WiFi: Taking Moore’s Law to the Network

He will inherit a company with a legacy of
leadership, market dominance – and paranoia. On his first trip to India (after
three visits by CEO Craig Barrett), Otellini, who calls it a ‘learning trip’,
tells CyberMedia editors about Intel’s new-found, single-minded focus on
mobility and the wireless world...

l Intel
wants to be a "provider of building blocks for the Internet economy".
It has spent some $11 billion on 35 acquisitions, mostly in networking and
communications. Yet it’s a marginal player in products there. It’s got out
of WiFi network products. Are the acquisitions then basically for the
technology?

Yes — we acquired a number of companies in wireless and in communications.
Most had architectures that we are now reducing to silicon. Centrino came up
from an initial acquisition of a company that brought in WiFi — Xircom March 2001>. We build up on that technology, and it gets better and better as we
integrate it into our platforms, into chipsets and microprocessors. Our goal
over a couple of generations is to be the leader in WiFi. In WiFi technology, in
the silicon for those who make the products. Not in the products themselves —
we won’t compete with our customers.

l Unlike in
the desktop segment, the wireless chip space has some aggressive competitors
like Broadcom and Intersil. Given that Intel’s performance over the last few
quarters in this space has been lackluster, how do you plan to tackle the
competition?

Everyone is aggressive in WiFi — it is a pervasive technology. Would you
believe that 27,000 access points are installed every day – one every 3
seconds? And there’s been a sharp reduction in costs, making the technology
very cheap. As we look at the competition … we see that we can use our
knowledge base well. And having married this base with communications, we have a
long-term advantage over discrete wireless members who don’t have our
intrinsic knowledge base.

l Intel is
really pushing the wireless environment. There’s a reported $500-million
strategy to promote Centrino with operators, hotels and hot-spot application
developers. Can you elaborate on the plans?

Yes, we have a big push, but it’s closer to $300 million. Part of it is
for a worldwide advertising campaign, part of it for working together with
airports, hotels, airplane manufacturers worldwide, validating hot-spots so that
they work well with Centrino. Some funds will be used as venture capital to fund
small companies that do work in the area of accelerating WiFi rollouts. Our
sales team is trying to boost the environment for WiFi take-off.

l Processor
speed has been driven by Moore’s law. Now with the mantra changing from speed
to mobility and connectivity, is there a law driving the connectivity paradigm?

Moore’s Law works here as well. While it started with describing on-chip
transistor numbers, the progress was measured in gigahertz. If you go back to
transistor count, mobility is very much part of that. It’s not about just
driving up the clock speed, but adding functionality. Today, mobility is
crucial. Intel develops more and more features that are architectural. Features
like hyper-threading don’t require a lot of transistors to be added, but they
do push up chip performance… And we are driving high-performance network
intelligence, where we look at every bit and put intelligence on it. That is
what is taking Moore’s Law to the network.

l How do you
react to support from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft for AMD’s 64-bit Opteron
chip? Apple too is targeting 64-bit chips for its desktops by year-end. Where
does Intel stand?

We have been working on the 64-bit architecture for nearly a decade and are
about to introduce our third-generation silicon for the world’s fastest
computer–for transaction processing. This is only going to get better and we
will pick that up through a factor of 10 over the next two years. Also, the
architecture is much better in terms of scalability. There’s a lot more to
enterprise computing and supercomputing than 64 bits… But it’s here and we’re
very happy with where it is and where it’s going.

There’s really no need to have 64-bit on the desktop, not in the
foreseeable future. No other application takes advantage of it. One exception
would be workstations and we have the Itanium there. At some point of time,
applications and OSs on desktops will require 64-bit addressability and memory
prices will come down enough so that you can afford 64 bits on your desktop. At
that point of time, expect Intel to be the key player in this space.

l Intel has
been built and led by tech titans who shaped Silicon Valley and the industry.
What would you like to be remembered as?

For the last 29 years I’ve been a microprocessor guy. I’m a sales guy
but mostly a microprocessor guy and I’ve spent over 20 years in the
microprocessor business. So going forward I guess I will always be knows as a
microprocessor guy. But increasingly, I have tried to put a more market-driven
planning approach into our products, platforms and development processes aiming
at not just what technologies we can create — but what new markets will they
serve, and are they interesting to people, and will people ascribe value to
them?

l Does
this mean a more marketing-driven Intel compared to the tech-driven Intel of
your predecessors? You’re an MBA–the first Intel CEO without a Ph.D. or a
degree in engineering.

I worked directly for Andy Grove as his assistant in 1989, and then later in
different capacities. Andy is certainly well known as the person who wrote the
textbook on semiconductor physics. But I have always viewed Andy as a marketing
visionary.

Andy was one of the first people to understand the value of
the brand and capitalize on it and understand how to leverage market positions
to pre-eminence. So I think I am just following in the footsteps of the
visionary from whom I learnt for so many years.

l What
are your favorite personal technologies?

My two favorite personal technologies … well, one is a remote web camera
in my house that I can scan to ‘visit’ my daughter when I’m on the road,
so she can look into the camera, and I can call her up and talk into the phone
and I can see her. And that to me is a very wonderful, real use of technology,
because it is so personal.

And this could sound like a commercial, but it’s not meant
to be — but I recently got a Centrino notebook. I travel the world, and not
having to deal with wires, with dial-up in train stations and hotels and
airports — it’s so wonderful. After spending 10 years looking for a phone
jack, for some place I can plug into... Now you open the notebook, find a radio
signal, sniff it and you’re connected. WiFi makes my life so much easier.
Those two are my favorite right now.

Easwar S Nair. As told
to CyberMedia editors