IDF Japan 2005: dual-core benchmarking, Yonah and virtualization
At IDF Japan 2005 that took place on April 7-8, visitors could see novelties belonging to digital home, digital enterprise, mobility and other categories with over 50 companies exhibited.
At Intel Multi-Core Zone you could see a machine on a dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition (XE) 840 with HT offering 4-thread parallelism demonstrated on gaming and image processing applications.
As a gaming benchmark they used Futuremark´s previously unseen, but talked about Mechanoids game test designed for multi-threaded environments and based on the Havok engine. Though strongly dependent on GPU, Mechanoids fully utilized the 4 threads of Pentium XE to increase performance. The benchmark was run on two machines, one incorporating Pentium XE 840 (3.2GHz), another based on Pentium 4 XE 3.73GHz. As a result, the former indicated 15fps (on the right image), while the latter could squeeze 3fps only (on the left image), so noone could doubt the goodness of a multi-core configuration.
Besides, the dual core design was also demonstrated on the example of RoboHordes game based on Unreal Engine 3 (which is, in turn, based on the NovodeX collision simulation engine), CineBench2003 rendering benchmark and Premiere animation suite.
Speaking of mobile (and actually desktop) solutions, in the same Intel Multi-Core Zone you could see prototypes on Yonah CPU scheduled for 2006.
Above is a "developer´s system" with a bare motherboard. The processor is covered with a cooler, but the proprietary frequency display utility (below) indicates two cores operating at 1467MHz each.
Another prototype was a superslim desktop PC with dimensions of a notebook (below). Nothing is known about the commercialization, but the keywords are "next year".
Since Yonah is still a mobile solution, a notebook prototype was showcased as well.
As for the handhelds, they demonstrated a miniature Tablet PC prototype on the Ruby platform that features ultralow voltage Pentium M 600MHz, 5" liquid-crystal display and a keyboard. Though it´s larger than a usual PDA, its size and weight (450g) still allow to call it a handheld.
Since the device utilizes Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, it has a familiar interface. As of interfaces, the prototype has Bluetooth, which allows to connect a wireless keyboard or a headphones (the latter enables using the device as a cell phone).
During media playback the device can disable unused circuitry to save energy, so up to 8 hours is promised. The prototype actually dissipates much heat, but since the development will take at least a couple of years, the company promises further miniaturization and improvement.
The portable media player concept below incorporates Pentium M processor, 8.9" LCD and supports DVD media.
Finally, they demonstrated the Virtualization Technology on a testbed that had Windows XP and Windows CE running at the same time (below).
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