Paul Otellini's Opening Day Keynote
Intel's Paul Otellini just delivered his IDF keynote to mark the opening of the event. Covering what he calls the three spokes of IDF, Technologies, Together (networking with people) and Timing, Paul delivered commentary on Intel's bigger picture.He spoke about the Internet bubble bursting in 2001 and what a long three years it's been for the industry to get itself back on its feet. The industry's recovery period is well underway and some sectors are experiencing good growth, something that Intel wishes to capitalise on.
He made a big deal about the digital home, something that Intel expects to kick the next three billion PC users into action, buying hardware. WiFi is one of the digital home drivers with WiFi capability to ship on nearly 100% of all notebooks sold in 2005.
A similar thing is happening with mobile phones, with approaching market saturation in GPRS devices being sold. When that happens, Intel expect the cost of voice calls to become free as the telephony market place moves to data as its main revenue source.
Those three billion users will mostly come from Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, as Western Europe, Australia, East Asia and the United States all home in on a completely digital existence.
Paul also commented on the entertainment industry. 700 million people have seen the film Titanic since its release seven years ago. Intel are expecting future films to have one billion people watch them inside the first year of release, due to broadband and other digital communications getting films into homes everywhere.
Intel's 65nm shift was also openly talked about, Intel hoping to make a full-scale shift of all their major semiconductor manufacture to the new process throughout 2005. Each new process switch allows a doubling of transistor count and density in the same die space, so the move to 65nm is crucial, given the growth of large transistor count silicon in major semiconductor areas. Music to NVIDIA and ATI's ears?
Finally, the focus from Paul was on Intel's platforms. Think Centrino and the new Intel PCI Express Pentium 4 platform. Wholesale shifts in technology that work well together. Their next full platform push comes in the digital home area as his keynote came full circle. Specs were delivered for DLNA in June (more on DNLA soon, in a separate article!) and the DTCP/IP (protected digital transmission over IP networks) is expected be delivered this year. Both are key building blocks for Intel's vision of the digital home.
Overall, a bullish opening keynote from Intel's COO, setting the ground for the rest of IDF. There's plenty more that he talked about too, keep your eyes open for that on the site very soon.
