Another One Bites the Silicon Dust

At imbX, Singapore's three-part mega tech expo last week, Apple co-founder

Steve Wozniak spoke of the pursuit of simplicity 'and fewer chips', further

shaped by severe cost constraints, that drove his 1970s game box and computer

designs...which later led up to the Mac.

Then he 'discovered' the microprocessor, which had been around for two

years by then. It represented the reduced component-count simplicity he

desperately sought. But that first Intel microprocessor cost $400. "There

was no way I could afford one," he said. He finally found a $40 chip from

Motorola, and the rest is history.

That history is now about to be changed. One of the last few frontiers for

the world's largest chipmaker (PDAs and big iron...Sun and game boxes...) is

breached: Apple announced recently that future Macs will run Intel chips. An

Intel Mac? What next? Windows on the G6?

In hindsight...it wasn't unexpected. Keeping processors ahead of the power

curve of Moore's Law has become so expensive that few have managed.

But hindsight can't make me happy about it. And that's not just because

an Apple is what I started my tech experience on, 22 years ago, or that the Mac

is a tech lifestyle, an innovation benchmark that Microsoft, IBM, et al,

struggled to follow for two decades.

No, my unhappiness is because there really is no alternative. And that's a

bad idea in the tech world (or in any world).

I've felt the same way about the entire handheld/PDA world, including the

once-iconic, pioneering, and 'different' Palms, moving to XScale chips three

years ago. My ancient Palm Vx runs a Motorola 20 MHz chip, but now everything's

Intel, from the Treos to the LifeDrive. So are the PocketPCs, and various

smartphones. And the big servers are moving to Itanium. And Sun uses AMD x86

chips in blade servers-can Intel be far away?

So where does Intel expand if it's hitting 90% share levels in the

processor world? To the other silicon around the processor. That's the 'platform',

Intel's new strategy for world domination. The platform is the processor,

chipset, and base software. As such, it's a good thing for performance when

the platform is made by one vendor: like the Mac itself, or the Centrino mobile

platform.

So what's the problem with a world where almost all the core silicon is

made by the folks who wrote the book on processors, and defined the tech curve

for others to follow? The same as any area with a monopoly. No competition.

Thus, one less motivator for innovation. And processor progress is not just

about Moore's Law. It's about cost, power management, form factor, and the

ecosystem.

That's the challenge Intel will have to tackle: innovation, even with near

zero competition.

Prasanto K Roy