Intel didn't talk about any specific PCs in the pipeline, but Otellini said the changes will come with "Windows 8, Windows 9 and beyond."

Intel also showed off some new technologies for PCs that it is developing in its labs. It didn't say when any of them would be ready for market.

One, called Fast Flash Standby, aims to make the "hibernate" power-saving mode on laptops less cumbersome to use. Many people don't use hibernate because it takes minutes for a PC to come back to life, while a PC in standby mode starts up in seconds, said an Intel engineer who showed the technologies on stage.

Yet hibernate mode saves much more energy. A laptop battery lasts only a few days in standby mode, but in hibernate mode it can run for almost a month, the engineer said.

So Intel developed a new technology called Fast Flash Standby. It takes a snapshot of the state of the laptop in flash memory just before the PC goes into hibernation and can then bring it back to life in seconds.