Intel Developer Forum 2006 will this year mostly be about Intel’s new microprocessor architecture Core, which you’ve perhaps already noticed in our news. Anyhow, there are more interesting things being displayed at IDF that we don’t think you want to miss out on, at Bit-Tech they’ve summmarized day one at IDF and managed to find some really interesting things. Among others they report about a special Battlefield 2 demonstration at IDF that displayed some of the advantages with Intel’s Robson Technology that use NAND flash memory together with a regular mechanical hardrive. Simply to speed up program starts and other heavy access applications. Loading maps with Battlefield 2 can be a long and painful process which made it a perfect software to use for Intel when demonstrating the advantages of Robson Technology.
“With Robson working, and what was called ‘Intel’s special sauce’ (leading to quips amongst the audience of ‘Intel wants to feed gamers its special sauce’), the load times for a Battlefield 2 were cut, roughly in half.
This led to an amusing demo where the chap playing on the Conroe system was in the map, had grabbed a plane and was able to frag his opponent with a hail of missile fire just as the poor chap was spawning.”
Robson Technology, and even better flash hardrives, are looking very promising and we are really looking forward to these technologies. Something that is about to disappear from Intel’s market is ATX as the chip giant will stop making reference boards after 2006. It will move on to the BTX format completely, while at the same time AMD finds a transistion unnecessary. Which unfortuantely brings some more unpleasant upgrade cycles.
:: Read on about this and much more at Bit-Tech’s coverage of Dag 1 at IDF
