Intel has done a very good job of maintaining a fast paced and exciting IDF this year. With yesterdays announcement about the Extreme Edition processor, we didn't think Intel had anything else up their sleeve. We were very pleasantly surprised by this morning's keynote.

In the following pages you will learn about Intel's new (and available) 855GME mobile chipset, and we have some finality on the next incarnation of Pentium M known as Dothan. Looking ahead we will show you a mobile chipset called Sonoma targeted at 2H 2004 which will be paired with Dothan and seems to have some good potential.

We will also talk a bit about Intel's vision for convergence and mobile technology with their next generation XScale processor codenamed Bulverde (which had some amazing demos), and the future of convergence devices.

Updates for Centrino

Intel is definitely keeping up the pace they set for themselves yesterday with the Extreme Edition announcement. Anand Chandrasekher's first revelation was a new mobile chipset for the Pentium-M (Centrino processor), the 855GME, which has some very nice features.

First and foremost, the 855GME finally supports DDR333, which should instantly increase performance. Intel lists the chipset as having an "updated" graphics core, although in reality it is the same graphics core from the previous chipset. The difference here is that the graphics core runs at 250MHz (up from 200MHz) and it can run at either 200 or 250MHz depending on workload. Intel still has much to improve on in terms of 3D performance, however if you don't play any games then their integrated graphics is one of your better options because of some of the other features associated with it.

One such feature is Display Power Saving Technology (DPST); DPST works only with the integrated graphics core to dynamically adjust the brightness of the back light depending on the image being displayed on the screen. Since the hardware knows what is being displayed on the screen by looking at the contents of the frame buffer, it is possible for you to run some mathematical algorithms on that data to determine the optimal back light settings on a pixel-by-pixel basis in order to produce the best balance of image quality and power.

The theory is that although you need your back light to be as bright as possible and relatively uniform when you have a picture of a bright sky on your screen, when you are looking at a normally lit environment there will be some parts of the screen where you don't need as bright of a back light and thus can save power by lowering the brightness.

Intel demoed the feature by turning it on while an 855GME based laptop displayed a still image; power consumption from the display dropped from 5W to 3W with no perceivable loss in visual quality (or course, it was on a giant display across the room and being filmed by a camera).

The next demo involved displaying a video on the screen, which was fairly dark initially but contained an explosion mid-way through. We were able to see from the power consumption graph that power usage went up when the image being displayed was brighter (e.g. the explosions) - indicating that the technology was doing what it was supposed to do and increasing the brightness of the back light only when necessary.

The DPST does not require (in its current form) any special support other than the OEM simply turning the feature on; you do have to be using the integrated graphics core, but other than that you don't need to have a special LCD panel. Availability of DPST is immediate as the 855GME chipset has already begun shipping.

Extreme Edition isn't the only thing with a 2MB cache

Next up on the block was something we had been hoping to see: Intel officially announced their next revision of Pentium-M previously codenamed Dothan. This little beauty is made up of 140M transistors, and incorporates a massive 2MB L2 cache. Of course, this is all made possible through Intel's 90nm fab process, and incorporates their strained silicon technology.

You can think of Dothan as a bit more than just a die shrink to 90nm, since it encapsulates a lot of what the original Banias design team didn't have time to include to make the Pentium-M launch. Dothan includes a more advanced register file that apparently better manages power when dealing with a bunch of mixed reads and writes, although there wasn't much more data on register file improvements given.

With the larger L2 cache, Dothan's data prefetching algorithms can be a bit more aggressive as they have more space to prefetch data into - thus improving performance as well.

Intel demonstrated Dothan in a head-to-head against the current Banias Pentium-M core by running the two at the same clock speed, in which case the Dothan processor was clearly ahead in a number of business and content creation tasks Intel ran. Dothan is due out in Q4 and will debut at 1.8GHz, before rising to 1.9/2.0GHz next year.

Sonoma - DDR2 for Centrino

We also got an update on the next generation platform for the Pentium-M, codenamed Sonoma. Planned for launch sometime in the second half of 2004, the Sonoma platform is made up of the Alviso chipset, Intel's Azalia sound hardware, PCI Express, SATA, and a new graphics core (the same graphics used in Grantsdale).

Azalia has the ability to deliver dolby 7.1 sound, while also reducing power consumption by approximately 50% over current generation AC'97 hardware.

The addition of PCI Express includes the use of the next generation expansion card technology called ExpressCard, which is much smaller in size than current cardbus expansion modules.

Intel did announce that Sonoma would use DDR2, much like the Grantsdale line of desktop chipsets. No decisions have been made as to whether DDR2-400 or DDR2-533 would be used however.

This platform will be built around the just announced Dothan version of the Pentium M. We will continue to look into this technology as the day wears on and if we find anymore information, we'll keep you posted.

Along with Sonoma, other next generation technologies we were shown include a feature that tracks where the users eyes are facing and turns off the display as necessary, the ability to locate yourself in a city via the wireless access point you are connected to, and moving through different wireless networks without interrupting a file transfer. Of course, most of these are almost necessary for the average user to adopt mobile technology on the scale that Intel wants, so we see these this as a definite step in the right direction.

Taking mobile even further

Moving into the embedded space, Intel spoke at length about their xscale architecture and new advancements made in very small yet nicely powered devices. Their next generation embedded system technology codename Bulverde was demonstrated for us, and stands to produce some very nice results. The technology incorporated includes advancements in Wireless MMX and new technologies in the embedded space called Quick Capture and Wireless SpeedStep.

We were able to see a port of Moto GP that looked amazingly nice on Bulverde technology to demonstrate Wireless MMX. Apparently the port was made from the Xbox to the Bulverde platform, and (differing from current portable technology) the game runs at smooth framerates.

With Quick Capture Intel is able to capture 4Mbit images and 30fps video via Bulverde. The Quick Capture demo consisted of a Bulverde chip with a camera attached doing real time mpeg4 encoding, decoding, and streaming the video to a display.

Wireless SpeedStep is basically an extension of the SpeedStep technology already incorporated in laptops. Basically, the processor is turned off when its not being used in order to save battery power. We were shown a demo in which a video was decompressed and played. Turning on SpeedStep dropped processor power usage by 50% without affecting the quality of the video and without dropping any frames.

Intel's Wireless SpeedStep demo

Its very nice to see some solid steps toward the convergence that Intel had been preaching for the past few years. Hopefully we will be able to see some products come from these advancements sooner rather than later.