IDF Coverage, Day 2

[Shadowmage]

Hey guys! I'm reporting live from IDF 2008, watching the keynote. I'll be updating this thread from time to time today, starting with a live blog about the keynote. There will be lots of pics.

I'm pretty sure that the stuff that I'm uploading is the first to hit the web, especially the pics. There's usually only a ~10min delay

If you're interested, please show your support by posting in this thread.

Enjoy!


8:16 - Anand is talking about the internet, and how people are dissatisfied with the internet experience: 2-1 prefer full internet to limited internet (in mobile devices).
8:16 - Russ has the "perfect demo" for a mobile internet device: Gypsy. He is demonstrating how he can use Gypsy to find people nearby. As an example, he wants to have lunch with Andrew. He can find restaurants that his other friends have recommended. He sends his friend a message and they can sync up at the restaurant.
8:22 - The internet is going to get much more interactive - need performance!
8:24 - So why are they talking about the internet? They just want to get a chance to talk about Atom
8:25 - The lead architect is up on stage now. Atom needed x86 compatibility, low power, ground up architecture, high perf. It was built in 3-4 years.
8:30 - They're demonstrating WoW on an MID. Apparently 5fps in WoW is acceptable.
8:31 - World's first 1080p HD video on a pocketable device. What about NVIDIA Tegra?
8:34 - So why Atom instead of an ARM/MIPS device? "IA (intel architecture) matters because compatibility matters"
8:37 - Warren, a game developer, is talking now. They launched McDonald's 30 second web content (aka commercial) in a bunch of different languages.
8:40 - Demonstrating their McDonalds game that you can play on a MID.
8:45 - Some dude from Neusoft (Chinese software company) is demonstrating their software for hospitals.
8:50 - He dropped the MID on stage LOL
8:50 - Enterprise customers can now do things they can't do before, since now they have a full-blown OS with IA architecture.
8:57 - Clarion is launching some MIDs. He has some demonstrations. Clarion works with car navigation software.
9:01 - Russ is demonstrating the new Lenovo IdeaPad, just launched in China in time for the Beijing Olympics.
9:08 - Internet is at an inflection point, blah blah blah. The keynote is over! Thank you very much!










Keynote #2!!!

9:13 - Eric Kim is hosting a game show: "The Viewer is Right"
9:17 - Each contestant won a 42" HDTV, lucky bastards.
9:21 - Announcing a HDTV standard: world's first CE optimized SoC with full IA core. Also announcing an open-source widget framework optimized for this SoC.
9:22 - Some dude from Yahoo is here. They're excited about the possibilities: users are always looking to improve their HDTV experience. They see the next wave as the internet on TV.
9:30 - You can watch trailers, browse your online photos, check stocks, etc. on your TV with your remote. There's a TV widget dock that sits at the bottom of the TV screen. There will be a demo of this later.
9:37 - Media Processor CE 3100 (Canmore) is announced with die shots! I'll upload pics in a bit.
9:40 - You can play two HDTV streams at once, while fastforwarding at 1.5x without dropping frames.
9:41 - <10W TDP, been sampling for 6 months, just a few weeks away from the full launch.
9:44 - 2x performance over other SoCs without any optimizations! Impressive! (I'm so hungry, woke up at 5 and haven't eaten yet... missed the free IDF breakfast)
9:55 - Ha ha, the guy can't pronounce "measurement"









Keynote #3!

10:16 - Took a break because I'm so hungry. No food until 10:30
10:17 - So far, they have demoed Farcry 2 (out later this year of course), and talked about a new Intel parallel tools set for developers. Nothing too interesting so far, all expected.

I left to find food, so I didn't get all of Keynote 3 (failed, only found orange juice).







Now it's on to the technical presentations! I'm attending: Tuning Your Software for the Next Generation Intel Microarchitecture Family. This is interesting because not everything runs faster on Nehalem; the 2nd level cache is much smaller, and the L1 cache latency has been increased to 4 cycles.

The first feature to optimize for is Unaligned Loads and Stores. Previously, data is aligned on 16-byte boundaries due to performance. Splitting the cache line is extremely expensive. Now, Nehalem adds unaligned instructions that are as fast as aligned instructions (as long as you're not splitting as a cache line). This means that you don't need to go out of your way to make everything aligned. As a result, there are increased opportunities for vectorization (SSE), memcopy/memset, and dynamic stack alignment is much less necessary for 32-bit stacks.

As a result, intel saw a 1.42% improvement in performance overall in SPEC cpu2000fp, with a 6.5% improvement in 168.wupwise.

Also, there were improvements in store forwarding, which is where you do a store and then immediately load the value. This is necessary for performance because x86 only has 8 architectural registers. The alignment of the stores is no longer an issue. All stores to 1, 2, 4, and 8 byte addresses will forward to lesser or equal sized loads regardless of alignment.

Nehalem also has additional new instructions, such as string compare instructions. As string length increases, we can see up to a 5x speedup (although there is little or no speedup with small strings due to the overhead).

Since branch prediction has improved, CMOV (conditional move) instructions become less and less important. The speaker recommended rechecking your CMOV custom assembly to see if it's still worth it over branch prediction.

To parallelize your application, Intel recommends using OpenMP, or the Intel Threading Building Blocks.



4:13 - I'm sitting at the Extreme Gaming Laptop seminar right now... they're just defining what 'overclocking' is

Check out the list of things that can happen due to overclocking:

- Data corruption
- reduction of useful life
- thermal implications
- no warranty

We better stop overclocking, guys! :p

4:20 - The guy from Kingston just asked who overclocks in the audience. I raised my hand, as well as about 5 other people in an audience of about 80. I wonder who those other people.

4:23 - HAY GUYS I'M LEARNING HOW TO OVERCLOCK MY MEMORY! I can't believe this talk is 3 stars (most techinical).... this is total bull.