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Glimpses of the Future from the Intel Developer Forum
km790816 writes: "Lots of cool stuff on CNet about the Intel Developer Forum, including the next version of the P4, followed by 3GIO on the desktop (1st version 0.5 gigabytes per second of data-transfer capacity but bumps up to 1, 2, 4 and 8 gigabytes per second with the use of more wires.), and Intel's work to embed wireless in silicon. Quote from the CTO: 'We could get it to the point where radios are built into every product we make, giving every device seamless, roaming connectivity. You will see orders of magnitude of cost (decreases) through integration into silicon.'"
I have a strog doubt that we will ever see working DRM. If it were possible to use this kind of technique to control people we would be driving cars that were limited to the speed limit. The situation is the same, consumers will shy away from products in proportion to how limited they are, so the manufacturers will find ways to avoid such a plnalty on their products
A great example of this I was a few days ago was a bin of RCA Lyra MP3 players for sale cheap, and noone was touching them, they are a pain to own simple because of the hoops they make you jump through because of DRM, and there are other players that don't, so they win.
Another example is DVD players here in New Zealand. When DVD first came out we had a crappy region code, and noone was importing suitable disks (as well as the artificial delays imposed by the US, sorry I mean studios), so people 'had' to pay to get them chipped to non-region-coded, these days you have trouble buying a player that is not 'chipped' straight from the retailer, as they know they cann't sell ones without this 'feature'.
I see DRM as a cash grab from the studios, they need to be able to point at something and say 'see - we are trying to save ourselfs, not legistale us more money!', unfortunately that part of the ploy will probably work, makes you proud to pay your tax dollars! (grrr).
The higher the radio density, the lower the power (and thus range) you need. For example, Bluetooth has very short range (30 feet), so a large number of Bluetooth devices can operate in a certain area. We can imagine these future devices might use adaptive transmit power to lower their range to the absolute minimum (e.g. those Bluetooth headsets for cell phones could probably work just fine with a range of 4 feet).
Hammer-based CPU's will not be running 32-bit code in an emulation mode. Hammer is basically another 32-bit native x86 architecture, with some additional 64-bit registers and other 64-bit specific items included, which can be used by a programmer if they wish. It WILL run 32-bit quite well, very much unlike the Itanium.