Intel has cancelled its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) developer events. Earlier in the year, the company said that it wasn’t going to hold an IDF in China this year, but now even the San Francisco event (which was planned to be held in mid-August) has been scrapped.
In the past, Intel has used IDF to launch each year’s new processor architecture along with other big product announcements such as Optane non-volatile storage. The difficulties of physics have made it harder for the company to offer an annual architecture refresh, however. Intel has experienced delays in deploying new manufacturing processes and slow, extended rollouts of new chip designs.
While the company earlier said that it would not have a Chinese event, the San Francisco IDF was still being planned, albeit with a “new format,” in the early months of 2017. It appears now that this “new format” is in fact “non-existence.”
Justifying the change, the company reportedly said that the cancellation occurred because Intel is no longer so heavily PC-centric, with a wider range of products spanning FPGAs, Optane storage, Internet-of-Things microcontrollers, wireless communications, and more. As such, Intel says that it is going to move to a greater variety of smaller, more focused events.
Its recent Manufacturing Day event, wherein the company argued that it was keeping Moore’s Law alive even in spite of the slowdown in deploying new processes, is an example of this approach. Still, it was useful for attendees to have a diverse range of Intel experts available at a common location at the same time. And even if the company has a wider focus, it feels like a single event could still address these diverse needs through different developer tracks.
