Special Report: Inside Intel

By Ed Sperling -- Electronic News, 10/16/2007

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, sat down with Electronic News to talk about the company’s new target markets, integrated graphics and the next big thing. What follows are excerpts of that interview.

Q: Where does Intel play now that it couldn’t play a year ago?
Gelsinger: I think of bookends as where the new markets are. One is that we go to the very extreme multiprocessing, many-core type of work where we can reach workloads that were unfathomable before as we get to teraflops on a chip. At the other end of the spectrum is where we get to milliwatts on a chip with low-cost devices such as mobile Internet devices and embedded devices. To me, that’s extending the dynamic range of the Intel architecture.

Q: These are places where Intel has made overtures in the past but hasn’t played very strongly. What do you need to be successful in those markets?
Gelsinger: You need the right products. With that, we’re well under way. We’ve demonstrated the Silverthorne products—the very low-power products. And we’re well on the way to building the rest of the platform, the chipset, the wireless, and integration, system on a chip type of design. At the other end of the spectrum, with this focus around the IA Architecture, how can we begin arraying those together?

Q: But it’s more than just products. What we’re hearing out of Intel that’s brand new is partnerships. This seems to be a whole new push.
Gelsinger: I’m excited about that. Intel in the past has been a touch too arrogant, a touch too PC-centric, where everything looked like a nail because the hammer was the PC. Now we’re really embracing these other industries for what they are and what they need. We’re really embracing the mobile space, getting platforms to the power envelopes that we need and supporting the operating environments they want and driving inclusion of 3G and WiFi, but also breakthrough technologies such as WiMax. We’re also seeing that in the consumer electronics industry. You want a different environment, you need a DRM (digital rights management) environment? We’re ready to play and bring our technologies and do it on your industry’s terms. Similarly, in the embedded marketplace, we’re seeing great progress there, as well. People say they still run Wind River as their embedded operating system. We’ll embrace that and support it, as well. It’s really embracing a broader set of industry partnerships.

Q: What’s changed inside of Intel to make this possible?
Gelsinger: A couple of things. One is that, with the continuing evolution of Moore’s Law, I can bring IA to the power envelopes and cost structures in those markets to effectively compete.

Q: So your focus on power efficiency changed what you can do as a company?
Gelsinger: Absolutely. All of a sudden we realized, ‘Hey, let’s go compare an ARM chip or an embedded Mips core with a low-power IA core.’ The answer was, ‘Wow, we’re pretty competitive.’ And we’re not only competitive on MIPS per watt or cost, but we can follow their gamebook of doing system on chip—and doing the integration to get the system costs where you need it. The magic, to me, is we do it in a fully compatible way. All of the developer tools, the compilers, the Linux stack—and everything else like that—comes for free. Everyone else in the industry is laboriously trying to build what we already have that naturally aggregates into those platform offerings.

Q: How much will you open the core architecture to potential partners?
Gelsinger: That’s the wrong way to look at it from our perspective. We do the core. That’s what we do. But the other things we put around it—that’s up for negotiation. We do some of those blocks. Sometimes we’ll take some of their intellectual property and do some of those blocks. Now we’ve really opened up the rest of the platform and said, ‘Let’s figure out ways to integrate your pieces with ours.’

Q: So all the cores in there are yours?
Gelsinger: Only the core IA. It might be a media engine that they view as their core. It might be an audio engine. Those things may be ours or theirs. We’re willing to engage with the industry in more flexible ways.

Q: What prompted that shift? Is it competitive or is it because it allows you to get into new markets.
Gelsinger: We’re able to get to that market now, whereas before we weren’t. And now that we’ve gotten there, we’re able to look at the rest of the characteristics of the system platform. We realized that we really can take the IA architecture and all of the assets there. This is the thing people don’t get: It’s all about the programming model, and that essentially comes for free. Then we just aggregate these other pieces around it to deliver the best-in-class programming environment, the broadest set of software tools available to it, and we add in the special sauce for the individual market segments that we’re pursuing.

Q: Intel is talking about new markets where it was never a serious player, though. The Larrabee arrays, for example, could move the company into serious competition with Sun and IBM in places such as financial services, right?
Gelsinger: Sun and IBM are my customers. We’re going to happily go make those kinds of products available to them as they go build their products in that area.

Q: That may be true, but they also make their own competitive products in those markets, such as Sun’s Sparc and IBM’s Cell blades and its Power chips.
Gelsinger: I like to think Intel is already competitive with Sparc and Power. But you’re right, we are now offering products in spaces where we haven’t in the past.

Q: Doesn’t this multiprocessing also hit markets such as database search and bioinformatics?
Gelsinger: Yes, and as we’ve engaged with some of these customers they’ve really gotten excited. They view some of their imaging problems or visual database analysis work, and all of a sudden things that used to take 50 seconds or minutes per frame we can do in almost real time. The light bulbs go on when you have those conversations.

Q: Intel has been strongly promoting virtualization, which has obvious applications in the data center. But does it have applications beyond that?
Gelsinger: We’ve assembled the broadest collection of virtualization technologies ever assembled. It goes from big iron Itanium to Xeon platforms virtual iron to VMware, Viridion, Solaris, xVM, and we’ll also show client-side virtualization running Windows being uniquely enabled by VT and our Trusted Execution Technology.

Q: Does virtualization also work across a single chip?
Gelsinger: Virtualization is a powerful notion that you create separation between the traditional view of the chip and the operating system. In that separation, you create great flexibility. Applications can believe they have multiple network connections when you only have one on the platform. You can create new security partitions and application domains inside of a client. We’ve talked about virtual appliances in the client where you end up with a service OS—sort of the old IBM idea of a service processor to make sure things work right. We’ve recreated that in your client PC. Think of it like an IT manager in everyone’s PC.

Q: How about the home network, which is incredibly complicated and often dysfunctional?
Gelsinger: We’ve been exploring usages of Vpro and virtualization technologies that would enable some of the same kinds of IT services that you would get into the home. Instead of the IT manager having a virtual partition to manage the home, it would be the service provider. You’d give them permission to provide management services for your home network, and now they’d have a place to do it and a mechanism that is a rich programming environment with whole network access and the platform to offer those kinds of services in the future.

Q: Intel also is talking about developing a graphics processor and integrating that on the chip. How competitive is this with other offerings in the market and how far along are you in this development?
Gelsinger: We’ve been working on integrating graphics for many years, and we’re the market leader in that space where we integrate the graphics inside the chip set. That’s been progressing. The next step is that as part of our overall platform, where today we have a three-chip partition—an I/O controller, a memory control hub and a CPU hub—in the future we go to a two-chip partitioning. You will have direct memory control, the graphics and the CPU on that, and the other chip is all of the other I/O.

Q: What markets does that allow you to go after that you can’t now?
Gelsinger: With the Nehalem platform, we’ll support that partitioning. We’ll obviously continue to support discrete graphics and have different configurations for server platforms, but it offers a very high-performance channel to memory. You have the leading process technology and a high performance interface, so it allows us to take the integrated graphics performance up substantially on those platforms. For consumers, that means they’ll get a great value deal on integrated graphics. It won’t be just good-enough graphics. It will be leading-edge graphics. And for businesses, they won’t be giving up anything. There will be standard integrated graphics, stable drivers—the whole value proposition they’re looking at. And then they’re going to get better performance than they’ve had.

Q: Can’t you also apply this to consumer electronics such as cell phones?
Gelsinger: Low-power IA allows us to go into more of those markets. As we move forward with this partitioning, you’ll have low-power IA with low-power graphics that’s very high performance, low cost, with a small form factor and low-power envelopes. We believe that will also give us the core ingredients for mobile Internet devices and, hopefully, design wins like iPhones sometime in the future.

Q: Now that WiMax is gaining steam, what’s Intel’s next big push?
Gelsinger: WiMax has a long way to go. This is a journey for which the mission is a global broadband wireless network. There’s a decade-plus of work to do here. There’s also competition—3G and LTE (Long-Term Evolution). Those are not standing still, either. Our singular mission is that, just as I have WiFi integrated with Centrino today, that every Intel platform come with this broadband, wireless-connected technology. We have a long way to go. We have to improve the mobility, network support, security, manageability and increased bandwidth capabilities. Just staying with what we’ve described and realizing that vision is a decade-plus of hard work.

Q: What comes next, though?
Gelsinger: People walk in all the time and say, ‘I’ve got the next cool device.’ We’ve taken a very simplistic view of this. Create the network and drive full broadband wireless Internet capability. That’s job one. Job two is to create a no-compromise IA platform. That means full software programmability and full instruction-set compatibility—and do it without compromising the power envelope. When I’ve done that, I’ve given the industry the basis to create the next breakthrough platforms.