Intel Developer Forum 2012 - Justin Rattner Keynote Live Blog

10:25AM PDT - Wrap up! We're done! On to the next one...

10:24AM PDT - Intel wants to support up to 100 base stations in a single server under light load

10:23AM PDT - Sidenote: I've been late for nearly every meeting at IDF this year, everything seems to run over - Justin has 8 minutes to wrap up before I'm late for another one!

10:23AM PDT - Consolidate multiple base station workloads in a smaller number of servers

10:22AM PDT - Can also work in the opposite direction, conserve energy when the traffic load is low

10:22AM PDT - This lets you continually balance base station load

10:21AM PDT - One of the base stations can be offloaded to another server, load balancing

10:21AM PDT - We see this scenario every morning, more and more users come online as they wake up

10:21AM PDT - As you add more mobile devices into the network, the load on the server goes up

10:21AM PDT - At first one server is running and processing two base station workloads

10:20AM PDT - Emulated mobile devices connected to the base station playing streaming video

10:20AM PDT - Two Core i7 servers running the basestation workload

10:20AM PDT - Load can be shared among different servers depending on the load of each cell site

10:20AM PDT - Today multiple base stations running on servers

10:20AM PDT - Last year we demoed a single LTE base station running on a server

10:19AM PDT - C-RAN demo

10:18AM PDT - All of this leads China Mobile to a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN)

10:18AM PDT - Interference between base stations is becoming an issue as well

10:17AM PDT - Power consumption last year was 13B kWh

10:16AM PDT - 200K by the end of next year

10:16AM PDT - China Mobile plans on deploying 20K LTE base stations by the end of this year

10:15AM PDT - China Mobile has over 900,000 3G base stations

10:14AM PDT - Can replace hardware at cell sites with standard server hardware running in a datacenter

10:14AM PDT - Last year Intel demonstrated a complete LTE base station stack with a Sandy Bridge PC

10:13AM PDT - Could potentially help operators deploy additional capacity and properly balance existing load

10:12AM PDT - Or much of the processing

10:12AM PDT - Move all processing to the cloud

10:12AM PDT - Put LTE basestation stack in an Intel server somewhere

10:12AM PDT - Deploy software defined radios in the cloud rather than hardware in each station

10:11AM PDT - Is there an opportunity to rethink the fundamentals of the radio access network?

10:10AM PDT - Last thing: building the next gen wireless infrastructure

10:09AM PDT - Using a palm detect sensor

10:09AM PDT - Instead of a standard fingerpint sensor you just hover your hand over the sensor

10:08AM PDT - Use the accelerometer in the tablet to immediately lock the tablet as soon as you put it down

10:06AM PDT - Wave hand in front of the device and it's unlocked

10:06AM PDT - Tablet with a biometric sensor

10:06AM PDT - Demo time

10:05AM PDT - Replace what you know with what you are

10:04AM PDT - Is there a way around this? Biometrics is one option

10:04AM PDT - Talking about users typically reuse passwords or make simple ones, sacrifice security for ease of use

10:03AM PDT - Director of Security Research at Intel Labs is on stage now

10:03AM PDT - Now talking about security

10:01AM PDT - Now we look at type of content and devices and adjust bandwidth allocation accordingly

10:00AM PDT - About half of the users won't be happy with that quality of experience

10:00AM PDT - Traditionally you'd give everyone a 1Mbps link

10:00AM PDT - Demo time, 10 devices, 4 tablets and 6 phones, streaming video over a constrained 10Mbps pipe

09:58AM PDT - Networks that understand when video is being transmitted and apply QoE to those streams

09:58AM PDT - Video Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN)

09:57AM PDT - Chris Neisinger, Exec Director Network Planning from Verizon Wireless

09:55AM PDT - Now onto video streaming

09:55AM PDT - Not too much additional detail unfortunately

09:54AM PDT - Save about half of the CPU power during active downloading

09:53AM PDT - That's what happens when idle, now what about when active?

09:53AM PDT - and removes unnecessary packets or defers others for later work

09:53AM PDT - Spring Meadow analyzes packets coming into the NIC while the Ultrabook is idle/asleep

09:52AM PDT - Today's Ultrabook, whenever a packet comes in the CPU wakes up

09:51AM PDT - New technology, codenamed Spring Meadow

09:51AM PDT - Web traffic tends to be erratic, leads to all kinds of inefficiencies

09:50AM PDT - How are we going beyond smart connect?

09:50AM PDT - Charlie Tai, Principal Engineer at Intel Labs just joined Justin on stage

09:50AM PDT - Now talking about improving over what we have today

09:49AM PDT - (S0ix baby!)

09:49AM PDT - Basically allowing updates to things like email, twitter, etc... while your machine is asleep

09:49AM PDT - Talking about Intel's Smart Connect technology

09:47AM PDT - Wireless charging discussions perhaps?

09:47AM PDT - Ok now moving onto convenience and battery life

09:47AM PDT - This is cool, it's sort of like wireless Thunderbolt

09:46AM PDT - Video is being streamed wirelessly from the hard drive through the Ultrabook, sent wirelessly to the display

09:46AM PDT - External WiGig hard drive, turned on, system automatically detects it

09:45AM PDT - Ooh the demo is working!

09:45AM PDT - WiGig certification program will launch in mid 2013

09:45AM PDT - WiGig docking would allow that

09:44AM PDT - You could shrink the size of the Ultrabook if you removed all external connectors

09:43AM PDT - The device would normally connect to the WiGig docking station and drive all the peripherals wirelessly

09:43AM PDT - Demo not working yet

09:42AM PDT - Two monitors connected to the WiGig docking station, 1080p displays, external HDD, printer, all connected

09:42AM PDT - Wireless docking with WiGig

09:41AM PDT - Does everything WiFi can do today plus additional applications

09:41AM PDT - We need to move into frequency band where there's a lot less interference, why we moved into 60GHz

09:40AM PDT - Why WiGig instead of other 60GHz wireless options?

09:40AM PDT - 60GHz spectrum, mm waves

09:39AM PDT - Very high throughput wireless technology to do things beyond what WiFi can do, transmit to monitors, move PCIe, USB, etc... away from cables

09:39AM PDT - Where are we with the development of the WiGig standard?

09:38AM PDT - President of the WiGig Alliance is on stage

09:37AM PDT - Showing how using WiGig your tablet becomes your desktop...wirelessly

09:37AM PDT - A WiGig demo video now

09:36AM PDT - This is huge as it is a necessary part of Intel integrating more into its mobile SoCs

09:36AM PDT - But some more can be moved into digital

09:35AM PDT - There are still some analog components, power amps, some things will always be analog

09:35AM PDT - Codename Rosepoint

09:35AM PDT - They did it

09:34AM PDT - Two Atom cores and integrated Moore's Law Radio in 32nm

09:34AM PDT - Pat didn't just ask for a digital radio, he asked for a digital radio you could integrate on a chip with other blocks, compute, registers, IO, etc...

09:33AM PDT - Hooray it stopped

09:33AM PDT - Proving it works by Justin Rattner blocking one of the antennas

09:33AM PDT - It works!

09:33AM PDT - Demo sending video over the 802.11g link

09:32AM PDT - Running 802.11g

09:31AM PDT - Waited 10 years for this can we see the radio?

09:31AM PDT - Power efficiency is on par with the best analog designs already

09:31AM PDT - Built on Intel 32nm process

09:31AM PDT - First complete WiFi digital radio, with full 40MHz wifi bandwidth

09:31AM PDT - Moore's Law Radio

09:30AM PDT - Now we have all the blocks, can we build the radio

09:30AM PDT - "required some definite mathematic manipulations"

09:30AM PDT - "this sounds like it's going to require some new mathematics not found in the textbooks"

09:30AM PDT - Intel is in the business of making things smaller, no different for the digital radio efforts

09:29AM PDT - Digital phase modulator, one of the last blocks to come together, once again had to prove functionality and that it would scale with process nodes

09:29AM PDT - Scaling will continue going to 14nm as well

09:29AM PDT - Had a feeling the DFS would scale, but proved it with 90nm to 32nm scaling

09:28AM PDT - Digital synthesizer was the first important block that Intel moved into digital

09:27AM PDT - That was the only integrated frequency synthesizer that could do WiFi and 4G specs

09:27AM PDT - Digital frequency synthesizer

09:27AM PDT - Now hearing the story of how this happened

09:27AM PDT - A 10 year quest from when Pat issued the challenge until now

09:26AM PDT - Went back to the books, focused on building the computer that could do the math to model analog components

09:26AM PDT - Not just convert analog blocks to digital blocks, had to invent new things in many cases that would work well

09:25AM PDT - The baseband is already digital, talking about the components outside of it

09:25AM PDT - Analog receiver/transmitter takes a lot of tweaking to get right, mostly analog blocks as you can see in the image below

09:24AM PDT - Going to move very fast through a lot of very technical stuff

09:24AM PDT - Yorgos Palaskas

09:24AM PDT - Research leader at the radio integration lab is on the stage now

09:23AM PDT - Poor form Justin.

09:22AM PDT - "Obviously not doing digital radios"

09:22AM PDT - "Pat is now running a software company"

09:22AM PDT - Not cool.

09:22AM PDT - Wow, Rattner just sort of made fun of Pat Gelsinger?

09:22AM PDT - (sorry I think Justin meant to say 100s of microns, not 100nm)

09:21AM PDT - Hence the desire to move to all digital RF

09:21AM PDT - The analog portion, as a result, tends to be larger than the digital portion as you exploit Moore's Law

09:21AM PDT - Analog components are better around 100nm than 10nm where we'll be in the middle of the decade or slightly later

09:20AM PDT - The trouble with analog is that it doesn't scale with the technology, it gets worse as the transistors get smaller

09:20AM PDT - (talking about the RF section of the radio)

09:20AM PDT - Talking about how radios are still mostly analog technology

09:19AM PDT - For those of you who don't remember, Pat promised that all Intel silicon would ship with integrated radios that would be totally software definable and could work across frequencies, networks, etc...

09:19AM PDT - Thus begun our quest to do the impossible, that was 2002, it has taken us 10 years but we think we did it

09:19AM PDT - ...was really too powerful for us to ignore

09:18AM PDT - Technical challenge that Pat gave us, to fulfill this dream of radios anywhere and everywhere

09:18AM PDT - Pat Gelsinger promised radio free Intel

09:17AM PDT - Gelsinger on video, talking about every chip shipping with an integrated radio

09:17AM PDT - Playing a video clip of IDF from 10 years ago

09:17AM PDT - Our quest in wireless began right here on this stage 10 years ago

09:16AM PDT - Intel exec showed up 10 years ago, talked about a technology that Intel wasn't ready to do

09:15AM PDT - That's the second time I've heard that this week, wireless will become the primary form of connectivity for almost everything

09:15AM PDT - From the simplest embedded sensor with a tiny processor to the most sophisticated high end supercomputer, nearly all of them will connect one way or another wirelessly

09:15AM PDT - Not just connected, but always connected (S0ix baby!)

09:14AM PDT - Makes sense, we know that

09:14AM PDT - Mobile computing revolution, in the future everything that computes will connect

09:14AM PDT - "I wasn't going to give a keynote where I just predicted or forecasted some technology"

09:13AM PDT - "have been thinking about it for at least the last three years"

09:13AM PDT - "that's so true for today's keynote"

09:13AM PDT - The topics of the keynote "tend to choose me"

09:12AM PDT - Rattner expressing his personal appreciation for everyone who showed up today, the day 3 keynote is usually awesome, everyone should show up

09:11AM PDT - Ok ears are off, now let's get to something good

09:11AM PDT - Rattner is talking about his ears

09:10AM PDT - ...wearing wolf ears?

09:10AM PDT - Here we go, Intel's CTO and Managing Director of Intel Labs, Justin Rattner just took the stage

09:08AM PDT - I promise this keynote is usually awesome

09:08AM PDT - It's a video of a bunch of kids singing about how they use their tablets, notebooks and smartphones at camp...

09:07AM PDT - Here we go, starting with an intro video

09:03AM PDT - The keynote is going to begin in ~2 minutes

08:57AM PDT - We are seated and waiting for things to get started. Attendance to the last keynote is always lighter than usual, but the content is usually pretty good.