Intel Sets Its Sights on the Future

Intel will discuss further details of its forthcoming mobile Banias and 3-GHz Pentium 4 processors, and reveal its plans for dealing with demand for sophisticated communications devices at its semiannual Developer Forum conference, it said Tuesday.

The architecture of the Banias chip, scheduled for release in the first half of next year, will be revealed during keynotes from Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief operating officer and Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of the mobile platforms group, on both Monday and Tuesday of the conference, scheduled for September 9-12.

"Banias is the first time we've developed an architecture from the ground up," says Frank Spindler, vice president of the Intel corporate technology group. "It addresses all the needs of the mobile user."

Ron Smith, senior vice president and general manager of the wireless communications and computing group, will discuss new capabilities for its XScale processors, which are based on a core from ARM. The XScale was introduced in February and is found in products such as Hewlett-Packard's iPaq PDA.

Schedule of Events

The convergence of communications and computing will be the focus of Wednesday's otherwise muted schedule of events. Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager of the enterprise platform groups and Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel communications group, will address the crowd on ways to access information stored on corporate networks and the Internet using new technology.

Wednesday is also September 11, the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia. Intel moved its annual party from its traditional Wednesday slot to Tuesday and will observe a moment of silence prior to the keynotes that day. Dates for the shows are booked years in advance.

The last day of the show will consist of a keynote from Patrick Gelsinger, vice president and chief technology officer of the corporate technology group, and Sunlin Chou, senior vice president and general manager of the technology and manufacturing group. They will discuss the future of Moore's Law, the law developed by Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore that states the number of transistors on a chip will double every couple of years. Sunlin also plans to discuss Intel's 90 nanometer process technology, which was detailed last month.

Additional announcements expected to come from the show include partner announcements with PCI Express, Intel's interconnect technology, and the final specifications for AGP 3.0, which allows data to flow between the graphics controller and the main system memory.