One laptop, many displays

I’ve been attending Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco and was looking in vain for good embedded FPGA applications. Little did I know that the wild four-screen laptop shown by EVP Dadi Perlmutter in a Sept. 23 keynote, was based on an FPGA performing data parsing and distribution duties for the four displays. Charlie Demerjian at the SemiAccurate blog provided the missing piece, though Intel was not too forthcoming about FPGA architecture or task partitioning.

The design features a single full-size display above the hinge, and three mini-displays above the keyboard. Perlmutter explained it would be useful for those that wanted to keep various email, social networking, and video portals open and visible, while performing primary work on the largest display. Sounds like a recipe for mental disorder to me, but I’m just old school.

At first glance, it would appear that the FPGA is implementing DSP heavy-lifting similar to the video demos Xilinx and Altera recently showed at IBC. However, in this design, it appears that control-plane tasks to manage display content and change the priorities of particular screens. We may not be able to place this application in the broadest utility category, but for a proof of principle, it sure looks cool!