HANDS ON GUIDE

4 - The Future

One of Intel’s recent taglines at its Developer Forum conference in the USA was ‘x86 Everywhere’. Although Intel maintains a tight grip on the all-important middle-ground market, desktop and server PCs the world over, there are still lots of other architectures, at both ends of the spectrum, where x86 doesn’t hold as much sway. One is in the supercomputing market: the fastest official supercomputer on the planet is IBM’s BlueGene/L; not surprisingly, this is based on the PowerPC chips designed by IBM.

More interesting to everyday computing are the growing handheld, mobile and embedded markets. There are still a large number of other processor architectures from different manufacturers available, including ARM, Motorola and Texas Instruments. These CPUs do what x86 processors can’t yet do – consume milliwatts of power. Neither do they give x86 the implicit advantage that lets it dominate the desktop, namely 30 years’ worth of applications that will only run on x86.

However, this won’t prevent Intel from trying. The Atom processor is the company’s most realistic attempt so far at producing a truly low-power processor. Intel’s chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, has claimed performance ‘about equal to Banias’, the early Centrino Pentium M processor released in 2003. It still isn’t frugal enough to put in a mobile phone, but it’s possible that your iPhone will be running on Intel before very long.

As for x86 on the desktop, it’s certain to be around for a long time, and it’s now beginning to spread its tentacles from the heart of your PC. Intel’s massively parallel graphics processor codenamed Larrabee – which Nvidia has spent a lot of effort slating – will feature a few dozen processing cores, all x86-compatible.

This full compatibility with standard x86 instructions will give it a lead over the relatively restricted instruction sets and capabilities of traditional graphics cards from Nvidia and ATi. It’s also one reason that Intel is trying to push real-time ray tracing as the future of the graphics pipeline: ray tracing is easier to implement on x86 than it is on a Radeon or GeForce. Larrabee is due at some point in 2009.

Latest Hands on guides

These are the most popular features articles over the past three months.

Mobile Broadband

Compare prices

Fastest, cheapest 3G mobile broadband dongles from 3, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange
from just £10/month