Intel Developer Forum: Quad core, Robson and... Supreme Commander?

Logan Booker fills us in on this year's IDF in Taipei, Taiwan.

In the heart of component central, better known by the name 'Taipei' if you were to search for it in an atlas, Intel is holding its latest developer forum. With Core 2 out and about, quad core and Robson are the focus of the show.

While VP of sales and marketing & GM for Asia Pacific John Antone made the opening keynote, it was VP and GM of Intel's digital enterprise group Thomas Kilroy's follow-up that held the goodies.

Kilroy talked of the success of Core 2 Duo, Intel's latest CPU micro architecture, and the move to its four-core Core 2 Quad in November. Kilroy also made it clear that for Intel, mobility, and further to that, energy efficiency, was the new yardstick for its processors.

'Back in 2001 ... we realised there was going to be a requirement to address power ... so we certainly focused, Intel Corporation did, on the mobility section. If you looked at usage model trending which proved out perfectly that if we optimised around mobility we would be best positioned,' said Kilroy.

'What this drove, this acknowledgement back in 2001 ... what we're saying is the single most important shift in micro architecture we've seen in over a decade.'

Quad core was also demonstrated using, oddly enough, Gas Powered Games' upcoming RTS, Supreme Commander. From what we could gather from the demonstration was that the four cores allowed the AI to be smarter as more resources and processing power was available to run the computer opponenets. The fact that Supreme Commander is coded for four cores was a surprise in itself.

The other interesting development of the show was Intel's Robson technology, otherwise known as 'a stick of non-volatile NAND flash'. It's a little more complicated than this obviously, but the basis of the tech is using flash to cache information between hard drives and the system bus, to soften the blow from mechanical latencies - something Intel has identified as the number one factor that currently affects drive read speeds. Robson is also compatible with Windows Vista's ReadyBoost feature.

Intel eventually wants to replace all flash in a system with a partionable stick of flash, either in a PCI-E slot or integrated on the motherboard.


Intel's Robson flash chip. This particular model can be inserted into a PCI-E slot.