Intel to talk ‘tera era’ at IDF

Intel will spend its spring Intel Developer Forum (IDF) this week talking about what it considers technology’s next epoch: increasing mobility and the “tera era” of large data sets and more complex applications.

Sources have indicated that Intel plans to demonstrate a processor with 64-bit extensions to the 32-bit x86 instruction set. It’s unclear whether Intel’s chip will be compatible with extensions used by Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processor, which has the support of IBM and Sun Microsystems.

“Intel has had this in its back pocket for a long time, and Opteron is clearly gaining momentum. Intel just didn’t feel it could sit back and hope the problem would go away any longer,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata.

Intel executives also plan to drop hints about the future of the Centrino package in different types of clients besides notebooks.

As usual, the conference will include a look behind the walls of Intel Labs courtesy of Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger. This time around the talk will focus on the tera era, or the emergence of applications and data sets that require terabytes of memory or terabits per second of bandwidth, Gelsinger said.

New architectures and enhancements to existing hardware will be needed to make that era possible, Gelsinger said. These architectures will also create new applications in areas such as visual recognition or graphics virtualization, which aren’t possible with today’s technology. Most of those applications won’t be ready until the end of the decade, but some might emerge sooner, Gelsinger said.