Intel unveils next-gen mobile technology

The annual Intel Developer Forum, one of the IT industry's premier events for hardware and software developers, showcased the power of convergence, in San Francisco, last week.

Intel executive vice president and co-general manager of Intel's recently formed Mobility Group, Sean Maloney, outlined at the Intel Developer Forum in San Franciso on March 2, 2005, how advances in mobile broadband and smart clients are creating a foundation for a new wave of innovation and significant opportunities for organisations and individuals.

The Intel Developer Forum is the technology industry's premier event for hardware and software developers. Held worldwide throughout the year, IDF brings together key industry players to discuss cutting-edge technology and products for PCs, servers, communications equipment, and handheld clients.

"The industry is driving a new wave of innovation that feels a lot like the early days of the internet era," said Maloney. "Before internet technologies were developed, there was a tremendous amount of information in computers around the world, but it was locked into one location, one terminal, one user. The advent of the browser and other technologies made this deluge of data instantly available to people around the world."

According to Maloney, innovations in Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies along with developments to make smarter, more efficient laptops, cell phones and PDAs can help take that experience even further and bring it to more people than ever before. The industry expects millions of new users to use low-cost wireless technologies to get mobile broadband. "Human beings are inherently mobile and computing will be too," he prophesied.

Smarter, mobile platforms Maloney revealed several new client platform innovations that are making mobile devices smarter and more useful. He demonstrated the next-generation Intel Centrino mobile technology platform (codenamed Napa). The demonstration included Intel's first 65nm dual-core mobile-optimised processor (codenamed Yonah), a new chipset and a next-generation Intel wireless solution.

He also disclosed three new technologies planned for Yonah that will improve the performance, power and design of mobile platforms. They include the Intel Digital Media Boost for rich digital multimedia content creation; the Intel Advanced Thermal Manager for enhanced thermal monitoring, accuracy and responsiveness; and the Intel Dynamic Power Coordination, which can automatically adjust the performance and power between the two processing cores on demand.

In addition to showing the latest Intel-designed and manufactured cell phone platform (codenamed Hermon) which it will ship later this year, Maloney outlined a compelling roadmap for the future of cell phone platforms that include one- and two-chip configurations with integrated graphics, high-end performance and low-power modules. These configurations give developers greater flexibility to design phones for all segments of the handset market.

Two becomes one Mobility in the new era won't be about selecting a single mobile device or a single network, but rather giving users the freedom to choose between cell phone, notebook or PDA, or even using multiple clients as one logical device, across networks. The 'one logical device' concept is defined as smart and automatic interaction between devices such as notebooks and cell phones, like sending a picture from a camera phone wirelessly to a notebook or using a cell phone to make a wireless connection for a notebook.

Broadband wireless: Coverage is king Wi-Fi adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, and more and more wireless WAN networks are coming online as WiMAX developments have progressed. Still, only a small percentage of the world's population has broadband access of any kind.

"Over the last year, the number of engineers in the industry working on WiMAX-related technologies has increased tenfold. The number of WiMAX carrier trials has increased from two to 15, on its way to more than 75 before the end of 2005. More than 200 companies have joined the WiMAX Forum," said Maloney. "This is great progress, but as the data shows, we've only achieved limited broadband coverage, which gives our industry a great opportunity to deploy applications and services much more affordably using broadband wireless technologies."