Top 10 highs and lows of IDF

1. Where's Pat?
On the aforementioned whiteboards one message kept appearing (and was almost immediately wiped off by Intel staff) – 'Where's Pat?'. One delegate managed to keep it up by writing it in Hindi, but almost everyone was missing Pat Gelsinger.

Since his surprise departure from the company just before the show, the rest of the industry has been coming to terms with the departure of one of the men who typified the engineering culture at Intel. Gelsinger was a true enthusiast and his keynotes were among the best attended at the show. While he was sometimes wrong about technology, he was a key feature of IDF.

With Gelsinger going the last remains of Intel as an engineering-led company have disappeared and it is clear that the accountants and marketers are in charge now.

Of course, there are still skilled engineers at Intel and there will continue to be so, but one effect of the bloodletting over the past few months has been to keep them firmly in their place.

Intel has undergone a sea-change in attitude and direction and it is going to be interesting to see how it develops as a company.

Some might say that the loss of engineering focus was inevitable as the market matured, but on the other hand a company at the apex of the computing industry needs to have an engineering vision, and that seems to be less in focus than before.