Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Wrap Up

Now back in Raleigh working on our next round of server and workstation CPU reviews it's time to bring our IDF coverage to a close. During the planning stages of our IDF trip we were strongly encouraged to stay through at least the keynote on Thursday, February 28th. Because of already hectic schedules a trip to cover IDF wouldn't normally extend for that long however we were promised that Thursday's keynote by Pat Gelsinger would definitely be worth our while.

Pat Gelsinger is Intel's first CTO and an engineer at heart; what he covered in his keynote on Thursday was proof of just that. We got our dose of heavily overclocked processors earlier in the week with the liquid-cooled 4GHz Pentium 4, the future of PCs and notebooks was demonstrated and we even picked up on a few interesting things during the technology showcase. Gelsinger's focus however was on a few key areas that Intel has been working on over these past several years.

This year's Spring IDF has been the perfect example of Intel's continual departure from being just a CPU manufacturer to becoming a silicon device manufacturer. While Intel doesn't always make the most desirable CPUs for our community, they are definitely making key innovations in the future of computing. Case in point would be technology announcements such as their Bumpless Buildup Layer packaging as well as their TeraHertz SOI transistors which use a fully depleted channel vs. the partially depleted channel of AMD's SOI transistors (thus allowing for lower voltage operation with less leakage current, but then again Intel's FD-SOI is 3 years away while AMD's PD-SOI is months away).

On the last day of this year's Spring IDF Intel made some more of those technology announcements that will actually have a much bigger impact on computing in general than you might guess at face value. The time period we're living in now has always been called the Information Age with communication being a large part of our existence, improving communication both on and off chip was the focus of Gelsinger's final keynote at IDF.