Hot chips with fried brains

When you beat the heat and understand wireless connectivity, along come slightly scary sensor networks, writes CHRIS BARTON.

Every couple of years, with fear and a little loathing, I make the pilgrimage to IDF.

Fear, because I know I won't understand half of what most of the people there are talking about. And a little loathing because I know my brain will hurt trying to understand.

IDF is the Intel Developer Forum - "the world's pre-eminent geekfest" - which began in 1997 as Intel's way of "delivering technology messages" to those who make stuff with its chips.

This year at the San Francisco event (there are others during the year in Japan, Taiwan, China and Germany) I'm among 4000 guests including 450 journalists from 55 countries.

I am not really complaining: Intel flies me business class, puts me up in a nice hotel and feeds and waters me for the duration. In return I sit and listen to hardcore technology-speak for four days and write something about it. Welcome to the gruelling world of the computer press junket.

As usual there are some new product announcements - faster Xeon processors that power lower-end servers, the biggish PCs used for serving up business software and running web sites.

Talk of the conference is that these new chips use "hyper-threading" - technology that essentially tricks the operating system software into thinking there are actually two microprocessors instead of one.

How? My brain is already hurting.

As with all new chips, the new Xeons cram more circuits on to each piece of increasingly thinner silicon and have much faster electronic heartbeats or clock speeds. With hyper-threading there's a new way to milk more performance.

As head geek and chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger puts it: "We'll harvest threads per clock for 15 years or longer." It's a worry when I realise I actually understand what that means.

In the second half of next year we will see the next version of the Pentium 4, code-named Prescott, for desktop PCs. It, too, will have hyper-threading and by then there may be some software to take advantage it.

How fast will it go? Nobody is saying, but Intel does demonstrate a Pentium 4 running at a racy 4GHz. There is much discussion about how to "beat the heat" these super-fast processors generate and the conference is laden with new chilling tricks - multi-finned heat sinks and pipes, water cooling and more efficient fans.

It all goes to show Moore's Law is alive and well. That is the law propounded by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore who said that the number of transistors you can cram on to a chip will double every 18 months or so. The more transistors the better the performance - so that doubles every 18 months too.

Ever since the PC began 20 years ago, the regular doubling of microprocessor power has proved to be more or less so - and here they're saying it will continue to increase like that for the next 20 years.

What that really means is that every few years our PCs will keep becoming slow and we have to fork out $3000 or so for a new one. Such is life in the Intel economy.

The upgrade theme is pushed by the avuncular Craig Barrett, Intel's president and chief executive. He asks a good question: "Why, hard on the heels of the worst recession the IT industry has ever seen, should anyone be excited?" Because new technology keeps coming - in good times and bad - and the only way forward is "new capability".

There are three phases of new technology: irrational exuberance (when silly hype and ridiculous promises are made), turbulence (which is the mess and confusion we're in now) and then the nirvana of sustained growth (which we are about to enter).

Somebody asks: "Isn't it just as likely that we're entering more turbulence?" Barrett admits nobody really knows when the recession is going to end.

But he does think the IT industry has stabilised, although at a lower level than last year when worldwide semiconductor equipment spending dropped a hideous 36 per cent compared with 2000.

Consumers need to be excited by great new products such as the clever software from RealViz running on a 3GHz Pentium 4 PC that incorporates still photos from a digital camera into a 3D video virtual world.

The demo has a digital Barrett as an extreme skateboarder doing a 180 degree backside lipslide from a San Francisco cable car roof. Great for would-be Peter Jacksons and special effects artists.

In the PC world the hunt is on for the next "killer app" - the software that everyone must have and which drives new PC sales. But while top-of-the-line PCs are devoured by games enthusiasts because they make games more life-like and "immersive", the rest of us aren't getting excited and tend to take longer to climb aboard the PC upgrade treadmill.

Barrett is more convincing when he says "the internet is it" - the killer application that will keep sales of Intel networking, communications and server processors chugging - all doing their bit to help to expand the global network of networks.

Then he spoils it with some irrational exuberance, saying the ultimate goal is to have "technology for everyone, anytime, any place". Geek cliche.

However, there are some signs baby steps are about to be taken, notably in the area of wireless communications.

The hot technology here is dual-band 802.11 "a" and "b". That is geekspeak for communicating through the air using publicly available radio frequencies in the 5GHz and 2.4GHz frequencies.

It also means that by the end of this year you can expect new PCs to come with these connectivity cards included, ushering in wireless networking in the home.

That will allow not just connecting several PCs in the one house without wires, but also transmitting things such as your digital photo album, or a DVD movie for viewing on your television.

It's called "radio free Intel" and advances "intelligent roaming" - the ability for your notebook computer to automatically recognise and switch to different communication networks, whether it be an 802.11 "hotspot" at your Starbucks, the wireless hub or wired connection to your office network, even the wider cellular data network run by Telecom or Vodafone.

Intel's five-year to seven-year plan is "silicon radio" - the integration of the innards of mobile phone, 802.11 and other wireless technologies, including the antenna, on to one or two chips.

Slightly scarier is the concept of "ad-hoc sensor networks".

These are small wireless sensors scattered around rooms, the office, cities or just about anywhere.

They can communicate with one another and to a central location providing "yes" or "no" answers to poll questions, and can monitor things such as temperature, movement, location or heartbeats.

Useful for knowing where your kids are, or if the elderly parents are still alive.

At present remote sensors are about the size of a cigarette packet. But with silicon radio, sensors will soon be motes: tiny specks of silicon which will give new meaning to the term silicon implant.

* chris_barton@nzherald.co.nz