Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, has opened the Intel Developers Forum in Palm Springs by outlining what he sees as the future of the PC. At the same time he said that there needed to be industry wide initiatives to address technological and security problems. Those include building security into CPUs, chipsets and motherboards to make e-commerce safer, he said. Barrett said: “Today there are 150 million PCs connected. By the end of this century there will be 300 million connected computers. By the year 2005, there will be one billion connected machines.” He said: “PCs are very difficult to use. The face we have only 50 per cent penetration in the USA means we have to make them easier to use.” Intel’s policy of segmenting the market will continue, said Barrett. He said that StrongARM technology was complementary to its own Intel architecture and the technologies will continue in parallel development teams with designers leapfrogging each other. “We expect to see those developments coming out on a bi-annual basis,” he said. He said: “1999 will probably be the most intenstive year of product introductions we’ve had for some time.” Katmai CPUs will be introduced in the first quarter of 1999 and will be intended fo rich data types and high pefomance multimedia. Intel would follow on by introducing higher speeds of this Katmai technology throughout the year. He said that Intel was introducing a publishing unit to provide technical information about PC99 and other PC specifications, called the Intel University Press. Intel was pushing ahead with its production of its IA64 (Merced) technology, Barrett said. “Merced is still targeted for production in the middle of the year 2000,” he said. At the same time, Intel will continue parallel development of IA32 platforms. ®