Farmer Pat Gelsinger, who also happens to be a Senior VP, arrived at the stage in a blaze of glory.

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His initial sobering message indicated that Intel, like most other tech companies, had significant challenges to overcome in the next 10 years.

How do we do 'more with less' was the question he posed at the outset. Sounds oxymoronic, right?

Gelsinger then went through the steps that Intel is implementing in achieving such an aim.

From a processor viewpoint, Penryn and then Nehalem are the answers to the CPU problem in the short term, he reckoned. We already know the technical details, so, again, head on over to here.

Pat was proud to announce that Intel has eco-technology leadership, through the pursuit of an environmentally-friendly policy, sustainable manufacturing and energy-efficient performance. For these parameters he cited programs such as the Energy Star initiative, the construction of Intel's first 'green' building in Haifa, Israel, and data centre efficiency, respectively. The latter point was especially interesting as Pat highlighted just how much efficient, in terms of hardware required for the same performance, Intel's latest data centres had now become.

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The graph highlights that in just 5 years the spatial and power requirement of producing 3.7TFlops of compute has dropped substantially, facilitated via higher-performing Blades packed with a greater concentration of multi-core processors, meaning a win-win situation of more compute per CPU and more CPUs per rack.

Continuing to speak on servers, Pat Gelsinger stated that Intel would bolster its Core microarchitecture-based Xeon lineup with the new 7300-series (Caneland). These low-power, dual- and quad-core SKUs will be aimed at the MP market and be available in H2 this year.

Gelsinger also announced Intel's tie-up with Sun Microsystems. The deal will feature both hardware and software integration. Sun will release an Intel-based dual-socket, quad-core Blade in the next few months, followed by the updated Blade Modular 8000 (currently an AMD Opteron box), to a four-way, quad-core server based on Caneland technology.

Covering a wide range of topics, Gelsinger also spoke about the advancements made to Intel's vPro technology. He demonstrated remote diagnosis and repair of his non-booting laptop, via vPro. The twist here lay with vPro operating via a wireless 802.11n connection.