IDF 2011 Justin Rattner keynote

Moving on, we're asking whether an LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) base station can be built out of a multi-core PC. Had an idea, along with our friends at China Mobile, that it might be possible to turn a standard PC into a base station. Entered into an agreement with them two years ago in order to do this. Architecture is interesting. Key idea is that at the cell tower is just the RF front end. Radio signals are digitized, moved over fiber network to a data center. It's kind of base stations in the cloud.

Dude from China Mobile is onstage to demo. He's armed with a quad-core Sandy Bridge desktop and a pretty thick accent. Says they're using AVX instructions to do signal processing. With lots of optimization, can handle real-time requirements. And the workload isn't even using all of the computing power.

Rattner: We're not just looking at base stations, however high-volume network equipment and switches using standard elements from computers.

300X improvement in energy efficiency for computing

Our 10-year goal is to achieve a 300X improvement in energy efficiency for computing. Equal to 20 picojoules/FLOPS at the system level.