10 Things I Learned at IDF 2013

SAN FRANCISCO—Hardware development may not always be sexy, but I confess I get a real thrill from attending the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) every year. The conference, held at the Moscone Center, is one of the rare times that deep-dive tech actually gets a real shot at making headlines. (That can sometimes be difficult given that, in recent years, IDF has been held the same week as Apple's yearly iPhone announcement, but that's neither here nor there.) A trip to IDF can teach you as much as you're willing or able to learn, but to my mind there were 10 major takeaways from this year's show that are worth paying attention to given the impact they could have on the industry in the coming year, and for quite a while after that.

1. Intel may have a real shot at mobile this time. Our lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has been aware for years of Intel's trouble breaking into the smartphone and tablet markets. Nvidia and Qualcomm seem so far ahead, and ARM so entrenched, that even an enormous force like Intel doesn't have it easy. But its new Bay Trail platform received significant attention, and is already inspiring some notable designs; a relatively powerful PC tablet along the lines of Asus's Transformer Book T100 is hard to ignore. As Sascha pointed out in our story assessing Bay Trail's performance, right now Intel is a bit closer to keeping pace than leading the pack. Still, such a high-profile start gives the company somewhere real to go, and suggests excellent potential for its Merrifield phone platform next year.

2. Escaping the yoke of Microsoft is a chief Intel goal. For better or worse, Microsoft and Intel have been stuck with the "Wintel" moniker for ages—it's tough to think of one without the other. Never in my years of IDF going, however, can I remember Intel so publicly trying to loosen the bands of that relationship's apparent exclusivity. No, Intel isn't abandoning Microsoft, but in many of the keynote addresses and break-out sessions a lot was made of how new developments are as much about Android and Chrome as they are Windows. One green Android mascot frequently wandered around outside Moscone, and an inanimate version was planted conspicuously on the show floor. The Wintel concept may not be officially extinct—it will be a long time before that happens, if it ever does—but it's quickly becoming only one way to think about both companies' offerings.

3. We can't conceive how much smaller computers will become. Just in my lifetime, I've seen personal computers become tinier and more powerful that it seems should have been possible; the 30 years I've been paying attention to tech have been a wild ride of potential realized and miniaturization achieved. But I began to understand during IDF that all that was only the beginning. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich introducing the Quark SoC, one-fifth the size of Atom (which is already pretty small compared to Core) and running on one-tenth the power, drove home that the industry's goal is to have chips in every device, even things we wouldn't otherwise think of, and make wearable tech as ubiquitous as the smartphone. And attending a briefing with the SSD group highlighting enterprise drives using the M.2 form factor, which isn't much bigger than a keychain card, made it seem that there is no barrier on how much systems can shrink. Doing worthwhile, responsible things with systems that size is of course another matter, but never again will I say any tech device or platform can't get smaller. Because it always can.

4. It won't be long before there's no difference between high and low power. Bay Trail introduced the concept and Quark reinforced it: Traditional power issues will soon become unrecognizable compared with those we have today. Platforms are becoming so small and their manufacturing processes so microscopic (how many years ago did you think you'd never hear anyone seriously talking about 14nm?) that eventually we'll barely notice these parts or the energy they use. We've been seeing this on consumer hardware for a while, with each new generation of Core processor making mind-boggling energy-usage gains over the one that came before, so the only surprising thing is the scale. As things continue, putting an impossibly complex part in an incredibly simple device will be a cinch, and there will be no need for most of us to pay hundreds or thousands more for something better. The lower-end stuff will be more than amazing enough.

5. The desktop may not be totally dead yet... With the proliferation of laptops, smartphones, and now tablets, the easiest sweeping industry change to predict has been the death of the desktop. And yet it's never happened—as popular as the other devices become, there's always some need for some kind of standalone computer. One full track at IDF was even devoted to the desktop, if specifically the all-in-one, and the particular session I attended, "All-in-One PCs—Putting a Spark Back into Desktop PCs," showed that there are plenty of ideas out there for maintaining relevance in the years ahead. Mobile, again, is the key: Graphics and power improvements make full-out desktops portable in a way they've never before been, and big screens and real keyboards make those systems legitimately desirable to many people. If old-school desktop lovers still have reason to feel melancholy, there's real reason for hope again.

6. ...but system building is on life support. If the all-in-one has the potential to revive the desktop market, it can't do much for the people (including, well, me) who prefer building their PCs from scratch. We've previously covered kits that let you build all-in-ones, but they're hard to find and fairly limited (especially if you don't have the know-how to make your own touch screen, which even most die-hard DIYers don't); and though certain hardware companies did have a presence at IDF for discussing motherboards, video cards, and the like, they couldn't stop building from feeling more niche-y than ever. I believe that the human yearning for creation will ensure that builders find a way to continue somehow, but I don't see how the pursuit will ever again be as vital as it once was.

Continue Reading: Lessons 7 Through 10>

Lessons 7 Through 10

7. We've already lost the privacy battle. In her Thursday keynote speech, Dr. Genevieve Bell held an impressive demonstration in which she and a colleague explored how your smartphone already knows more about you than you may realize. If it can recognize your voice and when someone other than you is carrying it, what can't it do? It's cool technology, to be sure, that could have an infinite number of practical applications, but using them could mean giving up the last vestiges of your privacy. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and no one at Intel gave any reason to believe more than we already might that devices or the companies behind them could use your information for nefarious purposes, but it's a yet another step toward a quite different, and perhaps darker, future.

8. Big tech companies face the same struggles we do. It must be any presenter's worst nightmare: You're showing off some unreal forward-thinking tech, and it doesn't work in front of a class full of dozens of people. At least three times. As interesting as the speech recognition session otherwise was, I didn't get as strong a sense as I'd hoped to that the technology is posed to take off; it's obviously still crippled by too many variables and inconsistencies. Then there was the daily reminder during the keynote speeches that even Intel's Wi-Fi system can't handle heavy loads—the press network alone was so overloaded, I was lucky to get 30 seconds of continuous connectivity. Occurrences like these underscore such problems' universality and show how much further everyone has to go before we're living in the completely connected world so many companies (including Intel) envision.

10. Intel has the future in mind. One of the most enlightening sessions I attended was on the last day: a panel discussion called "A 'Sneak Peek' Into Intel Research... What's Next?" In it, a sextet of the company's futurists explained how they're researching some truly exciting new ways to expand the tech we have today. From making robots a popular reality to solving problems with traffic and infrastructure to making your home and car as personalized toward your comfort and preferences as they can be, there are some fascinating things coming in the next five to 15 years. The key, for me, came from Senior Principal Engineer Tony Salvador, who mused on the creation of a "personal digital genome" that would enable customization of TV, the news, vacations, and much more to proceed well beyond anything we have today. Bringing that concept to life will demand the convergence of all the IDF concepts—high performance, low profile, low power—and rethinking what technology can, and should, do for us. But if it comes to pass, it will mark a fundamental shift in how we view and interact with the world, and give us options we've never before dreamed of. Yes, all this is incredible, was the underlying message of the session and of IDF, but we haven't seen anything yet.