News Articles
Trusted Reviews | April 18, 2007
IDF Spring 2007 - Day Two - Keynote - Wimax and UMPC
Benny Har-Even
At the second day’s keynote, mobile technology was on the agenda with the focus on UMPC and Wimax. David Perlmutter, Senior Vice President of the Mobility Group and Anand Chandrasekher, General Manager of the Ultra Mobility Group were on hand so see where we are on now with Internet on the move.
Both were very bullish about delivering a full, rich Internet experience on mobile devices over Wimax. “What we did with Wi-Fi, we’re going to do with Wimax. We’re going to make it happen”, said Perlmutter, while Anand set out Intel’s stall with the words, “It is happening; it’s not a case of if, but when”.
Perlmutter answered the rhetorical question, “why Wimax”, with the answer that is is cheaper and offeres better performance, presumably to 4G alternatives. He made a good point though when he said that it’s not about performance, it’s about coverage claiming that Wimax will cover a mere 150 million people in 2008, but predicted that this will rise to over a billion by 2012.
He then demonstrated the power of Wimax by switching to a live video stream of a someone outside the conference centre with the Olympic stadium in the background, which in the true spirit of all demos almost immediately froze up, greatly embarrassing demoer Craig. Nevermind Craig, it happens to the best of us.
Chandrasekher then took over to confirm that Intel’s UMPC platform for the second half of 2007 will be McCaslin, which Gordon actually got the skinny on a week ago.
McCaslin combines the ‘Stealey’ A100 and A110 processor, with the 945GU Express Chipset, ‘Little River’ attached to an ICH7U I/O controller. It will offer a 2-3x reduction in size and power over current UMPCs, which should mean that we can actually start using them for a decent length of time before charging.
Vendors selling them will be from Aigo, Asus, Fujitsu Haier, HTC and Samsung and will be available over the summer. The UMPC that was demoed featured a cool thumbnail based interface called Glide, and there will be version running on Windows and Linux.
Gordon’s gun jumping story yesterday suggested that new UMPCs would be dropping Windows like a ton of bricks, but in fact Perlmutter stated that all of the 2007 units would use Windows. However, after tactfully restating the strength of its relationship with Microsoft on UMPC Perlmutter said that, “in response to customer needs”, it will be offering support for Linux and the Unbuntu distribution.
Following McCaslin will be Menlow, scheduled to arrive by the first half of 2008. This will reduce overall average consumption to 4x less than that of the original 2006 models, based on MobileMark 2005 benchmarks. Anand got quite excited about Menlow, which is built from the ground up for UMPC, while McCarslin is derived from Dothan, which is getting on a bit in CPU terms.
The CPU inside Menlow will be Silverthorne, based on Intel’s 45nm process. The chipset will be Poulsbo, though no details were given.
In Steve Jobs style, Chandrasekher then pulled a Menlow based UMPC from his pocket and demoed it accessing YouTube and steaming a video, something well beyond the capabilities of today’s UMPCs.
He was then joined on stage by Peter Chou, president of HTC, holding its new McCaslin based keyboard equipped UMPC called, for some reason, ‘Shift’.
However, the impression I took away from the keynote, no doubt unintended, is to not bother with the 2007 devices, which will still be hampered by a lack of power, and hang on for the 2008 units. However, if the idea of UMPC is starting to appeal you’ll want someone to buy now to help promote the platform and get the software ecosystem up and running for when Menlow based units arrive.