CEO Paul Otellini Keynote
Over the last year Intel's delivered stonking new CPUs, as it promised. Not only that, but it's helped Apple double its notebook market share. In fact, Apple's moved completely onto Intel CPUs now, all within the space of a year. It's been a pretty good year for Intel and that comes across in Otellini's keynote speech. He doesn't just rave about the past though... the future must be discussed, too.
HD drives us forward
The demands on our PCs are ever increasing and the ways we use them are changing. Otellini gave examples that included Apple's OS X, Windows Vista, Google Desktop Search and that social networking, bandwidth guzzling, copyright nightmare that is YouTube.
Back in 2003, before YouTube was around to give us funny videos of people singing, decoding such videos streamed over the net would have kept a then speedy Pentium-M rather busy. In 2004 a high end Pentium 4 would use up 40% of its processing power, but now a Core2Duo cuts it up, no trouble.
However, as video goes HD (and is is - prices will start to come down soon, and uptake will increase as Christmas draws now), processing demands increase further still. Encoding high definition content takes 8x the CPU power of an SD video.
Energy efficiency
Intel's energy efficiency plans are panning out well too, says Otellini. As people get more mobile with their hardware, batteries need to last longer and machines need to get smaller and lighter, while still providing enough processing power.
The Pentium-M was a good start, with Core2Duo's July launch delivering big performance boosts while reducing power consumption. Speaking of Core2Duo, Intel's been getting inside some different computers over the last year...
Intel Inside your Apple
An Apple representative appeared for the first time at an IDF keynote. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing spoke about the year long transition to Intel's CPUs (IBM and Motorola must be shedding a tear about now...) and how its helped them develop new product designs and boost performance.
Intel powered Apple laptops have proved very popular. In 2006 Apple's notebook market share increased from 6% up to 12%.
