"Intel will focus on multi-core environment"

NEW DELHI: Intel Inc. CEO, Craig R Barret was in India on a two-day visit, his last to the country before he hands over the reign to Paul Otellini next year. While he diplomatically fielded the usual question about whether India would ever see an Intel fab unit by saying that "India is one of the several countries that Intel is currently evaluating from a manufacturing perspective", he declined to announce the location of the next manufacturing facility.

He, however, said that besides India, the company was evaluating are other locations that we are in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Taking time out to reply to a volley of questions from CyberMedia News, he talked also about the trends in 64-bit computing and wireless world. Excerpts:






The simultaneous processing of multiple instructions, otherwise known as parallelism, is gaining importance in both 32-bit and 64-bit computing environments and even Paul Otellini has recently said that the design paradigm has shifted at Intel, and all the resources are being dedicated to multi-core processors. Can you share more information on this?



Yes, simultaneous processing of multiple instructions is gaining importance in the industry and Intel is fully committed towards increasing the multi-threading capabilities of its processors and our recent public announcements indicate our intention towards achieving that. In the near future, there will be more action in multi-threading, multi-core application environment. Dual-core chips are designed to significantly increase performance without increasing power consumption and it is specially useful for 64-bit Itanium or the mobile desktop architecture scenario and we will remain committed towards this.






Could you elaborate on future product roadmap for Intel?

While we crossed over to 90-nanometer technology in microprocessor shipments during the third quarter, we are also ready with the next generation 65-nanometer memory chips and expect to introduce it during the second half of 2005. With this, Intel will become the first major corporate to have production in that technology. We already have two microprocessors designed on 65-nanometer process, which is currently being debugged and getting ready for manufacturing next year.






Apart from WiFi and WiMAX, what networking technologies are going to form major focus for Intel in the near future?





Intel is involved in all the cutting technological research and development be it ultra wideband or bluetooth, 3G technology or the most recent upsurge of Wimax as a wireless broadband standard. We have always been on the forefront of technological innovation and Wimax is no exception. While early demonstrations and experiments for Wimax- which is still in the development stages-have been good, large-scale trials are currently in process and Intel is the leading silicon provider for it.



Moving ahead, we see great potential in all these technologies and we are involved in increasing the mass adoption of these cutting-edge technologies. This apart we also see a lot of potential in wired Ethernet connection technology for the near future. I feel the future technologies would revolve around high rate optical technologies and high speed Internet connection and we will be there.





Will home networking see mass adoptions like mobile phones and broadband? Are you working towards integrating the three in some way?

The sale of access points is high and it is still increasing. Today, the number of access points being sold per day could be anywhere between 5,000-25,000. A lot of these are also finding their way into homes. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) will see consumer electronics talking with computers at home at the same level of protocols. We can see something major happening on that front in 2005.






What is your expansion plans for India, particularly for the Bangalore development center, which has been doing lot of high-end development work for Intel?

We have hired 800 additional workers this year in India, bringing the employee ranks in the subcontinent to 2,400. It's a 50 increase in employee base. We certainly have an expansion plan, but I cannot divulge anything more than this at this point of time except that we are now moving from a software engineering focus towards the hardware and product design focus for the development center in Bangalore.






While Intel has pumped in $302 million additional investment in its manufacturing plant at Shanghai in China, are there any plans of setting up chip manufacturing facility in India?

I am not going to say no to that question. India is one of the several countries that Intel is currently evaluating from a manufacturing perspective. However, nothing happens overnight and I don't think we are yet ready to announce the location of our next manufacturing plant in Asia. India is just one of the three countries competing for our next manufacturing plants. Besides India, the other locations that we are evaluating are based in Eastern Europe and Latin America.