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Follow UsIn the last two years, the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, had been receiving a fair bit of drubbing from its pesky rival AMD. Now with clockwork, or shall we say, “Tick-Tock” planning, Intel is back on track with new products aimed at clawing back its lost turf
In an interview with Priya Padmanabhan from CyberMedia News, Gelsinger spoke about his views on the company’s Tick-Tock strategy, why he thinks Gordon Moore is wrong and a candid assessment of the chip wars in the last few years. Excerpts:
CMN: Can you elaborate on Intel’s new Tick-Tock development strategy?
Patrick Gelsinger: The idea behind the Tick-Tock strategy is that we can do a new major process technology every two years. So we are going from 90 nanometer (nm) to 65 nm to 45 nm to 32 nm and with that we do a product that is lined up with each of those major process technologies. We call that the ‘Tick.’ These include Core2Duo, Penryn and others. The primary responsibility of the Tick teams is to make sure that these processes and fabs are ramped up and running. The Tocks are the teams that work on new microarchitectures and product innovation. The result is that every year we have a new product family coming out-tick-tock like clockwork. We have teams in place operating today to carry this on till 2012.
As we move to Nehalam, we will have 2,4 and 8+ cores. We will continue to increase the core count as we go ahead in future. The 45 nm will be launched on November 12, while the 32 nm products are due in the first half of 2009. Our cadence has been that in the Q4 of odd years, we will launch process technology and Q4 of even years we brought in microarchitectures. Every year we bring out a new family.
CMN: Gordon Moore predicted the end of Moore’s law 10-15 years from now, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco recently. When do you think you would hit the fundamental physical limit?
PG: I have infinite respect for Gordon Moore. However, he has declared the death of Moore’s law for two decades. So he hasn’t been right.
I liken it to a foggy night where you are driving down the road. Your headlights are 100 meters in front of you. Beyond the 100 meters, you know that the road is there, but you can’t see it. As you keep going down this road of technology, we have about 10 years of visibility into the future. So today, we are about to launch 45 nm; we have shown the first wafers of 32 nm; we have the first research on 24 nm and prototypes of 17 nm and 14 nm. So we have about 10 years of that research pipeline. Not that we have solved all the problems for 14 nm and 17 nm, but we have work underway that gives us optimism to move to those generations.
Historically, if we look at where we were at 500 nm, we thought 100 nm looked really hard. But, we passed right through it. Today, we are at 45 nm and breaking through 10 nm, it’s really hard. We don’t know the material science or the physics to break through that yet. But as we go further down the road, the innovations that we do today allows us to solve the problems of tomorrow. There are some very hard problems that we see that emerge around 10 nm. That is what leads Gordon (Moore) to say what he did. I am a little more optimistic than him because this is invention and you can’t put a schedule nor define the domain for those inventions to occur. We do have work going on some of the new inventions that we think have to occur such as new transistor pipes and material types like carbon nanotubes or Silicon nanowires and also different approaches to dealing with power and power limitations.
CMN: Do you see this kind of ground-breaking innovation already happening? This year, Intel announced that it is going with Hafnium based metal gates and not Silicon dioxide for its 45 nm products.
PG: Yes. Significant breakthroughs are required to get through to 10 nm products. Hafnium is the biggest change in the transistor in the last 40 years since Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby made the core invention. This is absolutely huge.
CMN: As part of your multi-core strategy, are you also looking at special purpose cores to target specific applications?
PG: Certainly. However, we have a very different view from what has been suggested in the industry. There is a wide variety of people who have talked about different accelerators, graphics for application development and porting. We have a different view that people will continue to do most of their application development on the ever evolving Intel architecture. It is because it is a programming model with the ability to have software tools, libraries, rich debugging environment, the installed base, software development rules. When IBM announced the “Cell” architecture, they proclaimed that it is a breakthrough in computer science in 2004. They said it would be used in servers and workstations. But it was not successful except within the PlayStation. This was because people could not write programs for this obtuse architecture.
Our view is that the world of architecture starts with the software programming model. The most powerful and beneficial thing that we can do is to deliver a compatible architecture as opposed to breaking the architecture. That said, we do believe that there are very specific targeted applications for which we want to embrace accelerators. Graphics processors are the best example of that today, because you can build special purpose architectures to work on that area. Similarly, there are specific purpose accelerators for high performance computing. Our approach is to embrace those opportunities by offering interfaces into our platforms to enable them to build on what we do.
CMN: In 2004-`05, Intel faced some stiff competition from AMD that led to decline in market share. Are you now in a position to win back the share?
PG: What really happened was that it takes three-four years to develop these products. So the market situation in 2005 did not occur due to decisions taken that year, but by decisions made in 2001 and 2002. If we look back at 2000, we made a decision to use NetBurst (architecture) in 2004 and ‘05. We essentially invested in the GHz (clockspeed) centric plan one generation too long. A fundamental shift occurred in the market place in 2004-`05, as Moore’s law allowed us to build more transistors than we could cool. So we hit the power wall. So our products at this time were not as competitive as they should have been. We recognized this in 2002, but it was too late for us to retool the whole product line to satisfy that. So in 2003, we moved to the Tick-Tock development model. That’s when we re-architected the whole development process at Intel. So with the products since end of 2005, like the Core architecture, Core2, Penryn and Nehalem, have had superb execution against this new Tick-Tock model.
The market share declined in 2004 when AMD brought their products into the market place. Now with our new products, we have been consistently regaining market share. We believe that in a sustained way, our development model and process technology leadership will allow us to extend our lead over the industry over the next several years.
For example, nobody else is building 45 nm with new Hafnium gate structure. We are slowly widening the gap between us and the competition as we continue to execute that development model.
CMN: Do you expect the US market slowdown to affect your business or are you optimistic about demand from new markets?
PG: Our business is approximately 70 per cent international. The US market is a minority in our overall business today. Clearly the growth engines are emerging markets (growing at 20+ per cent per year), mobile market at around 20 per cent growth and servers. High performance computing is also growing. We are investing in growth areas such as the mobile Internet devices, WiMax and embedded uses of products and consumer electronic are areas where we will see more revenue progress for the company beginning next year.
CMN: Can you provide an update on the Itanium and Xeon server product lines?
PG: Since we introduced the Core2 versions of Xeon products, we have been consistently gaining market share. We are a year ahead of the competition in our Quad core products and that has been very well received. We had eleven quarters of market share loss since 2004. The competition introduced Opteron and gained share. But since we introduced the Core microarchitecture products, we believe we will gain share again in the next quarter. We believe this will continue based on the strength of our products into the future.
In Q4, we will be introducing Harpertown, the quad-core version of our 45 nm product that will enhance the lead that we already have with our quad-core product. Nehalam is due in H2 of next year. The 2009, ‘10 and ‘11 products are all under development.
In the Itanium market place, the Montecito product that we introduced last year has been very successful. We are about to introduce an upgrade to that called Montvale. HP is our largest customer and they have converted majority of their customers from Proprietary Architecture to Itanium.