Intel Developer Forum Fall 2003 - Day 2: All About Mobile

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.