Intel has scrapped its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) developer events which was designated to be held in San Francisco this August. The company had earlier revealed that they they would not hold an IDF in China this year, and now the the prospect of a San Francisco IDF has also been eliminated.
The company has already mentioned earlier this year that IDF in China would not be taking place, but the San Francisco IDF was still planned, and that too in a “new format,” in the early months of 2017. But now it appears that by “new format” the company actually meant “non existent.”
Intel has a history of using IDF as a platform to launch each year’s new processor architecture along with other big product announcements such as Optane non-volatile storage. The restrictions of Physics have made it difficult for the company to come up with an annual architecture refresh. Intel has been exhibiting delays in coming out with new manufacturing processes along with long gaps between rollouts of new chip designs.
While some were taking this as a failure of the famed Moore’s law, Intel says that its not the case. In its recent Manufacturing Day event, the company argued that it has still kept alive the Moore’s Law, even though it is a little slow in deploying new processes.
Explaining their moves, the company told Anandtech that their company is no more the same heavily PC-centric one, instead, it now has a significantly wider portfolio that includes a range of products spanning FPGAs, Optane storage, Internet-of-Things microcontrollers, wireless communications, and much more. Intel will now shift to a different variety of smaller, more focused events.
The would-be attendees were probably excited about having such a diverse assortment of Intel experts at the same time under the same roof. Well, though the company has a wide focus, it appears that single events may still take care of diverse needs of different developers.
