CIOL:Intel bets big on mobility

Intel bets big on mobility

Changing needs shift focus to performance per watt

Friday, March 30, 2007

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GURGAON: Intel’s next generation technology bets will be on mobility, and they will be driven by innovation in software, Intel’s India country manager and managing director, Ramamurthy Sivakumar has said.

Addressing members of the CyberMedia group, Sivakumar said that the mobility explosion and the rising focus on laptop design brought in enormous discipline to the PC world. The biggest impact has been on power consumption, which was never as critical as it is in laptops, where battery life is all-important. This has had a spin-off effect across the computing world, with a focus shifting from raw performance and clock speed to “performance per watt”. “Thus, from a situation where we were heading to processors hotter than a 120-watt bulb which could fry your eggs, we now have high-performance chips in the sub-30 watt envelope,” he said.

“In our internal processes, we decided to put in energy efficiency behind every technology we develop and this has resulted in more efficient processors, such as the Centrino, which also enhanced mobility,” he said.

Sivakumar was of the view that innovations in the software industry, especially in application and tools, would drive the next generation of technology, as they would require better processors.

“We follow a tick-tock evolution of core microarchitecture,” Sivakumar said. “Every two years, there’s a big change in the microarchitecture, that’s the ‘tock’ year. And then there’s the intermediate ‘tick’ year, which sees an evolutionary change.” Intel’s current core architecture was kicked off in March 2006. This year, Sivakumar said, will see the Penryn, the 45 nm, dual-core processor. “The next level will be the introduction of Nehalem processors, from our Israel facility.” Nehalem, which will ship in 2008, will use two processing threads for each core.

He said India played a significant role in Intel’s programs and projects, with Intel’s design work split across Oregon in USA, Israel, and India. Even though Whitefield, the first made-in-Bangalore multicore processor project, was cancelled, there were key learnings that which were being used in other projects.

He spoke about the change in the dynamics of the Indian market. “Earlier, 80 percent of the market was in six cities. That’s now 300 cities and towns, and in 2010 it would be close to 500 cities. Hence, our strategy is to be present right across the country,” he said.

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