San Francisco (CA) - The reorganization of business units at Intel also affected traditions at IDF: For the first time in several years, it was not the former CTO Pat Gelsinger who presented the outlook. Justin Rattner, former director of the firm's microprocessor development and newly appointed head of the corporate technology group informed us about tech that is cooking in Intel's labs.
A keynote at IDF certainly meant for Justin Rattner and Intel breaking with traditions. For once, despite he is widely believed to be one of Intel's smartest and the brain behind major Intel processors of the past two decades, Rattner is of rather quiet nature and typically remained in the background of major events. At most, we heard his speeches at smaller conferences such as the Microprocessor Forum. On the other side, the keynote marked a departure of Pat Gelsinger from a habit he had been doing for quite some time. But Gelsinger took seat in the first row of the keynote room to have a good look at how Rattner managed to give his first industry outlook speech at IDF.
"Imagine a phone that can translate languages in real time so you can talk to people in other countries more easily, or finding a photo of your children playing with a pet from among the thousands of photos you have stored in multiple computers in your house," said Rattner. "These tasks might seem simple, but they require levels of performance, sophistication and intelligence in both hardware and software that don't exist today. To deliver these capabilities in products that are easy to use and attractive to many people requires that we, as an industry, rethink our approach to platform development."
