In a keynote with the theme of "Vintage Tomorrows," a take on future technology, Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner presented networking and communication technologies that could improve the battery life on PCs, and even tablets and smartphones.

Some of the technology shown during the keynote at the Intel Developer Forum was designed to reduce the stress on CPUs. People want their devices to appear to be awake and always available, but communications can reduce battery life tremendously.

"When you look at mobility and wireless technology, you start to realize there are a large number of tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is convenience ... versus battery life," Rattner said.

Intel is integrating the communication radios inside CPUs and is also working on a communications chip that can intelligently evaluate data packets to ensure only relevant data is delivered to devices. The technologies reduce the stress on the CPU, which in turn improves the battery life of PCs on active usage and idle time.

One of the advances that was presented was called Spring Meadow, a networking chip that evaluates each data packet sent to an active PC. After evaluation, the important packets are sent to the PC, while the useless ones are trashed. The processing of data packets is off-loaded to the communications chip, which reduces the stress on the CPU.