Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Today began the Intel Developer Forum, a chance for Intel and a number of other companies to debut their newest computer technology.  It’s the perfect opportunity to see what’s coming up next in terms of computer hardware and will likely see a lot of new Windows 7 machines throughout the conference.  Today, as the opening day, saw a lot of announcements during the keynote presentation.

The biggest announcement for Intel looks to be the new Intel Xeon 5500 series of processors.  Intel is saying these new chips will power everything from the Internet to research oriented supercomputers.  They look to be quite fast and smart enough to clock the multiple cores to handle the task at hand through the new Intel Turbo Boost Technology.  Intel is saying the chip series is the most important processor innovation since the Intel Pentium Pro which was released nearly 15 years ago.

For processors, Intel also brought on stage a wafer of its 22nm chips that are due for release in 2011.  The technology is said to push Moore’s Law further than some have thought possible with the scaling wall nowhere in sight.  The new technology would allow for 2.9 billion transistors in the area of a fingernail and will make for even faster, more efficient computers.

In terms of more pressing consumer matters, Intel has announced the new Intel Atom Developer Program.  The program is meant to draw developers into making apps for netbooks and later MIDs and smartphones that use Intel Atom processors.  The idea is that the program will create more applications that are designed to fit on netbook-sized screens, and will be cross-platform using platforms like Silverlight and Flash.  Some companies like Acer are planning on putting app stores for such apps onto future netbooks.  It’s not clear why that is needed, however, as the idea of netbooks always seemed more like a portable web browser and maybe word processor, apps seem like they could be redundant or rarely used.

Read [Xeon 5500 series]
Read [Intel Atom Developer Program]
Read [22nm chips (PDF Link)]