What was the coolest stuff at Intel Developer Forum?

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Lots of new CPUs on the way

I won’t go into more details in this post, since you’ll hear a lot more from Loyd.  However, Intel is very ambitious with a lot of new products in the pipeline. The most-important news is that Intel’s newest microarchitecture is back from the lab and working well enough to demo.  Intel got Sandy Bridge back from the fab about a month ago, and this Nehalem successor includes integrated graphics, unlike the multi-die products that will soon ship.  We didn’t hear any details about Sandybridge, beyond Intel showing a brief demo.

We also didn’t learn much about Larrabee, Intel’s forthcoming discrete graphics architecture.  Most analysts found it disturbing that Intel only showed a native graphics demo with a ray-traced game conversion.  There are some rumors that DirectX performance isn’t very good yet, so Intel didn’t want to show anything that could be compared to competing products.

Will Intel be writing a big check to Europe (and AMD)?

The one topic that spoiled Intel’s IDF message was the recent publication of emails that showed Intel in a very negative light for their competitive behavior.  As an analyst, I don’t want to go on record with a legal opinion.  There was a lot of discussion in the press room about this topic, and at least one analyst buddy is being pulled into the lawsuit. My only comment is that Intel will likely say that these customers were just being paranoid, and they had no reason to fear Intel’s reaction to a purchase of AMD CPU’s.  It will be interesting to see what happens, but I predict that it will take a long time to resolve this case.  Feel free to offer your own comments on this topic, since it will be fascinating to watch this play out.

Want more technical details on IDF topics?

Loyd and I have quite a few notes from the conference, and there are many interesting topics that deserve an article to dive into the details.  For more highlights, check out Loyd’s daily show reports at Tom’s Hardware. In this post, I just wanted to give a few high-level impressions.  Let us know what topics you feel aren’t being covered well by the other sites, and we can dedicate an article to covering it in more detail.  Feedback is always welcome.

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