Speaking on the final day of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel's chief technology officer came out wearing a pair of rabbit ears. A sensor on his head measured his stress level. The ears rose if he was nervous, and they fell flat if he was calm. His ears stayed up the whole time he wore it. But he did have something interesting to show.
Rattner said he learned not to make predictions and talk only about technology he could demonstrate from a speech his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger (pictured right), made at IDF in 2002. Gelsinger famously predicted "Radio Free Intel," where every Intel processor would ship with an onboard radio.
"Pat caught a lot of flak for that, especially the free part," Rattner said. "We had no idea how to do that."
Most of the time, however, it's better to separate analog and digital functions into separate chips. One of the tough problems is interference between the analog and digital parts. It is a big challenge for Intel to do the same with standard chips made by the millions. Intel set out to create a digital radio, over the past decade, and it has finally completed the task.
Intel created digital frequency synthesizers, sigma delta analog to digital converters, digital phase modulators, and digital radio frequency power amplifiers. Those were the elements of digital radio receivers and transmitters.
Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Associates, said that cellphone baseband chips combined different kinds of analog and digital signals on the same chip. But he confirmed that the digital radio is a lot harder to do because of the interference problems.
The Intel chip is code-named Rosepoint and it features two Atom microprocessor cores on the same chips as a WiFi radio. Rattner showed off a wafer (which is processed and then sliced into chips) that contained the Rosepoint designs, proving that the technology is in prototype production.
"Here it is, a not-so-free Radio Free Intel," Rattner said.
He added in a question-and-answer session with the press, "We're reasonably confident the radio will be a relatively small part of the" overall chip. He said that the interference is dealt with on the fly, as the synthesizer isolates an interfering signal and then cancels it.