Niso Levitas · 09-25-2007 · Category: Tech-planations

Introduction

This year Intel celebrated the 10th anniversary of IDF (Intel Developers Forum) with over 5000 visitors attending. Unfortunately for me, it was my eighth year attending to the forum. Since 1997, each year all the geekiest engineers from all over the world and world's best technology editors leave their jobs and travel to the show. They camp for three days in San Francisco and the caffeine flows through their veins keeping them wide awake during all those lovely presentations. Everybody trys to get into every workshop to understand what is coming in the next three years and be ahead of the game.

While waiting for the next workshop to begin I visited the stands to see all of the new products. Even after the show, these people prefered to stay at the hall and discussed new products with engineers instead of going back to their hotel rooms and watching TV. If you did your day right, you should be tired to death at the end of the day. Imagine, that in 1999 I photographed SATA and Bluetooth work schematics in Palm Springs when the technologies were not in use. If you are a technology addicted IT editor and there are 3 different seminars which you are interested in at the same time, then you push yourself to be in all three places at the same time. On the below photo you see my friend Mario Nagano from Brazil. We shared the photos we took at IDF over the last eight years. However, his are always clearer and brighter than mine. And it makes me kick myself every time. By the way, to talk about the other old guy on the photo, actually I should write a book, but i can't just pass him at all.

Everything started in 1947, in Bell Laboratories three physicists invented the transistor. The transistor gradually replaced the bulky, fragile vacuum tubes that had been used in the huge room-size devices called "computer" and it turned them into the today's pocket size computers. Actually it took fifteen years, but everything started with the transistor. The old guy you see on the above photo pioneered and presented on the design of first integrated circuit. Using the eight of the newly invented transistor he turned them into a circuit which has been discussed a lot. Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation back in 1968. They did not start with the Intel brand at the beginning. They were originally incorporated just to get through the papers as Moore Noyce Electronics which later on changed to the Intel Corporation. Since someone had the name already, they ended up having to buy the name Intel from a motel chain in the Midwest. It was a great experience to hear the story from the Gordon Moore himself.

Most people know him by his famous Moore laws. In his publication on 1965 he came up with the theory, which would later known as "Moore laws":
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer." If you consider the upcoming Intel Xeon 5400 processors (codenamed Harpertown) have 820 million transistors you will understand Gordon Moore's vision back in 42 years ago. We all take our hats off to him for joining the tenth year celebration of IDF and visiting to us in the press room to answer our questions.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. 45 Nanometer Technology
3. 45 Nanometer Results
4. Technology Breaks
5. USB 3.0 - PCI-E 3.0
6. SATA 2.6
7. SURGERY SIMULATION

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