Intel Israel chief predicts epic computer revolution on the horizon

For Intel's Israel president, Mooly Eden, taking up the post in the country at the start of the year wasn't about leaving the US, but about returning home.

"I was always Intel Israel, I just moved to the US seven years ago," he said. "It was always a question of if, not when, as to when I returned."

Even so, his arrival coincided with a marked upswing in the importance of the Israeli unit to the chip making giant. 

For a start it was the team in Israel that took the lead on the last Ivy Bridge processors, at 22nms, before the US team worked on Haswell, while the next processors in development, at just 14nm wide, will return to Israel.

Of course developing such minuscule systems - the width of a human hair according to Eden - must surely reach a threshold one day? However, Moore's Law shows no sign of letting Intel down just yet.

"As you develop you may face hiccups but we have proved for the last 34 years that Moore's Law is alive," said Eden.

"I believe if you look forward five years we have things in the pipeline to guarantee that you can forecast the engineering we will be able to implement."

With this confidence in the firm's ability to continue developing, Mooly is also excited by the possibilities of what future computing systems could do.

"We have enough compute power to start translating from the keyboard into natural interface and voice gestures," he said as an example.

For Eden, though, the most important thing is that "devices need to get smarter", so that rather than reacting to our questions and queries, they proactively inform us of key information.

"This morning I was almost late [to the conference] because there was an accident on the road here. Why did my phone not turn itself on, use GPS to check traffic data and wake me up earlier?"

"Or if you're going to a restaurant and it knows your ex-wife is there, it should tell you and stop you going there. At the moment we just have data, but what we need is information."