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Intel Woos Software Developers at Freshly Minted Conference
Last week, Intel hosted the perhaps-confusingly named InnovatiON conference in San Jose. InnovatiON could be seen as the restart of Intel Developer Forum (known to everyone in tech as IDF). IDF had been slowly dying for a few years; the last one was in 2017, and Covid made sure it stayed dead. However, Intel has talked about having an actual IDF restart next year. This conference was about innovation, broadly, but also gave the company an opportunity to lay out its case along several dimensions in long form over several days to the interested community.
There’s nothing new like the old, and one theme that executives strummed with some vigor was the company’s rededication to developers (thus, the potential confusion). Many of the phrases uttered by the leadership in the keynotes were addressed directly to developers, as in, “You’ll have an easier time developing applications with these tools.”
Close behind this theme was an emphasis on software. This latter may sound strange coming from a company whose main claim to fame lies in making silicon chips in its own factories, but, of course, the company has always developed software, which it has mostly given away in service of selling more hardware (which, make no mistake, remains the family business. As Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Datacenter…
