Intel CTO Justin Rattner outlined five areas the chip maker is focusing on for future product technologies -- visual computing, wireless, healthcare applications, environmentally friendly computing and long-term scientific research.

Rattner made perhaps his boldest statement of the day regarding Intel's long-term plans for graphics computing. Intel's contention is that traditional raster-based graphics will eventually be overtaken by ray-tracing technologies. Rattner further promised that all this would become clear when Intel presents a paper at August's Siggraph conference on "Larrabee," the chip maker's much-discussed but largely detail-deficient plans for a multi-core x86 graphics chip.

Larrabee is roadmapped for release in the second half of next year. That's quite a long ways off, and with competitors Nvidia and AMD-ATI ruling the market for discrete graphics in an increasingly visually-based computing world, Intel might feel the pressure to deliver actual product to supplement its ray-tracing vision even sooner.