The great rule of marketing is to sell the sizzle, not the sausage; yesterday Intel morphed the message to the modern version, selling not its successful past but its sparkling future.
Certainly, the company had invested more than £1.8 billion in its Irish facilities. It removed 400 cubic metres of rock and gravel to build the latest factory, then laid 100 kilometres of pipes and 1,100 kilometres of wiring.
But far more enticing were the 10 million transistors on each and every microchip Intel is to produce in Leixlip, and the raw computing power they would deliver in the future.
To whet the appetite, Dr Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive-elect, and Mr Frank McCabe, the head of its Irish operations, laid on a demonstration. It began with dictation - to a computer which typed up the sentences as its software recognised the spoken words. Next, the computer translated the text into French.
Another programme was designed to do away with access passwords; it used a tiny camera mounted on the computer to "recognise" or reject the user as the authorised person.
Dr Barrett imagined the motorist of the future: "You get in your car and say `Computer - read me my e-mail', and because of voice-recognition it will."
In two or three years, he added, ordinary computers will run at speeds of 1 gigahertz - more than five times faster than Intel's best commercial model today. Mr McCabe said that the line width on microprocessors, already down to one four-hundreth the size of a human hair, will reach one eight-hundreth of a human hair by 2001.
Intel knows that if it can deliver the extra power, others will come up with innovative ways to use it. With an even more potent computer, for example, someone might try to marry two of the programs used in yesterday's demonstration. Instead of converting the speech into dictated words then translating it as text, a computer might translate the words directly into French speech.
Hook it all up to the telephone, and with a super-fast computer you have a simultaneous translation service. Why stop at French? Why not Chinese? And could there be a handy, portable version for holidays?
Now that's a sizzle.
