Intel Developer Forum diary--lifting spirits
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003 The first keynote. You'll have read about it by now: it was the usual mix of corporate video, flashy graphs and demos that mostly work. The first of a million mentions of Moore's Law comes 10 minutes in, and with one genuinely new fact every quarter of an hour it's just about possible to turn it into a reasonable news story.
The event takes place in a cavernous hall, and the stage is backed by a projection screen easily as big as that in a large cinema. At some points, every inch is awash with high resolution graphics and the effect is genuinely impressive. The sound is loud enough to dislodge ear wax, and when at one point a clip of the Animatrix video is shown it's rather a shock when they fade it out after two minutes and you realize you're still in a presentation. "If you want any more, you'll have to pay for it" jokes the presenter, which in the context of the subject under discussion--digital rights management--elicits a rather uneasy laugh from the floor.
I happen to know that certain people have been taking advantage of the flood of free wireless networking that permeates the show to keep up with some of their favorite TV series through means illicit, and I rather suspect they're not in the minority.
Later, on going through the press pack, I discover the terms of service of that wireless networking--it says, among other things, that you're not allowed to use it to "decrypt... the Intel Web site". How else are we expected to understand the press releases, chaps?
One of the more forced jokes in the keynote was the use of Intel's Universal Communicator super-smart phone--it's a technology demonstrator, not a product, but is every bit as well designed as a saleable item--to summon a flash mob. This duly assembles outside the hall and shouts various amusing slogans: I'm mildly disappointed that the organizers don't choose to copy yet another current cultural silliness and suspend CTO Pat Gelsinger in a glass box in the middle of the hall for the duration. He's a nice chap, at least when dealing with us journalists, and always up for a bit of entertainment.
News Focus Intel Developer Forum  Chips for the future | ||||
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2003
One of the constant themes at IDF for the press is the search for power. Not the sort that makes dark plans and shady deals, or imperialistically commands the world to Buy More Chips, but the prosaic electrical sort. My laptop for this jaunt is the new silver Dell Latitude X300, a very nice laptop indeed that attracts many compliments from passing journalists laden down by their older, heavier boxes, but it does illustrate one of the disappointments of recent technology. The Centrino does indeed take less wattage than its forebears, but to a man the makers of kit have chosen to reduce battery size rather than increase battery life. So I am still stuck lugging around a power supply -- so much for lighter batteries -- and looking for spare power points in between briefings, panels and other press events ("Wireless Idol!", err, no thanks). And so is everyone else.
There are plentiful PowerPoints in the press room, but there are also plentiful journalists. And most of those PowerPoints are in tiny strips: I've got a UK travel adaptor that's too bulky to fit those if anyone has plugged something into the adjacent socket. So I slump down in corridors and squat on the floor for ten minutes while the adaptor ladles electrons into my laptop: it's undignified and uncomfortable. It's also ironic: the air is filled with megabits of free connectivity, but what good is that if the low power light is flashing?
It's worse in meetings, where the seat next to the solitary outlet is much desired. Inevitably, this leaves power leads trailing from the wall to the table, which nimble people can spot and step over but flustered fumble-footed fat hacks in a hurry invariably fail to notice (sorry, Dimriti. Hope the connector gets fixed).
Given the high concentration of sugary, stodgy food on offer in the press room--after lunch, the only choices are cookies, chocolate brownies, ice cream, full-fat soft drinks or very odd coffee that has to be sweetened in order to be drunk. One longs for an apple--the solution is obvious. Exercise bicycles connected to dynamos.
Thursday Sept. 18, 2003
My favorite day--the corporate bluster about sales projections, product rollouts and enterprise issues fades down and the R&D elements take over. Gelsinger's keynote starts off in the best way possible for a true radio nerd such as me--a replica of Marconi's first wireless transmitter takes front of stage and the coarse crackle of those first transmissions fills the hall. Ah, very bliss. Lots of new radio ideas are aired--I'll be writing about those in more detail soon--and the traditional alphabet soup of acronyms, abbreviations and gnomic standards is served up by the imperial gallon. 802.11n! 802.20! MIMO! 70GHz CMOS 90nm VCO! And a couple of slogans: No More Copper. It's a fine war cry--the theme being that broadband wireless access is going to be more than good enough for anything that might otherwise need new bits of wire in the ground or the office--but it does come back to haunt me when I'm in subsequent meetings with people who design network processors whose main market is sucking signals off that very element.
The other Gelsingerian slogan comes at the end of his presentation, and is a curious personal manifesto. "Before I retire, I want there to be a piece of Intel technology touching every human on the planet every minute of their day." Last time, he just wanted there to be a corner of every chip Intel makes devoted to radio: clearly he now feels called to greater things. We wonder afterwards just what he meant by that: the quickest way to achieve his aim would be to sew an RFID tag into every piece of underwear, but that's possibly not what he intended. Whether the 21st century really will be the Age of Pat's Virtual Finger remains to be seen, but it'll be fun finding out.
There's an opportunity to find out, which I fluff: there's a round table with Pat and about 15n journalists at the very end of IDF, but there isn't enough time to ask all the questions. Some entertaining snippets from that: a German journo asks whether the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition was the first member of a major product family. "We'll see what the market says," quoth Pat. "When we launched the Centrino, we didn't know whether it would be a success. That brand could well not have been continued." "But you're spending millions of dollars on marketing it" pointed out the hack. "Ah well, some bets we make are bigger than others."
And are you keen on Bluetooth? Yes, but not the radio bit.
Right.
And with that, IDF was over. It merely remains for me to file my notes, pack my bags, head off to San Francisco for the weekend and struggle back to London over whatever bits of the airline industry Hurricane Isabel has left intact. You can be sure I'm walking down to the hotel checkout...
biography
Rupert Goodwins is the Technology Editor for ZDNetUK.