Today’s JavaOne General Session was presented by Intel.  Chris Mellisinos of SUN Microsystems introduced
Doug Fisher, Intel Vice-President

Fisher showed a video from Intel with the theme, “Software Unlocks Hardware”.
He showed a picture of a spiral, and said that innovation in hardware drives innovation in software which drives innovation in hardware.
Software initiatives in SaaS, the open source community, SOA, parallelism, Java, and virtualization all help to drive the hardware market.

Fisher talked about Intel’s “Tick Tock” cadence that they use to set the innovation pace.  The “Tock” is the innovation of a new micro-architecture for their chip set.  After about one year, the “Tick” occurs whereby Intel is able to shrink the current architecture.  The cycle then repeats itself.  Fisher said that if the diameter of the earth represented the first transistor ever made, today the earth would be the size of a marble.

Fisher said that Intel has a strong partnership with SUN, and is focusing work on making Solaris, Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, and SUN Studio perform better on the Intel platforms.

Intel’s “Threading Building Blocks” API is used by developers to implement multi-core parallelism.  Fisher announced that the “Threading Building Blocks” API is now available for OpenSolaris using the SUN Studio.

Last year, the release of the Xeon processor resulted in a 20% performance gain for the Java VM.  With the new partnership between SUN and Intel, a team of SUN and Intel employees working on the same Xeon hardware were able to optimize the Java VM, and achieve a 68% performance gain.

Fisher then held up a small vial that contained 1000 of Intel’s new Atom processor.  The Atom processor is new architecture chip for mobile devices.  You can watch the “What If…” video at http://moblin.org.