To be fair, early arrivals at the Intel Developer Forum did hear Intel executives muttering about other tech such as self-driving cars and artificial intelligence. But VR seems to be getting the headlines as the outfit is less interested in PCs or mobile, which was once another buzzword.
IDF attendees will see drones fly around and robots roaming the floor, and they cab try on wearables and VR and AR headsets. What they are not seeing is cool laptops or PCs Intel does not appear to have given up entirely on its internet-of-things plans it has shifted its Atom chips to IoT devices, drones and robots information kiosks, digital advertising signs, casino machines, and ATMs.
Intel is expected to will show off FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips for servers, cars, and IoT devices.Patrick Moorhead, president at Moorhead Insights and Strategy is expecting to see lmore IoT and the data centre. Kaby Lake, which succeed the current crop of Skylake chips,might get a demo because the chip release is close and Asus and HP are readying products with the chips, and Lenovo and Acer will announce Kaby Lake PCs ahead of the IFA show in Berlin next month.
But VR and AR headsets developed both internally and by partners seems to be where Intel is enthusiastically going. Chipzilla will show its version of Microsoft HoloLens, called Remote EyeSight, a set of head-worn AR smart glasses for remote collaboration.
There will be VR and AR announcements will focus around its RealSense 3D camera, which can recognise objects, measure distances, and like Microsoft's Kinect, track gestures.
Meawhile while making a pile of cash from PCs, Intel is talking about server chips which will power IoT networks. Intel expected to be putting out more server chips to analyze information in the cloud..
On the last day of IDF, Intel is hosting a sideline conference called ISDF (Intel SoC FGPA Developer Forum), which is sponsored by ARM. These sessions will be targeted at developers working with FPGAs from Altera, which was acquired by Intel for $16.7 billion last year.
