Intel Talks Gesture and Facial Recognition, Low Powered Chips at Developer Forum

IDF 2012

The Intel Developers Forum officially launched today, although its Labs group had a Day Zero event yesterday, and as expected the company rolled out low powered processors along with some other interesting technologies on stage.

David Perlmutter, Intel’s head of its architectural group gave the opening keynote and showed quite an array of interesting technologies, not all of them home grown, before rolling out the big processor news.

He showed Nuance Communication’s software for a voice recognition demonstration. The software offers the type of help features that are currently available in both Apple’s iPhones and on Android devoices. Nuance expects to ship the software next quarter.

A key technology that will probably interest the growing group of people that use their smartphones for banking and purchasing products was a demo with MasterCard that showed Intel’s security technology authenticating a credit card- it was used with an ultrabook but there is little doubt that the company will also be looking at tablets and other mobile devices in the future.

The company reiterated its previous statement that there are 20 tablets based on it’s Atom processor technology currently in development by its OEMs, but the first on-stage demo went a bit awry. Expect to get a good look at most of these when Microsoft officially rolls out Windows 8 next month.

The company demoed its next generation Core microprocessor, code-named Haswell that will be targeted at next generation ultrabooks and tablets. The 22nm processor is will feature integrated HD graphics support, new instructions for faster encryption and performance, new hardware-based security features and low-power processor sub-states to enable longer battery life.

Perlmutter showed it against the company’s current Ivy Bridge processor and it ran more efficiently at half power than Ivy Bridge did at full power. The processor is expected to appear in products sometime next year.

The starting of the keynote with voice recognition software was a pointer in the direction the company is headed with its partners. It has released a Perceptual Computing Software Development Kit, available next quarter, that will allow hardware and software developers to incorporate gesture, voice and facial recognition capabilities in future products.