One laptop, many displays
posted by Loring Wirbel on 09/23/2009 | comments 3
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!
Reader Comments
at 9/24/2009 2:05:39 PM, BobsUrUncle said:
Silly FPGA tricks. Multiple displays ? What happened to having multiple windows open on your screen or is that not Kewl enough?
at 9/24/2009 7:47:05 PM, JeeShen Lee said:
At some point, I agree with BobsUrUncle. But another thought, this could be useful for multi-domain system developer. Switching between displays to work on multi-domain system (software, hardware, material etc) is a neat feature for some professional say web application developer who needs the logic screen fulls with IDE (Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio and some browsers) and design screen fulls with layout tools (Expression Design, Expression Webs, Macromedia Flash, Photoshop etc). This is applicable especially on the space limited laptop's screen.
at 11/24/2009 5:21:49 AM, B.S.Choudhary said:
Thank You!
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