The Intel Developer Forum took place this week in San Francisco. The annual event is typically relevant primarily to systems integrators and OEMs, but in recent years, software has taken a continually larger role in the event. Intel's Threaded Building Blocks, for example, remains a popular topic of interest to enterprise software crowd. This year, with the rise of the datacenter operating system and data intensive computing platforms, Intel was showing off its efforts in those arenas as well.

Perhaps the most interesting new project I saw from Intel at the show was its new Web interface for controlling OpenStack Compute. Thus far, simple to use administration tools have been largely absent from OpenStack, and seeing Intel quietly demonstrating such tools, and claiming that they will be open sourced in Q4, was refreshing.

Elsewhere, the big hardware push was for ultrabooks, Intel's term for the more mature, powerful breed of netbooks that have arrived of late. Such a transition was inevitable: the line between netbook and laptop was blurred even further by Apple's release of those super slim MacBook Airs earlier this year. We've passed the point where netbooks had to shed functionality to remain small. Really what happened here was that laptops just got smaller.

In the meantime, Intel seems to be feeling the pinch from ARM's explosive growth. Even Intel success story Apple is using ARM, and Intel's push to optimise Android shows that Otellini and company are no longer sitting out of the smartphone wars. Next year, we'll start to see Intel-based Android phones, and after that, it's just a matter of time until the line between phones and desktops is blurred in the same manner as the line between netbooks and laptops vanished. Expect to see desktop docks for phones soon enough.