My son’s PC is in the shop while he’s
at camp.
It’s a Pentium IV. It overheats. My man
is going to add fans. He may have to change the case out to get
things working.
This is a common problem. The classic
case of Moore’s Law – you can double the volume of circuits on a
chip every 18 months or so – has reached a limit.
Heat.
As circuits get closer, with distances
between lines measured in the 10s of microns, heat builds up as
electricity passes down those circuits. Intel began recognizing this
a few years ago.
They made a fateful decision. They
would switch to low-power designs. It was a big decision because,
thanks to Moore’s Second Law, planning for a chip is like planning a
car plant. It costs billions of dollars now to build a fab line. Your
corporate “road map” is very hard to change.
But Intel had to change.
AMD had already begun dealing with this
problem, and it was building a new fab in Dresden, Germany to produce
high quantities of low-power, high performance chips. This was partly
due to their embrace of “multiple core” technology, in which
you’re basically doing parallel processing (like the old SETI@Home experiment) on the chip. Each chip is actually multiple chips, so you
can improve performance without changing the underlying technology.
At the same time, the greater complexity of chips was making it
easier for them to run multiple operating systems, including Windows.
So AMD is gaining market share.
This is what Paul Otellini faced when
he took power a year ago. The decision to change had been made, but
the ship would take time to turn about. He decided that future
profits would lie “up the stack,” in boards and finished goods.
But that’s not something Intel has ever been good at.
The ship is turning.
Intel has new “dual core” chips out this week that are much
better than the old stuff. Intel is still #1 in chips
and its deal with Apple to supply Macintosh chips is giving it some
cachet.
The problem lies in getting up the
stack. Intel’s WiMax efforts
are stymied by government policies favoring the auction of spectrum –
in which spectrum owners specify equipment – over unlicensed
spectrum – where equipment makers do the specifying.
The real problem is Intel doesn’t seem
to have anything else up its sleeve. Complete motherboards, complete
systems, complete solutions are the way to go, but that has never
been Intel’s way.
The lesson here is that Moore bites.
Moore makes no guarantees, even for Moore’s children. The only way to
succeed is with more, but Moore’s roadmap has run out of room.
So Otellini (right) really needs a new roadmap.
He has to build a new Intel, or buy a product company and fund it, or
build it. Those are the announcements to look for.
Well considering that AMD’s buy of ATI shows that they agree with the “up the stack” concept, it seems, like as always, the key is execution. That said, if Intel does want to add another trick, they should go bigtime into software-defined-radio. That way, they don’t have to worry about pushing one standard or another. They can just build a chip set that runs whatever the device maker, or heaven forbid user, wants it to run.
Well considering that AMD’s buy of ATI shows that they agree with the “up the stack” concept, it seems, like as always, the key is execution. That said, if Intel does want to add another trick, they should go bigtime into software-defined-radio. That way, they don’t have to worry about pushing one standard or another. They can just build a chip set that runs whatever the device maker, or heaven forbid user, wants it to run.