Pat Gelsinger kicked off his keynote here in San Francisco and chatted about embedded applications. He's talking to car manufacturers like BMW and Nissan, and wheeled in a BMW guy who said his firm is using Intel CPUs for embedded systems using the Atom microprocessor.

BMW demoed a 3D navigation system which includes 'points of interest' that goes to the back seat, and gives you a running commentary on what you're seeing. A lass reads out the commentary. In front of the back seat there's an LCD screen which keeps your passengers riveted.

Heck, you can even check your email in the back seat - what a nightmare, eh?

Gelsinger said the idea was to stream WiMAX to the car, so you can browse the web as well. Gelsinger said embedded Internet will transform the world with 15 billion connected devices by 2015.

Gelsinger then started talking about Nehalem and said the Itanium processor family was alive and well. In 2009, Itanium Tukwila is on track.

Dunnington, the 'six core wonder' has shipped since July, and will be launched to the marketplace next month. The first performance results from the Dunnington processor are superior results, he said.  An eight socket IBM TPCC benchmark is delivering an industry first, showing benefits of caching and architecture.

Nehalem is Intel's first dynamically scalable architecture. I7 is the premier member of the family, with the first products available in quarter four, and the rest of the family being rolled out during 2009. Gelsinger said Nehalem has hyperthreaded eight and four core monolithic designs. Power management in the shape of turbo mode is a breakthrough, claimed Gelsinger. Nehalem will shut things off when not in use. The concept has been around for about 10 years, but hasn't been possible to implement before Nehalem.

The power control unit is a microcontroller which only works on power management and uses a million transistors - Gelsinger said that was more transistors than his own design project, the 486. The unit detects how many cores are active and switches cores on and off as needed.

NASA, said \Gelsinger, will buy many Nehalems in the future in its insatiable quest for more computing power. X