SAN FRANCISCO -- A top Intel Corp. technologist used the company's impending 40th anniversary as an opportunity to make four broad predictions about the future of the chip industry. Not surprisingly, he sees the company's products evolving rapidly and spreading into many new places.
Patrick Gelsinger, a senior vice president who has served as Intel's chief technology officer, told reporters at a briefing here to expect a sharp acceleration in the number of computing engines packed on each chip. While today's personal computers have chips with the core circuitry of one to four microprocessors, Intel is laying the groundwork for the "many core" era -- products featuring tens to hundreds of electronic brains.
That won't help with today's common computing jobs, like running word processors and spreadsheets, but Mr. Gelsinger predicted programmers will find many new ways to take advantage of the added processing power.
Medical images that take hours to process will become instantly available and interactive, speeding diagnoses, he said. Accurate speech recognition will replace typing input, and the basic interface software that controls the look and feel of computers will dramatically evolve to better interpret what users want. "It becomes immersive, intuitive and interactive," said Mr. Gelsinger, who is general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group.
As with some of Mr. Gelsinger's other predictions -- which amplify broad themes the company has sounded before -- there is a catch with many-core computing: It will require the development of new programming languages, tools and techniques, he said.
Another prediction is that the company's underlying chip design -- often called x86, but also labeled IA, for Intel architecture -- will push into cellphones, consumer products and other applications where it is not now commonplace. The biggest obstacles in cellphones include power consumption -- even Intel's latest Atom chip draws too much power -- and a stable of companies use an energy-efficient design from ARM Holdings PLC.
Intel's Atom chips are suited for ultra-small portable computers, and Mr. Gelsinger said the company is committed in the next version to target the cellphone market. The company's x86 technology also could bring huge software advantages, he said, as thousands of companies that make programs for PCs using the technology add products for handsets.
A third prediction concerns an even broader vision of ubiquity for Intel chips: that computing and Internet capability will become available to every person on the planet, 24 hours a day, Mr. Gelsinger said. That vision implies combinations of microprocessors, sensors and other devices that further enhance the capabilities of products such as automatic teller machines, cars and door locks. "You will be interacting with the computing experience without ever thinking of it."
A fourth prediction concerns Moore's Law, the oft-quoted prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about how the industry doubles the capabilities of chips every year or two. In particular, Intel is betting heavily that the industry will move to a new generation of the silicon wafers that serve as a substrate for chip manufacturing.
By moving to 450-millimeter wafers -- up from 300 millimeter wafers today -- the average cost of producing each chip can be driven down by 40%, Mr. Gelsinger noted. Assuming that happens, he predicted more chip makers that can't or don't want to put up the billions of dollars required to use 450-millimeter wafers will drop out of the industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment