by a factor of 10 by the year 2010.

He also talked about the company’s intention to reduce the size of the dies and packaging for chips used in mobile platforms, while at the same time reducing power consumption and enhancing thermal characteristics.  He mentioned that with next year’s Montevina platform, the goal is to reduce motherboard size by 60% and chip packaging by 25%, which will in-turn bring forth new form factors.  Dadi also mentioned that Montevina will fall within a 25W thermal envelope.

At this point, Dadi demoed a prototype notebook that featured a Penryn-based CPU, the chipset codenamed Cantiga, and Intel’s Eccopeak integrated WiMax / WiFi controller.  He then spoke to the platform’s power consumption and that due to 6 new power saving technologies coming with the Montevina platform and due to Penryn’s new deep sleep state, battery life would increase significantly when systems are introduced next year.  Finally, Nehalem’s finer grained per-core clock gating technology takes power savings even further.

Dadi wrapped up his part of the mobility keynote with talk of 802.11n WiFi and of WiMax.  A WiMax equipped car, segway, and scooter were wheeled out into the auditorium to demo some of the features enabled by the technology and Dadi spoke of the 350 WiMax trials currently going on worldwide.  We also learned about Intel’s Eccopeak integrated WiFi / WiMax controller. It was noted that it will be available in mini-card and 1/2 mini-card form factors, and that it will have similar power characteristics to current 802.11n WiFi controllers.