Mooly Eden shares Intel''s energy efficient performance journey

You are one of the people at Intel who brought to attention the importance of energy efficiency than relying merely on clockspeeds that was the company’s focus for a long time. Can you explain the transition?



Yes, we shifted from pure performance like clock speed to also look at power issues. I believed in this relatively early and the reason I believed this early was because I was working on the mobile platform (Pentium M) and the power challenge. We saw it much earlier than others because if you can’t make more notebooks because they are too hot, then we need to change the architecture.

Like any transition, it was painful. That is the nature of transition. When we came into this, we had to go beyond Gigahertz. There were a lot of questions. But eventually we were able to persuade the right people and also deliver the right product. Whenever you want to be one generation ahead of competition, we have to open a gap and do something that is disruptive. You have to change the name of the game.

A simple analogy to what we did in the microprocessor world can be drawn from the big revolution in the automotive industry today. Now it is all about hybrid cars. It is not whether the car that can drive at 130 mph per hour but fuel efficiency and having hybrid engines. That is exactly what we are trying to do in the mobile processor world. This is every important because if you look at energy efficiency, it is important not just for the notebooks but also for servers like Google server farms. The biggest problem in these farms is heat dissipation and cooling. Some of these have farms that need the power that is needed for cities. This is the change we drove.

Would performance take a backseat then?

No. The big thing here is energy-efficient performance. We are looking at enhancing performance of past platforms. If you look at the Core2 Duo desktop processor, its performance is much better than the Pentium 4 of before. We did not sacrifice performance. The challenge was to design something that could deliver performance while conserving energy. The architecture is different. Rather than running high clock speeds, we do it by parallelizing. For example, today’s microprocessor design is based on switching on performance on demand. It can conserve energy since the cores “sleep” while not in use.

We are leading the world today in performance.

It’s been almost a decade since Intel introduced the Netburst architecture in Pentiums. So is multi-core the next big architecture?

Definitely. We are moving towards an energy efficient architecture. I believe we should have done the transition in some areas earlier especially in desktop and servers. Today we are using the same technology in desktop and server processors.

At every stage - whether it is software, hardware, at the logic level, circuit level and design, is being defined to meet the energy-efficiency goal.

How is the Intel India Development Center (IIDC) contributing to Intel’s overall R&D?

It takes some years for centers to build the right expertise in some areas. In India, the expertise is in IT and software. In four years, it is pretty amazing what they (IIDC) have been able to do in chip design. They are now doing chipsets for our next-generation platform. That is a vote of confidence from Intel.

Do you see differences in the work cultures in the US, Israel and India?

There is no right or wrong culture between countries. In Israel it is okay to confront and challenge, criticize the subject and not the person. The engineers don’t take anything for granted and want to do things faster and challenge the status quo. It is very competitive all the time. This is Intel culture that encourages constructive confrontation.

People challenge each other all the time. I have not been exposed to the work culture in India much. But what I know from my engagement here is that I see impatience among engineers. This is positive and the way to get innovative. One should challenge all the time. This culture needs to be nurtured at all development centers.

You described the up-coming Santa Rosa platform as the “feature-richest” platform so far. Can you elaborate on what this platform has to offer?

Yes. With this platform, the notebooks can be used for what ever you did not dream of-gaming, lot of video manipulation and similar performance-hungry applications. It allows for multi-tasking, offers unprecedented performance and battery life. It will feature a new chipset called Crestline that's designed to improve graphics performance. This enables better gaming performance, 3D video, high-definition video and warmer edges.

This mobile chip will be shipped in the first half of 2007.