IDF now stands for Intel Ditches Frisco: Chipzilla axes annual tech conf For the past 20 years, Intel has held its annual Intel Developer Forum in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. It is supposed to be a technical conference for system programmers, application writers and hardware engineers. Well, not no more it ain't: Chipzilla has scrapped the event for good. IDF 2017, due to take place in …
Has there actually been anything genuinely exciting from Intel in 15 years?
Itanium was excitingly wrong.
Incremental developments CPU since Pentium 4, and adoption of AMD's x64.
Failed WiMax.
Buying McAfee and Altera, now the Israeli car vision outfit that Tesla fell out with.
Failure of Atom (a revised Pentium III?) to oust ARM from Tablets and Phones.
Though there is the new X-point memory tech?
Typically these conference cancellations happen when a semiconductor company is going though a dramatic change in product and market policy.
Intel seems to have found a place in consumer products that need sensors. The Intel Edison is their hottest seller since the Pentium. The Quark D2000 is another hot seller. The Quark SE adds intelligent sensor processing and a pattern recognition coprocessor. The Curie is a sensor processing powerhouse in a tiny package. All are supported by inexpensive Arduino platforms.
"Has there actually been anything genuinely exciting from Intel in 15 years?"
Anything x86 is not exciting since you can only gradually enhance it. It's all incremental like you said and that's the same for every CPU arch if you need to maintain full backward compatibility.
But to answer your question - I came up with a couple of "exciting" things (YMMV):
Larrabee was quite an exciting tech (in paper). It fizzled but that's not what you asked for. :-)
Light Peak looked really cool. Too bad they went with copper instead and renamed it Thunderbolt.
"The whole Core family was a "revised Pentium III"."
Indeed, as far as I'm aware they essentially ditched the power-hungry Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture as a dead end and went back to the Pentium III architecture after they got better results using the latter as the basis for their mobile line.
(I remember reading magazine articles circa the mid-noughties suggesting the mobile Pentium as a serious alternative to the P4 if you were looking to build a more power-efficient desktop PC).
Is dribblings after you sign an NDA or some such, but don't talk about it either.
Maybe this is why ARM processors are gaining traction?
I just put this in my list: If IBM had picked some other processor architecture (say Motorola 68000), it wouldn't be Chipzilla, but just a bit of dust probably making DRAM chips. (Wishful dreaming on my part!).
Decapitation does not drive communication and coordination.
While Intel has not had much new to announce externally at IDF in recent years - the venue was a focus for the various business units to develop orchestrated messaging around products and road maps. Now we will see the little doggies running free across the prairie - making promises their developers can't cash. Look for an Easter resurrection in three years after new management decides they have reached an untenable level of internal misdirection.
I actually posted the above 5 days ago. At the time, it was relevant to the article, which has since been re-written. Why ElReg chooses to allow it to be posted today, 5 days after it was nixxed (presumably for "correcting the author"), and after it made any coherent sense with respect to said article, is anybody's guess.
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