Intel IDF 2010 Conference Side Notes
On April 13, 2010, I attended the Intel IDF 2010 conference in Beijing. IDF stands for Intel Developer Forum, but in Chinese it’s oddly translated as “Intel IT Summit.” Probably because calling it “Developer Forum” sounds low-class, and government and institute leaders wouldn’t come.
The conference was held at the National Convention Center, a pretty impressive venue right next to the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube. You could see the Bird’s Nest from the hall. The conference started at 9am, but first, to set the atmosphere of “Harmonious society blooming like flowers, scientific development surging like waves,” they had a circus troupe perform acrobatics for 15 minutes. In all the tech conferences I’ve attended, this was unprecedented. It fully demonstrated the grand, peaceful, prosperous image of our great nation. Then, with background music and spotlights, the boss finally appeared. Wait, isn’t that the “post-70s high-end white-collar” guy from MOP? MOP regulars will definitely recognize him. Even I, a non-regular MOP user, knew who he was. Why invite him? Was Intel going for an “entertainment to death” approach to show their modernity? Roping in a past-his-prime post-70s white-collar guy as support — they’d have been better off with Sister Feng or Brother Chun.
As it turns out, this so-called post-70s high-end white-collar worker is Intel’s China president, warming up the stage. His fame on MOP must make for awkward moments at work.
Then came the keynote. Two Intel senior executives spoke. To be honest, the content was unremarkable. Same old stuff about Intel’s server, desktop, and embedded processors: Xeon, Core, and Atom. Nothing new. I was nearly falling asleep. Comparing this to Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC 08, where the crowd was roaring, it was worlds apart. Some demos were perplexing too. They brought in Liu Jiren from Neusoft and some unknown companies as shills. Demonstrating a 6-core 12-thread machine with graphics? That immediately makes one think of Intel’s stillborn Larrabee project. Anyway, I was here for UEFI on day two. Today was just warmup.
The entire second day was embedded-focused. I was very pleased. In the morning, Intel’s embedded division boss presented Intel’s contributions to embedded, still hardware-centered, pushing ATOM. They brought shills from Adidas, Delphi, State Grid, Huawei, and Huatai Auto. Huatai was the most dramatic — driving a car directly into the venue to showcase their ATOM-based车载 computer. Intel also announced ATOM SoC. Intel, you finally got it. No SoC means no embedded play. But this ATOM SoC is still weaker than ARM, only integrating memory controller and graphics chip. UART, USB, etc. are still outside the processor. They also demonstrated some smart home projects that were quite appealing. Personally, if ATOM can reduce power consumption, it could really compete with ARM.
The afternoon sessions were all about UEFI. Ran into Dr. Long from Intel, an old acquaintance. He presented on UEFI security, which was good. Other companies introduced innovative UEFI applications, like playing ads during boot, showing calendar and Outlook schedules instead of the Windows logo, etc. HP claimed UEFI is already used in all HP laptops, working perfectly with Win7. UEFI is clearly the trend. BIOS is surely doomed. I wonder, my Mac is also UEFI-based, why do I only see the Apple logo at boot? Why not do something innovative? That’s not like Apple. Speaking of Mac, Apple updated MacBook Pro configurations yesterday — all using Intel chipsets, i5/i7 Core CPUs with NVIDIA graphics. Mouthwatering. My laptop is only 6 months old and already outdated.
Conference over. Straight back to the hotel to lie low. Nothing much to do in Beijing.