As announced in advance, this year’s IDF Keynote, held by Intel’s top brass, focused on 45-nanometer technology, the upcoming Penryn processors as well as their successor, the Nehalem family.

Intel’s president Paul Otellini isn’t exactly credited with having the same kind of charisma as Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. On the contrary – if anything, Otellini’s style is considered rather dry. Nonetheless, his keynotes at the Intel Developer Forum are always greatly anticipated.

Penryn in November and Nehalem with up to Eight Cores

This year’s IDF was no exception, although all of the topics were known well in advance. As expected, Intel’s CEO began by speaking about the Penryn-successor “Nehalem” under the motto “From Extreme to Mainstream”. Nehalem was already announced at the IDF in Beijing and was demonstrated publicly for the first time here. It will consist of 510 million transistors. Like Penryn, Nehalem will be manufactured on a 45-nanometer process, but only Nehalem will be able to fully exploit the refined process. Mr. Otellini said that the 731 million transistor CPU will offer around three times the performance of current high-end processors. An 8-core Nehalem CPU running at 3 GHz had already been mentioned at the IDF in Beijing. As Nehalem enters stage right in the second half of 2008, the front side bus that has been with us for so many years will finally prepare to make its exit stage left. It will be succeeded by the Common System Interface (CSI), which will be called Quickpath. According to Mr. Otellini, Intel can already count on broad support by the (motherboard) manufacturers.

32 nanometers – 1.9 Billion Transistors

Intel’s plans go beyond 45 nanometers, though. At the IDF in Beijing, Intel already spoke about 32-nanometer structures, which will be the basis for the “Westmere” generation of CPUs due in 2009. Today, Otellini already showed the attendees a 32-nanometer SRAM chip with 1.9 billion transistors. These memory chips are incredibly small, measuring only 0.182µm2, according to Intel. The reason why Intel showed off this chip is simple. As Mr. Otellini emphasized, “We’re on track to ramp 32nm technology in 2009”.

But let’s get back to the 45nm and 65nm technology for a moment. Intel promises that these processes will be lead and halogen free as of 2008. As of then, Intel’s production processes will use a new combination of materials with a high-k value as an isolation layer to reduce transistor leakage currents. As Mr. Otellini emphasized, these will no longer require lead or halogens.

Penryn & WiMAX for Mobile Computing

That the Penryn generation will also be used in notebooks is already well known. However, this was the first time any concrete information was given about how power-efficient the mobile Penryn CPUs will be. Mr. Otellini said that 25 watts could be expected for small, light notebooks.

WiMAX will finally find its way into mobile computers in 2008 as well. According to Mr. Otellini, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Panasonic, and Toshiba plan to incorporate the new wireless standard into their new products based on the Montevina platform. This is mainly of interest to customers in the US, where Sprint and Clearwire are hard at work creating WiMAX network infrastructure.

Pat Gelsinger : USB 3.0 & More Security

Next up after Mr. Otellini with a keynote address was Pat Gelsinger. Intel’s vice-president began by emphasizing the company’s part in the development of the USB 3.0 standard – although this standard has not yet been finalized. We can expect to see that happen towards the middle of 2008. USB 3.0 promises transfer rates of up to 5 Gbits per second – that’s ten times the speed of the current Hi-Speed USB 2.0. Of course USB 3.0 will also be compatible with the forthcoming USB-Wireless standard. It, in turn, promises transfer rates of 480 Mbit/s over three meters and 110 Mbit/s over 10 meters.

Trusted Platform, Take Two

Security was also a central topic in Mr. Gelsinger’s talk ; more specifically, the security of business users. “McCreary Business Platform” is the name of the product that will make Intel’s vPro technology even safer starting in 2008. It will consist of a – halogen and lead-free, as Paul Otellini repeatedly emphasized – quad core processor, the “Eaglelake” chipset, a new Trusted Platform Module and an encryption standard called “Danbury”.

Sun, VMware, and Intel Holding Hands

After that, the stage got a little crowded, as representatives from Sun and VMware, together with Pat Gelsinger, informed the audience of the state of Intel’s virtualization technology, formerly known as Vanderpool. Sun and Intel have been cooperating in the x86 and x64 server market, amongst others, since January of this year, and Intel has been investing in VMware since June. Together, the speakers demonstrated how to ensure security in a virtual-machine environment – especially in regard to future workstations.

In the end, Mr. Gelsinger impressed the audience with a quad-core Xeon workstation (3GHz) running on a 1600 MHz front side bus. A test with the “Paradigm Benchmark 1” showed twice the performance of currently available dual-core CPUs running at the same clock speed.

THG will post pictures and videos of the IDF-keynote shortly.