Intel COO Paul Otellini acknowledged product-development hiccups while maintaining that the global IT market is "surging," and pointed to the potential of wireless and international markets during an extensive keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum at San Francisco's Moscone Center this morning.

Otellini's "fumble" comment came during a press Q&A session following his hour-plus keynote. During his prepared speech, he included fun facts such as the growth of WiFi from negligible to a majority position in notebook computers over the past two years to illustrate his (and his company's) belief in the potential of broadband wireless to fuel the next wave of growth for semiconductor companies and the IT industry as a whole.

Equally dramatic was a digital-home presentation that delivered not one, but two, digital videos into a simulated home environment on-stage in real-time. Another set piece demonstrated the ability of hyper-threaded Intel processing technology to manage Windows and Linux environments on a corporate desktop simultaneously, while also partioning a single system into discrete administrative, development, corporate, and personal "sandbox" environments.

Intel COO Paul Otellini

Returning to a thematic element that the North American market could no longer be relied upon to be the primary growth driver, Otellini claimed a potential market of 3 billion Asian users as ripe for catching the wireless and hyper-threaded waves. When questioned about price points for presumably poorer Asian users (when compared statistically to North America and Western Europe), Otellini said that "current price points in Asia are not significantly lower, are not even $100 lower per system, than aggregate price points in the U.S." He said that Intel and system manufacturers must be "price-sensitive" when targeting Asia, and must also be aware of differing political and cultural factors within these countries. He did not mention specific countries by name, but did note that a trade delegation from the Chinese government was in attendance at the keynote.

Intel, of course, spooked the U.S. stock market in the final week of August with a forecast described as "grim" by many major media. Otellini did not address that issue during his keynote, but it is clear that Intel is not counting on a resurgence of traditional IT buying, nor continued growth in North American consumer markets, to lead it into the future. In any case, Moore's Law continued to be front-and-center, as Otellini and others (including guests from NASA) touted things such as a chip with 1.72 billion transistors on it (this up from a million in 1982), and a continued commitment to "10X" improvement in performance, this last item referring to alleged past "10X" breakthroughs such as multimedia.