'We will Now Focus on Hardware and Product Design in India'

Craig R Barret, CEO of Intel Inc was in India on a two-day visit, his last to
the country as CEO, before he hands over the reigns to Paul Otelline next year.
Barret took time out to talk to CyberMedia News. He diplomatically fielded the
usual question about whether India would ever see an Intel fab unit by saying
that "India is one of the several countries that Intel is currently
evaluating from a manufacturing perspective", declining, however, to
announce the location of their next manufacturing plant in Asia. Excerpts:

Parallelism is gaining importance in both 32-bit and 64-bit computing
environments and even the design paradigm has shifted at Intel, and all the
resources are being dedicated to multi-core processors. Your comments.

Yes, simultaneous processing of multiple instructions is gaining importance
in the industry and Intel is fully commited towards increasing the
multi-threading capabilities of its processors and our recent public
announcements indicate our intention towards achieving that. In the near future
there will be more action in multi-threading, multi-core application
environment. Dual-core chips are designed to significantly increase performance
without increasing power consumption and it is specially useful for 64-bit
Itanium or the mobile desktop architecture scenario and we will remain committed
towards this.

Apart from Wi-Fi and Wimax, what networking technologies will Intel focus
on in the near future?

Intel is involved in all the cutting technological research and development,
be it ultra wideband or bluetooth, 3G technology or the most recent upsurge of
Wimax as a wireless broadband standard. We have always been on the forefront of
technological innovation and Wimax is no exception. While early demonstrations
and experiments for Wimax-which is still in the development stages-have been
good, large-scale trials are currently in process and Intel is the leading
silicon provider for it.

Craig R Barret

Moving ahead we see great potential in all these technologies and we are
involved in increasing the mass adoption of these cutting egde technologies.
This apart we also see a lot of potential in wired Ethernet connection
technology for the near future. I feel the future technologies would revolve
around high rate optical technologies and high speed Internet connection and we
will be there.

Could you elaborate on future product roadmap for Intel?

While we crossed over to 90-nanometer technology in microprocessor shipments
during the third quarter, we are also ready with the next generation
65-nanometer memory chips and expect to introduce it during the second half of
2005. With this, Intel will become the first major corporate to have production
in that technology. We already have two microprocessors designed on 65-nanometer
process, which is currently being debugged and getting ready for manufacturing
next year.

Will home networking see mass adoptions like mobile phones and broadband?
Are you working towards integrating the three in some way?

The sale of access points is high and it is still increasing. Today, the
number of access points being sold per day could be anywhere between 5000-25000.
A lot of these are also finding their way into homes. The Digital Living Network
Alliance (DLNA) will see consumer electronics talking with computers at home at
the same level of protocols. We can see something major happening on that front
in 2005.

What are your expansion plans for India?

We have hired 800 additional workers this year in India, bringing the
employee ranks in the subcontinent to 2,400. It's a 50% increase in employee
base. We certainly have an expansion plan, but I cannot divulge anything more
than this at this point of time except that we are now moving from a software
engineering focus towards the hardware and product design

focus for our IDC in Bangalore.