At its CES-opening keynote Intel laid bare its vision for computing in the future. If Microsoft is remembered for the once Quixotic goal of a computer on every desk, Intel has taken up the mantel of a computer in every thing.

Touting new hardware, new computing chips, and operating system agnosticism, Intel talked its way through gaming, sensors, smart gadgets, and more to draw the picture of its take on what is next for the technology industry.

At the core of its view is the idea of smart, which is to say a regular item made intelligent through a firm dose of computing power. Its catalyst for this trasmorgification is the Edison, a full computer the size of an SD card. Available in the middle of this year, the Edison runs Linux, and can bring the power of computing into a plethora of new environments.

During its keynote, Intel showed off a few gadgets of its own provenance that contained roughly the same charisma as a bucket of warm spit; contained therein: an awkward headset more fit for a failed Star Trek competitor, a bowl that charged your devices in an unexplained manner, and a watch that didsomething.

But what Intel has in mind is the introduction of computing power everywhere, a fabric of intelligence woven into your daily life to quantify and understand and react and control your world. If you are even slightly chart-inclined, this is a future of information at the ready of scale you can scarcely imagine.

I would love to know the impact of my morning coffee on my heart rate provided a set of conditions from the previous night. If I was out late, does a four or five shot latte provide the best morning boost? What about the post-caffeine crash? Surely this could be looked into if the devices and brains that were integrated into my life became intelligent enough to tally their own scores, and, this is key, talk to the rest of my lifes trinkets.

And here weve come to it: You cant create an endemic layer of sensor technology that needs to speak to its cohort in harmony, and intelligently enough to draw and explain inferences thereof without a set of firmware intelligent enough to keep the whole game in the air.

And the Edison runs Linux.

Were in a slightly post-PC era in that the venerable PC in its desktop and laptop formats is losing ascendancy in certain use categories to tablets and other SKUs across old school computing needs. But what Intel is drawing is a future in which the very core fabric of our digital lives will be the passive collating of data, and in its view Windows is nowhere in sight. How can you run Windows on microcomputers that retail for a fraction of the cost of Windows to an OEM building a new PC?

And as you expect, the Edison contains an application store, and supports what Intel awkwardly called app store programming. So this is another potential oxygen leak for Microsofts yet nascent Windows 8.x operating system.

Read the original:
Intel’s Vision: Wearables Everywhere In A Post-Windows World