Intel, which has been pushing a theme of lower power chips and energy
conservation of late, had a bit of fun helping to kick off the Oracle Open
World conference in San Francisco today.
Toward the end of his keynote remarks, Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off what’s considered to be the
first all-electric sports car. The car, which uses Intel chips in computers both in back and front of the car, one running an Oracle 10G lite database, is made by French automaker Venturi.
On stage the car looked slick, and even better in a fast-paced video.
Hold onto your wallet though, the sticker price is $500,000, plus tax. “But
with that,” quipped, an Intel Monaco official, “we’ll give you an iPod with it for free.”
The Venturi car can go up to 170 miles per hour and zero to 100
kilometers speed in a mere 4.5 seconds.
“It’s sexy, powerful, and environmentally friendly,” said the Intel official. It also takes three and a half hours to recharge, though it can travel some 400 kilometers on a full charge.
There are several tech angles to the futuristic auto.
With its built-in WiMax connection, the Venturi sports car can communicate wirelessly with an Oracle database. Intel said it has developed an end to end fleet management solution which can retrieve real time information from a Web portal about such status readings as the car’s electric current and voltage usage.
Venturi’s data center uses servers based on Intel’s Itanium processor. Intel is actively pushing for wider adoption of WiMax, also known as 802.16, an emerging standard for
wireless broadband over metropolitan areas.
Earlier, Otellini played up his company’s strong support for Oracle whose
software is used extensively by Intel, as well as at numerous customers
sites. Otellini said more than half the Global 100 list of the biggest
companies use servers or computers based on Intel’s high-end Itanium processor and that many of them are running Oracle software.
In a video presentation, the Chinese interactive gaming company Shanda
was highlighted for its very demanding use of both Itanium and Oracle’s
database software. A Shanda official in the video said the company can have
as many as 20 million users playing concurrently online for its more popular
games.
“When you have tens of thousands of players attack the same city at the
same time, that requires extensive load balancing and reliability,” he said.
