In many marketing strategies, you will often see product offerings get positioned in a Good / Better / Best kind of framework. Whether intentional or accidental, this morning's keynote followed the same pattern, broken out by the VPs that presented. So let's go through them in order..
Dr. Hermann Eul, Vice President & General Manager, Mobile and Communications Group
This was the "good" presentation, but not because there were some great news in the segment, but rather because the execution could have been better. On the upside, he was able to announce the new Atom-class processor called Bay Trail, formally known as: "Intel® Atom™ Z3000 Series." You can read the full press release here: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013/09/11/intel-launches-new-multicore-low-power-socs-for-tablets-2-in-1s-and-other-computing-devices
But, some of the highlights of this amazing new product is that is built on our latest, cutting edge, 22nm process that uses the tri-gate transistors and is based on our ultra-efficient Silvermont architecture and will come with 4 cores. Perhaps the best part of this announcement was that, purely by coincidence (I swear the guy wasn't a plant), our CEO got asked yesterday: "Tablets are cool and everything, but when do I get to edit video on a tablet?" I believe Brian's answer was roughly "soon." Well, we now know what Brian means by "soon" because, as part of a demo of what Bay Trail can do, live on stage the specialist used it to actually edit video on a tablet. From any angle you look at it, that was awesome! But then we slipped into the area that wasn't so awesome. The next demo involved brining some fashion "expert" lady up on stage & the next 20 minutes seemed to drag on as she talked about things that I don't understand. i think I'm in the core demographic of the audiance where I can honestly say that a) I've never walked down a cat walk & b) i have no intention of ever doing that, in the real world or the virtual one. While, mathematically I can appriciate the computational complexities of simmulating the behavioer of cloth on an avatar, every minute of an IDF keynote is precisious and to waste it on this topic that didn't resonate with the audiance really should have been reconsidered. But aside from that glitch, there was some great news and the future of Intel in tablets looks extremely bright!
Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President & General Manager, PC Client Group
This was definitely the better keynote because every keynote was amazing. There was a combination of Bay Trail and Haswell designs shown that really highlight the innovative designs that are either hear already or coming around the corner. The new term of #2in1 is really going to make people rethink their future purchase. I, like many other people that have tried a tablet, can see the advantages they have pretty easily. But, like most profesionals that spend more time typing on a keyboard than I'd care to admit, I sometimes need the power of a more conventiona computing experience. And that is where this 2in1 concept shines;
It is a Tablet when you want and a PC when you need it
it is literally the perverbial "best of both worlds" and that is an approach that has people talking. At one point they had 4 different folks with 4 different models - some slide, some detached, some flipped, and one of them did cartwheels - or ferriswheels as they called it. Since the keynote, I've spoken to several people and, interstingly, many different folks like the different solutions better. Which, says to me, the future will usen many of these various different approaces to get you what you really want - which is simply whatever you want, whatever you want, without compromises.
Another big part of Kirk's talk was about the wonders of the vPro refesh. In fact there was 1 slide that had some amazing stuff on it, but he went through it so fast, it felt a little bit like an auction, but here's the slide:
But then, as if the potential future of nevery having to remember a password again wasn't good enough, we got a little peak at the next core product, codenamed Broadwell, which is based on 14 nm and was running live on stage. The interesting point was the showed it running the same bechnmark as a current generation processor (Haswell), but it consumed 30% Less Power! That is so cool (all pun intended) that there should actually be completely fanless versions of the future Intel Core products. How amazing is that?
Douglas Fisher, Vice President & General Manager, Software and Services Group
And last, but the best, was Doug Fisher, who closed out the keynote with great story after great story, including a brief conversation with an executive with Google.. All of that was to completely cement the sentiment what Intel is into Android in a big way. Between the two of them, there was tight commitment to be closely aliigned on all future releases which, quite honestly was music to my ears. In truth, I've been an Android Fan Boy since 1.6 and I think it is just brilliant. But then to find out that there are over 1,000 engineers at Intel devoted to JUST supporting OSes from Google, I thought that was just brilliant! But it didn't stop there. Instead, there were some really cool tools and services that are available today for your use. In order that they were discussed, they were:
- Beacon Mountain - fulling integrated Android development environment
- Havok Project Anarchy - a FREE tool for developing for Android, iOS, and Tizen
- The NEW Intel XDK - an HTML5 Cross-platform Development Kit that publishes to Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Android, iOS, and Facebook
But the umbrella that covered it all was the Intel Developer Zone - the 1 place that any and all software developers can go to get all kinds of support regardless of the type of development they are doing. It doesn't matter if you write for Windows, or for Android, or in HTML5, we've got all types of help for you from Tools to code snippets and other resources to help you to get your project finished! You can find it at:
http://software.intel.com<< go there and sign-up today to get kept informed of what's going on!
So that's it - that's what I saw - leave me a comment below if you have any questions or hit me on social media at:
~ +Eric Mantion on Google+ or @CaptGeek on Twitter
Icon Image:
