Friday, 21 August 2015
A rider on a sensor-equipped BMX jumps over Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at IDF
If you’ve paid any attention to Intel’s developer event in San Francisco
this week, you’ve probably gathered already that there’s almost no chip
news at the show. Intel has moved up the food chain, so to speak, and
is showing developers what they can build with its technologies rather
than focusing on new components.
It makes sense, since with PCs on the wane Intel needs developers to get
creative with its products. It can no longer flash a faster Core i7
chip and expect them to go do something interesting with it, because PCs
nowadays just aren’t that interesting. Instead, it needs to show them
what else they can do with its latest chips.
So we’ve been hearing a lot about robots, depth-sensing
cameras, smart vending machines and bracelets that log you into your PC.
It’s important stuff for Intel, and entertaining to watch a
sensor-equipped BMX bike jump over the head of CEO Brian Krzanich. But
there’s not a ton of big news we hadn’t heard about before.
Still,
here are 5 of the most interesting things announced so far, and since
we’re already halfway through IDF there probably won’t be much else.
SmartSound and Wake on Voice
Intel
didn’t talk much about its upcoming Skylake desktop CPUs this week, but
it did reveal that the chip has an integrated DSP used for a feature
called Intel Smartsound, whch will allow computers to listen out for
audio signals without using up too much power.
It worked
with Microsoft to build an upcoming technology for Windows 10 called
Wake on Voice, which will let you walk up to a Windows 10 in sleep mode
and bring it to life by saying “Hey Cortana.” Some smartphones already
have this always-listening feature, but it’s not available yet on a PC.
The
catch is, we’re told Wake on Voice won’t arrive with the first Skylake
chips, which means it won’t be supported in the first wave of Windows 10
PCs.
Button-sized Curie chip coming in Q4
OK, there was a little bit of chip news. Curie is Intel’s tiny system-on-chip for wearables. Unveiled at CES earlier this year, it's as big as a fingernail and includes a Quark microprocessor, Bluetooth radio, accelerometer, and gyroscope.
Intel
announced this week that "select” hardware makers will get their hands
on Curie to build products in the fourth quarter. Regular developers
will get it too at the Maker Faire in Rome, Krzanich said, which takes
place in October.
As well as rings, bracelets and fitness
trackers, Curie can be embedded in just about anything. Intel showed
how you can track the speed and position of a BMX bike that apparently
had Curie chips on its handlebars and saddle. It also released some new
SDKs, including one called Identity IQ, which can authenticate a
wearer's identity. That could eventually let you unlock your PC using a
smart bracelet, as Krzanich demonstrated in his keynote.
Intel
Intel's Curie SOC for wearable computers
RealSense goes everywhere
RealSense
is Intel’s 3D depth-sensing camera. It uses three lenses - a standard
2D camera, an infrared laser and an infrared camera. It basically allows
a computer to “see,” and Intel has already shown a drone navigating
through trees in the woods using RealSense.
It’s already
in some PCs, and at CES Intel showed the first prototype smartphone with
RealSense. This could allow several handy uses. RealSense can be used
to measure distances, so you can go furniture shopping and use your
smartphone as a tape measure. It can also take photos that allow you to
adjust the focus later, a bit like a Lytro camera, and it can be used to
scan objects for sending to a 3D printer.
RealSense is the most pervasive technology at IDF.
It’s also being shown in a vending machines that can tell the sex and
age of the person standing in front of it, and in a robot bellhop that
will deliver drinks to your hotel room. it’s also in gaming systems,
including a new camera from Razer to use on the Twitch game streaming
service.
Intel will launch the first products next year based on 3D
XPoint, a new memory type it developed with Micron. Intel claims it will
be 10x as dense as DRAM and 1,000 as fast as NAND Flash - although
speed tests on stage revealed the initial performance gain to be closer
to just 7x.
Under a new brand called Intel Optane, Intel
will launch SSDs for servers and PCs next year, and also memory DIMMs
for servers. Intel says 3D XPoint will supercharge everything from PC
gaming to in-memory databases.
Intel is sponsoring a reality show?
Strange
but true, Intel has partnered with United Artists to produce a reality
TV show called "America's Greatest Makers." It will follow the trials
and travails of inventors cometing to build the greatest wearable or
gadget using Intel's Curie chip, and the winner will get a $1 million
prize.
