MIDs still exist?
Moving on to MIDs, which seem to have been snazzily renamed "handheld Internet-connected devices", Otellini declared that Atom architecture had been "designed with a purpose". Whether that purpose was actually to cannibalise Intel's more lucrative chip business is doubtful, but the CEO said netbooks had effectively managed to fill the gap in what would otherwise have been a down year for Intel, and that now there was "no looking back" as far as Atom was concerned. Otellini didn't sigh, but he may as well have.
Instead, Otellini said Intel was realising people wanted to do more with their netbooks than the firm had originally anticipated and, with this in mind, he announced the Intel Atom Developer Program.
According to the Intel spin machine, the program will apparently provide a framework for independent software vendors (ISVs) and software developers to create and sell applications for netbooks and other Atom based products. It will be cross platform and will therefore purportedly support multiple operating systems and run-time environments, to allow developers to use a single code for various device platforms.
The program, which works on Windows and Moblin, already has its first three customers (Asus, Acer and Dell) and Otellini said he envisioned a wide variety of OEM support, including OEM application store fronts where validated software applications would be sold. In other words, Intel is following Apple, Google and even Nokia into the app store space. But Intel's Atom already has some 460 embedded design wins, so the app development concept is potentially huge.
Medfield
Otellini continued on to say huge progress was being made in terms of handheld devices, with Medfield set to burst onto the scene in 2011. He said that handheld devices would grow by a factor of eight over the next five years and that Medfield would unleash some "as-yet-unimagined devices," although to be fair, Intel has been doing a pretty good job of imagining them for a while now; it's just getting them out to market which seems a little bit on the conceptual side. To prepare for the expected ‘onslaught', Otellini showed Moblin 2.1, a rather attractive update of Intel's own operating system, running on a MID.
To finish up, Otellini didn't forget to mention servers, which he said were "the backbone" of Intel's continuum. He noted, however, that the challenge would be to scale up server offerings in an affordable fashion, something the firm planned to do by - buzz word alert - "leveraging virtualisation and cloud technology."
All in all, an informative keynote. The only three questions left unanswered being "where's Pat?" "what about WIMAX" and "Why didn't you mention Larrabee?"
