IDF Day 1 - Paul Otellini's Keynote

IDF Day One

Manufacturer: Intel

There has been a very sombre feeling amongst the press around IDF this year, as one of Intel's key visionaries is no longer working at the company. After more than 30 years service at Intel, Pat Gelsinger left or, more likely, was forced out for unknown reasons just days before the show kicked off.

Pat was a true visionary for the industry during his time at Intel, where he became the company's youngest vice president, its first CTO and was heavily involved in many of the company's microprocessor architectures. As a result, he's largely responsible - either directly or indirectly - for a lot of what we've come to take for granted in the world of computing.

He had the ability to make complex technological advancements sound incredibly simple without talking down to you, and it just doesn't feel like IDF without Pat taking to the stage to unveil the latest developments in Intel's microprocessor business. It's something we're going to have to get used to. While we know there's more to Intel than Pat Gelsinger, it's fair to say that he will be sorely missed.

Paul Otellini's Opening Keynote

Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief executive, opened this year's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco following his absence last year. The buzzword in his speech was "Continuum". This word left us dazed and confused, as Otellini either stopped short of giving an explanation of how that related to Intel, or that explanation was so vague that I completely missed it.

Otellini said convergence is yesterday's news, so it can't be that. But I get the feeling that it could be the continuation of convergence, wrapped in a new word that hasn't been overused for the past several years. Regardless, there were some exciting things in his keynote.


Vital to everything at Intel is its relentless pursuit of Moore's Law. Keeping with tradition from previous Otellini keynotes, Paul held up a 22nm wafer containing SRAM memory and logic circuits that will be used in future Intel CPUs and claimed that Moore's Law "is alive and thriving [at Intel]".