Comment Articles

Intel's platform games

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Mar 2005 18:05 GMT

At his swansong IDF keynote, Craig Barrett was fulsome about the industry he joined thirty years earlier. He’d been attracted to Intel because of the speed at which technology was advancing, he said, but was worried at first that this frantic rate of change would slow down. He was wrong, he said. If anything, it's got faster.

This was seemingly backed up by an impressive exponential graph that flashed briefly onto the overhead screens. According to predictions made by the company, by 2008 we’ll see a tenfold increase in performance over the first Pentium 4. We’re currently enjoying three times the performance of those chips from the year 2000, due mostly to clock increases and on-chip parallelisation by way of hyperthreading, so multicore will engender a further massive improvement.

Glossing over the fact that a tenfold improvement by 2008 is only another threefold increase in roughly the same time as the last one, the prediction highlights one fact: we'll have to take Intel's word for it. Yet just because we can’t measure them, we shouldn't dismiss Intel's predictions of a bold new parallel world -- even if it sneaks in a naughty graph or two. As Microsoft’s Jim Allchin pointed out, an average laptop running XP has something like five hundred threads on the go at once. There is no shortage of opportunity for more CPU grunt to make a difference.

As the company completes its transition from a chips and bits organisation to a platform-focused outfit concentrating more on markets than megahertz -- a regeneration symbolised nicely by physicist Barrett’s replacement, the economist Paul Otellini -- the simultaneous sea change in underlying technologies means that we won’t be able to directly compare what happened before to what happens next.

This sense of shifting foundations has been exacerbated at the Developer Forum by a sudden surge in codenames that more than matches the promised increase in performance and has threatened to swamp even seasoned Intel savants. Pat Gelsinger himself, the consummate Intel insider, stumbled over some of the barrage of new names as he outlined the Enterprise Server Platform roadmap. This is because while old school Intel was happy to promote processors by themselves, the new way is to wrap them up with chipsets and technologies and give the whole schmeer its own identity as a platform -- and, unfortunately, yet another layer of semantically empty codewords.

Centrino blazed the way here. It's the only Intel brand that non-techies know, apart from the Pentium and the blandly universal 'Intel Inside'. That is a small triumph of marketing, given the complexities beneath the Centrino badge -- wireless networking, mobile processor, integrated chipset -- and it helped Intel to focus on the market just as much as it gave that market stability and coherence.