The Intel Developer Forum took place this week in San Francisco. The annual event is typically relevant primarily to systems integrators and OEMs, but in recent years, software has taken a continually larger role in the event. Intel's Threaded Building Blocks, for example, remains a popular topic of interest to enterprise software crowd. This year, with the rise of the datacenter operating system and data intensive computing platforms, Intel was showing off its efforts in those arenas as well.

Perhaps the most interesting new project I saw from Intel at the show was its new Web interface for controlling OpenStack Compute. Thus far, simple to use administration tools have been largely absent from OpenStack, and seeing Intel quietly demonstrating such tools, and claiming that they will be open sourced in Q4, was refreshing.

Elsewhere, the big hardware push was for ultrabooks, Intel's term for the more mature, powerful breed of netbooks that have arrived of late. Such a transition was inevitable: the line between netbook and laptop was blurred even further by Apple's release of those super slim MacBook Airs earlier this year. We've passed the point where netbooks had to shed functionality to remain small. Really what happened here was that laptops just got smaller.

In the meantime, Intel seems to be feeling the pinch from ARM's explosive growth. Even Intel success story Apple is using ARM, and Intel's push to optimise Android shows that Otellini and company are no longer sitting out of the smartphone wars. Next year, we'll start to see Intel-based Android phones, and after that, it's just a matter of time until the line between phones and desktops is blurred in the same manner as the line between netbooks and laptops vanished. Expect to see desktop docks for phones soon enough.

Meego is still going. Despite the departure of Nokia from the Meego camp, the Meego Developers Conference USA still took place earlier this week. It was right in the heart of San Francisco, in the Hyatt Regency that played host to Mel Brooks' High Anxiety, and Hunter Thompson's famous drunken Super Bowl rant from the balcony.

And it was the site where the Meego faithful struggled to prove their OS of choice was still alive. As a conference, it was packed with talks, and almost devoid of exhibitors. Attendance was free, ensuring a healthy mix of real developers and retired tourists with no idea what Meego was. Free lunch is a powerful enticement.

At the end of the day, this event was basically all about Intel. With Nokia now huddling together with Microsoft, Intel is really the last major vendor standing behind Meego. As Peter Winston, president of Integrated Computer Solutions Incorporated, put it: Intel wants to sell chips, Nokia needed a blockbuster.

Nokia was falling behind the iPhone/Android crowd, and instead of waiting for Meego to mature, it decided to jump onto Microsoft's chariot in the smart phone race. Intel was clearly not happy with this decision, and at the conference, all references to Nokia sleak new Meego-based phone were expunged. One anonymous attendee close to the Meego community said that he expected free Nokia phones for all attendees until Nokia walked away from Meego in February.

On the other hand, there was still free hardware at the event. San Francisco geeks have known since March that Intel is holding AppUpp Labs; time-share-like two-hour talks where attendees get free Exo PC tablets at the end. Said geeks have been passing the word of mouth on these events, and they've packed every recent instance of the talks with developers, non-developers, and even some homeless people. All received their tablets at the end.

Of course, those tablets are qualified as loaners, and while they come with Meego installed, most everyone we've spoken to has used the included Windows 7 license to install a better OS on the device.

It's a wildly different tactic than Google has taken. Free tablets were given to Google I/O attendees, most of whom paid for the privileged of being there. Additionally, Google's Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) has been a hot item in the hacker community, but remained unavailable to the general public. Instead of opening a cattle call to all comers, Google attended the recent hacker-friendly Maker Faire, and handed out ADKs to developers showing off cool projects, and to the room full of hacker spaces at the event.

Intel's hardware handouts are a bit like pulling up to a popular curb and handing out energy drinks, whereas Google's tactic is more like finding a target and strategically mailing it the product. I'd wager Google will see more return on its dime, especially after having attended an Intel tablet session and seeing the level of discourse at these open events.

That “tablet session” at the Meego conference turned out not to yield a tablet: Intel ran out on the first day of the show. That didn't stop one fellow from attempting to get a second one by attending this event. Dubbed “PNG-guy,” by the rest of the Meego conference attendees, this fellow asked the same questions in every Intel session. Questions like “What do you mean by compliance?” “What's GCC?” and the ever popular “What's a PNG?”

At one point, when PNG-guy asked why he needed to include an index.html file in his Web directory, the Intel representative, fed up with the constant stream of stupid questions, just answered “Because I said so.”

Contrast that with the deeply Arduino-focused technical questions we overheard at Google's booth at Maker Faire: developers there were asking about methods for managing signal strength from one device to another before hooking them into an Android device.

My goodness, a lot happened this weekend, didn't it? I mean, outside of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan... Did I miss any countries in there?

Perhaps the biggest for you, dear readers, is this blog posting from Mark Reinhold. In it, he states that himself, John Duimovich and Jason Gartner of IBM, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, professor Doug Lea of SUNY Oswego, and Adam Messinger of Oracle are drafting a new take on OpenJDK governance. The initial governance board--while made up of some rather esteemed and intelligent folks--hasn't exactly been active. Reinhold insinuates in his blog posting that the initial OpenJDK governance board has completed its tenure, as he thanks them for their service.

This first draft of new governance rules should be available soon, wrote Reinhold. While governance on the OpenJDK is good news, two very bad things happened this weekend, as well.

By now, you've already heard about Intel. This historically reliable company is just about as predictable as the phases of the moon: it hits or exceeds both product shipment deadlines and earnings predictions every quarter. But the Sandy Bridge processor is a complex beast, and along the way, an engineer or two made a mistake. It sounds like this will delay Sandy Bridge for a month or so. Everyone building with Sandy Bridge will likely have to spend some time reworking schedules, if they haven't already.

Another bit of bad news comes from SourceForge, which was hit by hackers. The consequences are a recommended password reset for all users, the possible removal of CVS services from the site, and a massive write-up describing the entire incident. Everyone needs to check in on their projects ASAP, if for no other reason than to change your password.

Finally, the biggest news of all, for any of you doing Web development in JavaScript: JQuery 1.5 is out. Everyone should check out the changes written up in the blog entry to see what's new, or just download the actual code and dive right in.

Agner Fog is a computer science professor at the University of Copenhagen's college of engineering. As he puts it, “I have done research on microprocessors and optimized code for more than 12 years. My motivation is to make code compatible, especially when it pretends to be.”

Fog has written a number of blog entries about Intel's compilers and how they treat competing processors. In November, AMD and Intel settled, and Fog has written up a magnificent analysis of the agreement.

If you have any interest in compilers, and in Intel's compilers, you should definitely read his paragraph-by-paragraph read through.

Fog broke it down for me:

The machine code is actively testing for vendor ID before testing for any CPU models or instruction sets. When the vendor ID is not "GenuineIntel" then it chooses what Intel calls the "generic path", which is the least advanced among the possible paths, using the oldest instruction set for compatibility with old processors.

This happens in code generated by the Intel compiler if you allow CPU dispatching. It also happens in many Intel function libraries that are called from code compiled with the Intel compiler or with any other compiler, even if you are not explicitly asking for CPU dispatching. — Agner Fog

The big question now is: Will Intel remove barriers to its compilers working on other processors? And thus far, no one seems to know the answer.

But Fog has written some code to solve the problem. You know. Just in case. He says it's "very easy. Remove the check for vendor ID and check for supported instruction sets only. I have made a small function library as a showcase to show how to do this and how to support all x86 platforms. http://www.agner.org/optimize/#asmlib"

My colleague Jeff Feinman just published a story about new Intel parallel programming tools. In it, he mentioned that Intel bought out RapidMind, which also helps scale applications running on many-core processors.

RapidMind was a stand out at some of the trade shows that I attended; it produces software that creates a layer of abstraction intended to make parallel programming easier. Its software worked on a number of different processors and was not tied to Intel technology, and it is my sincere hope that it stays that way. One of RapidMind's biggest selling points was that it is an alternative to vendor tools and SDKs that may lock developers into a specific hardware platform.

Intel has been very innovative developing parallel tools for its platform. Intel's Parallel Studio tackles some of the complexity that parallel programming introduces, helps developers avoid common mistakes, and most importantly, cuts down on the time it takes to develop parallel applications. RapidMind's technology will no doubt complement the work Intel has already done, but Intel shouldn't drop RapidMind's core products just to absorb its technology.