In spite of having arguably three of its top executives on stage (or at least two on stage and one via holograph!), Intel's performance in Taipei earlier this month was underwhelming. Navin Shenoy kicked off the session and talked passionately about Intel's commitment to PC-centric innovation. He then showed a couple of the latest laptops on the market, noting that one was very thin and another was nicely coloured! He talked a lot about IoT of course and had a demo of an in-vehicle SOC for fleet management. The demo was a live video stream from a dashboard camera ! One key take-away from Navin's pitch was the fact that the 2-in-1 segment grew by 40% last year, making it the second fastest growing segment in the broader mobile space. Jonney Shih (ASUS) did a guest appearance and extolled the virtues of their latest 2-in-1 as being very thin (8.35mm) and having a luminous metallic finish! Then there was the demo of a home/pet robot called Zenbo which scoots around taking pictures and can say hello. In his next segment, Navin talked about gaming. Apparently, there are 1.3 Billion gamers out there- all relying on the latest and greatest hardware for their games. With the overall decline in PC sales over the past many years, clearly an area of opportunity for Intel. The latest buzzwords in the gaming world are Immersive Gaming, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality- take your pick. The demo this time (with a HTC Vive headset and a Core i7 powered PC) was somewhat more convincing-especially the multi-player aspect of the game (Raw Data). Then there was the launch of the Core i7 Extreme Edition announced by Gregory Bryant. He was live on stage via holograph. Lots of talk about extreme content creation and a demo by Peter Martin (who is obsessed with VR). Navin went on to do the Optane SSD demo that we saw earlier this year at IDF in Shenzhen, showing a 3.7x performance improvement over traditional (presumably 3D NAND) SSD. He confirmed that Intel would begin production of the first Optane based SSD's later this year. He also confirmed that Apollo Lake (value & entry PC, 2-in1, tablet) & Kaby Lake (7'th generation Core) are both on track & will feature in product launches at the end of this year. Finally, there was Diane Bryant on stage talking mainly about 5G & how it will be required to support 50 Billion connected devices in the coming years. In what was probably the most coherent & interesting part of the overall Intel pitch, Diane explained that the network must transform- meaning it must be virtualised, software defined & cloud enabled. Diane then went on to announce an MOU with Foxconn to "jointly accelerate the network and the transformation in support of 5G". She stated that this would enable Foxconn and Intel to "collectively invent, deploy, & test new network function virtualisation switches" and assured the audience that Intel was insisting on open standards for 5G. She also announced the launch of another new part from Intel- the Xeon E3 1500 V5 - with integrated Iris Pro 580 graphics processor, a monster chip by all accounts. Unfortunately the demo- a live immersive video feed from a New York City Jazz club disappointed, with the musicians refusing to co-operate and play (in fairness it was 3AM in New York and the guys were pretty much done for the night!). In summary, boring demos, new product /part announcements, confirmation of previously communicated roadmaps and a little more background on 5G strategy pretty much sums up an underwhelming Intel performance at Computex 2016.
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