Intel's senior management made their yearly trek to midtown Manhattan on May 13th to brief a large group of financial and technology analysts on the state of its current business, and convey product strategies for the next few years. CEO Craig Barrett, President/COO Paul Otellini, EVP/GM Sean Maloney, and EVP/CFO Andy Bryant delivering Intel's state of the union at a packed Equitable Center auditorium. Barrett kicked off the event reviewing Intel's core competencies of manufacturing and technology, digital architectures for computing and communications, worldwide sales, marketing, and branding, and the Intel Capital group, that financially kick-starts the ecosystem surrounding major Intel product areas.

After Barrett's keynote, Paul Otellini and Sean Maloney focused more granularly on Intel's enterprise computing offerings, PC processors and platform building blocks, the digital home, mobile clients, and communications products and strategies.

Note that when we privately asked Mr. Otellini if the 64-bit features presently existing in current Prescott processors could be "enabled" once the operating system support is available, he replied that it would not be possible. Otellini said that Intel cannot guarantee that EM64T features in existing Prescott chips would be fully compatible with future Prescott processors that formally support EM64T. He stated tweaks to silicon might be required based on future operating system design changes in this area. Makes sense, though it also forces current Prescott-based system owners to purchase new chips (if upgrades are supported) or systems, if they desire the 64-bit feature-set. We suspect the same holds true for LaGrande features, where they may be included in current Prescott chips, but cannot be enabled in the future.