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[FiRe] Intel & Intel's Future
These are notes from the Future in Review conference. More here.
Claude Leglise, VP at Intel Capital, and William Swope, VP Enterprise Platforms Group of Intel, talked about the present and future of Intel Corporation.
Intel has evolved to a processor and now rather general, complex computing-related company. The personal computer is one of the largest-distributed electronics devices in the World, thus it drives a lot of technology.
Radio on Chips: The most notable immediate future trend will be that, every chip has some kind of radio ability going forward, both visible and invisible to the user. The idea is that, every device will communicate, and the Centrino chip is a manifestation of that idea. Flipside: Every communication device will also compute. -> Convergence regarding devices in their ability to communicate and compute.
Intel: A Software Company? There was a notable discussion on stage between the Intel managers and moderator Mark Anderson, whether Intel is indeed much more a software than a hardware company right now. They said they're not going to be in the operating systems business nor in the applications business. But runtime environments have to evolve. Intel wants to differentiate their chips "when they ship". And that's done with software (Claude Leglise: "Chip design has actually become software design."), but not in the conventional way. All the hardware vendors will have to deal with that issue. The challenge is how to put software on Moore's Law path. Thus, by definition, Intel has to move up one layer to bring software along with Moore's law.
Large new business hopes: Single-chip cellphones (with camera and other functions). Telecommunications gear. Still the personal computer.