Talk about being put on the spot! Just hours after the announcement of the Intel Atom Developer Program, Ajay Mungara, the Community Manager for the program, asks me about the type of applications we might see on netbooks, the compelling use cases and a ton of other stuff that really made me think quickly and deeply. 14 minutes of brain-drain! Hope you enjoy it.

And please, let me know what you think of the Intel Atom Developer Program. Do you think it will take off? If not, why not?

I took MIDMoves to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last week with a focus on the three M’s of MIDs, Moblin and Moorestown. IDF is the highlight of my mobile computing year and I was hoping to see Moorestown MIDs being demonstrated, the launch of Moblin 2.0 and a bunch of new products. As it happens, we got the expected Moblin 2.0 launch but didn’t see much in terms of hardware. We did get a few surprises though and as usual, in-depth information that helps us predict what is going to happen in 2010 and 2011. Here’s a summary of the Intel Developer Forum 2009 for a mobile computing perspective.

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I’m just a few posts away from completing my Intel Developer Forum 2009 related work now and it’s time to round-up and summarize the news and to try and work out what it means for 2010 and 2011. Power-gating, Mobiln 2.1 and the App Store are just three very important elements but for the full overview, check out an article I’ve just posted at UMPCPortal which goes over everything I learned. I can not deny that it was disappointing not to see more Moorestown prototypes but the news is more than enough to keep my excitement going until the next big event. See you at CES 2010 in January.

IDF round-up at UMPCPortal.

Image via. Intel

Many thanks to Intel and the Intel Insider program for the sponsorship of my MIDMoves work at IDF.

While we didn’t get full details about Moorestown at Intel’s Developer Forum this week, we did get a sneak peak, as Intel love to call it, into what Moorestown brings to the table by the chief architect himself, Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar.

Most of it is summarized in a PDF issued to the press but there’s also a set of slides to check out too. See SPCS004 on this content page. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the session but I’ve been through the documents and have pulled out some key features below.

2x power reduction in use. In real terms we should see what I call ‘on-net’ active power drain (using the device) reduced to under 2W. With the smaller screen devices that will reduce further. This is about double what you’d see on an ARM-based device under similar usage sdcenarios but in terms of getting things done, should be much snappier.

50x idle power reduction. This brings, for the first time, a PC into always-on scenarios.

Hyperthreading capability. As we’ve experienced on Menlow, devices with hyperthreading feel faster.

Burst Performance Technology (BPT) Monitoring thermals to allow short-term bursting of the CPU clock beyond the design limit. Basically, as other parts of the Moorestown platform are turned off, there is the potential to increase clock until certain temperatures are reached.

Bus Turbo mode Allows the bus speed to be increased in line with CPU frequency scaling thus reducing memory latency and increasing bus bandwidth.

Active power management Turns off certain parts of the system when not in use. E.g. turn of video decoders when web browsing. Power management is controlled by a ‘profile’ system that identifies certain usage modes and turns on and off ‘power islands’ as required. Here’s a thermal map of the system in a fully-on and controlled (‘gated’) state. This is something that may only be successfully achieved when using a Moblin-based OS.

Through this technique we should be looking at 2x power reduction overall but in certain usage modes the effect will be dramatic. Standby, video decoding and audio playback modes will be vastly more power efficient. Up to 50x in standby more for example.

Briertown. This embedded mixed-signal analogue control circuit integrates functions that were previously found on descreet chips. DC-DC power conversion, audio, LED control, battery charging circuits. This module also integrates with the ‘power-gating’ process mentioned above.

In addition to the information released this week, we should not forget what we’ve learnt before. We’re probably looking at a PowerVR SGX graphics core, hardware decoding video to 720p or even 1080p levels, hardware encoding of video and huge reductions in platform size (about 2x volume reductions expected in devices.)

CPU clock rates aren’t known at the moment (expect SKUs to be announced in early 2010) and pricing is also an unknown factor that could affect OEM choices but I think that’s enough information to be getting excited about for the time being.

Note: Moorestown could scale from smartphone to MID and ultra mobile PC scenarios, smartbooks and many other product categories. For a look past the technical specifications into what the Moorestown platform could mean for consumers, see this article.

Even if you couldn’t get to IDF in San Francisco last week you still have a chance to learn all about the mind-blowing technology that was covered at a very technical level. From cars to TV’s, MIDs to desktops, laptops to smartphones, there’s a huge range of markets that Intel addresses and for each segment there was at least one technical session at IDF. If you’ve got any interest in any of these areas (that leaves about 0.5% of you that landed on this by accident when searching for towns in the U.S. beginning with the letter M) you need to dive into some of the amazing content that’s been made available. Known as the content catalogue and used largely for session planning by attendees at IDF, it’s now populated with nearly all of the slides that were presented in those sessions. I’m working my way through the MID and Moblin-related PDFs but as I said before, there’s a lot of other markets and products covered.

Check out the session catalogue here.

We’re finally getting a look at what the Moorestown MIDphones of the future should offer us. Chippy has a short demonstration of Wind River’s interface running on top of Mobilin. This is designed for MIDs as compared to the standard Moblin which has an interface based around more standard input devices (ie: mouse and keyboard on a netbook). The demo you are about to see below is running on the Inventec MediaPhone that jkk went hands on with at Computex 2009.

While some of the demo looks pretty good, such as the smooth application opening animation, it is also quite disheartening to see that they couldn’t even get the app pages to slide smoothly at this point. Hoping that it won’t end up shipping like this (it doubtfully will).

[MIDMoves]

There’s a huge amount of information to digest around the announcement of the Intel Atom Development Program, or app-store but at a special lunch meeting with some of the key people in the IADP team I managed to refine what I think is going on here.

In summary you’re looking at Intel setting up a distribution, billing and  validation process for applications that are built to run on Windows and Moblin-based netbooks. Intel expect most of the (currently 19) Moblin distributors to build this into their Moblin-based distributions and on Windows, the system will be available as a downloadable application. It’s early stages for the program but I’m hearing that work on the back-end is well progressed and making an estimate that we’ll see this being fed into Moblin-based netbooks in the first half of 2010.

Key features of the program:

• To be available for Windows and Moblin-based netbooks initially with other Intel architectures being supported at a later date.
• Intel will manage the billing systems.
• Component sharing to allow code segments, engines etc to be shared in a controlled way and including a financial payments system.
• Reputation points. A feedback mechanism that scores developers.
• Validation process. Intel will run an operation that will check for thinks like: clean install, component use, malware, security, network utilization issues, appropriate content. They will not be testing software for bugs.
• Primary use is for binaries (executable programs) rather than source code. Open source sharing will be supported though.
• There will be a lightweight mechanisms for licensing code to restrict use and provide statistics for developers.

Clearly this is a significant step forward for Moblin but also a significant step forward for distribution of Windows applications for netbooks. Intel are saying that the program is not there to generate revenue directly but to enhance the platform and make it more attractive for end users and developers. (Increased product sales.) The revenue split is likely to be 70/30 with the 30% going towards financing the validation process back-end systems and further development.

With tens of millions of Netbooks already out there and tens of millions coming, this is clearly something that developers need to take a closer look at. Moblin is not just for netbooks and as the platform support widens, I would expect this to be available for devices based on the Moorestown platform later in 2010. With one CPU and software architecture running across all of those platforms, from smartphones to laptops, there is a lot of potential for this to rise high on the list of platforms that developers consider when they write mobile and web-focused software.

For more information, see the new app developer website from Intel

Chippy has posted a video of the Moblin 2.1  at IDF 2009. Moblin is Intel’s open source operating system project for MIDs and netbooks. While it is already up to version 2.1, it has seen very little adoption so far, but Intel is hoping to change that once Moorestown phones start coming to market. Anyway, peek the video below, and I don’t know if you’ll find it equally as funny, but for some reason, the giant cat monster terrorizing people made me chortle.