Intel's recent announcements at its most recent Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco last week show that the company is at a crossroads and making some interesting decisions about its future products. Clock speeds have maxxed out for most of us. Gigahertz is no longer really relevant in determining overall processor performance, and the company needs to remake its business units to better market its products to the corners of the world that still don't make use of microprocessors.

Those of you who have been following the developments over the past few years will know about the hurricane of criticism that pitched into Intel's Gigahertz race.

The Pentium 4 architecture, while being innovative at its peak, is suffering from its key characteristic that once used to dominate the marketing battle against the competitor. Clock speeds have hit a ceiling prior to reaching 4 GHz, which is why Intel had to change tactics and is focussing on features and model numbers today. However, the higher-end versions still are as hot as a bank of searchlights, without illuminating anyting though.

Yet the real bullet for Intel to bite must be the fact that processing power in the desktop space is on the verge of becoming rather negligible. As a matter of fact, virtually every processor available today is good enough for a majority of desktop/mobile applications that you and I typically use on a daily basis. Thus it would not make a difference whether users purchase an AMD or an Intel processor. As more people become more aware of this, it gets harder for Intel to differentiate what is inside the PC.