GOVERNMENT

During his keynote, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said Intel Architecture (IA) processors now span MIDs to High-Performance Servers. In HPC, Intel's Xeon processors power three of the world's top five HPC systems, and in 2007 Intel supplied roughly four of five processors in the HPC market, including one of the most powerful in China, the SINOPEC system used for petroleum exploration. Gelsinger provided some technical details of Intel's next-generation processor family, codenamed "Nehalem," which will begin production in the fourth quarter. Nehalem will first be seen in high-end desktop processors and dual processor server systems, and expand to other market segments in 2009. Nehalem is designed to scale from two to eight cores. Gelsinger also disclosed Intel's Advanced Vector Extension new instructions that are planned for a family of processors due after Nehalem, codenamed "Sandy Bridge" in 2010. Honglin Zhang, deputy chief director of the IT Center for the China Ministry of Railways, joined Gelsinger onstage to talk about IA-based systems playing a pivotal role in providing cost-effective, flexible and reliable end-to-end solutions. Beijing officials also discussed how the upcoming Olympics IT infrastructure and Web portal will be run on Intel Xeon processors. Gelsinger concluded his keynote talking about Intel's Visual Computing vision and need for more compute performance, higher memory and I/O bandwidth, improved graphics, better software tools and libraries in order to deliver photo-realistic 3-D rendering, high-definition video and audio, and computer modeling, all leading to a better computing experience. One critical element will be the "Larrabee" Architecture, which will feature many Intel architecture cores, a new cache architecture and new vector processing instruction set.