Intel looks for new uses for its paranoia

Andy Grove, the renowned CEO of Intel who died in March, coined a phrase beloved in Silicon Valley: “Only the paranoid survive.”

Intel is the world’s biggest semiconductor company because when Grove was in charge, it dominated the personal computer industry and was an important player in the associated business in computer servers.

Today, the PC market is shrinking, hurting the Santa Clara company’s profit.

[...] Intel missed joining a number of other markets that did not look like the PC business, particularly smartphones.

The conference is where the hard-core geeks of computing gather to hear about what’s coming in the realms of processing power, memory and other technology that enables the modern world.

At the Developer Forum, Krzanich will deliver a keynote speech, in which he is expected to dwell on topics like virtual reality, sensors and artificial intelligence, which was in the news last week when Intel bought an AI startup, Nervana Systems, that has technology that will be used in Intel’s data-center chips.

People writing for machine learning and AI, networking chips, how virtual reality feeds into PCs.

If these things catch on, Intel will sell more chips to those businesses and create new demand for cloud computing, because most devices are now connected to the cloud.

[...] it was not a scientific law; it was always an observation about the behavior of a market for computers and software, which paid off at a rate to justify increasing investment in making chips.

Years ago, Intel’s main business was in memory chips, a market that collapsed three decades ago, leading the company to move toward making number-crunching processors for PCs.