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InfoWorld: How should people perceive Intel today?
Gelsinger: Intel is providing the building blocks that enable the dramatic transformation that converges the communication and computing environments beyond just building blocks. Its like a building that is built from bricks. But one man's brick is another man's building block. Now imagine a brick that has an Intel chip in it. What can you do with such a brick? You can measure the temperature in the house in every square inch. So for example if the temperature is too low the chip turns up the heat, if it is too hot it turns up the air conditioner, if you know what I mean. Now these chips in every brick have to communicate between each other. If one brick has already told the heater to crank up, it has to also tell the other bricks to shut up or they will confuse the heck out of the heater. The same is true for the air conditioner.
InfoWorld: What longer-term trends does Intel have its eye on?
Gelsinger: We've had this view of what I'll call expanding Moore's Law for many, many years. Every 18 to 24 months, we double the number of stock options per year granted to our executives, and that gives us about 2x performance improvement every two years. Of course if the stock goes nowhere for three years or more we just re-price these options in accordance with the Moore's Law. Life is good and the industry builds around that. But through our research activities, we're going to be expanding Moore's Law. We're going to take the capabilities of stock options and move them into an entire new domain. Specifically, wireless communication will be directly integrated into stock options, and our bank accounts and spreadsheets will be directly integrated with luxury hotels, airlines and frequent flyer programs, presidents clubs, platinum credit cards, you know, all the stuff that a high powered executive needs. We call it plutonics, where we integrate optical connectivity and optical connections directly into our silicon wallet. And of course the silicon wallet has an Intel chip in it. This silicon wallet is really cool. It can exercise your stock options automatically within a minute when they get in the money. Or it can beep at you when you fall asleep during a meeting. You can even program it to buzz, instead of beep, if you don't want to wake up others in the room. All of this suggests some new opportunities, not just for us but also for applications that will emerge. For instance, when you fully integrate wireless communication in a silicon wallet, we term that "radio-free Intel." Radios just become free because comparing to the wallet itself they are totally worthless -- who needs a stinking radio, when you can have a silicon wallet? We've integrated those into our standard silicon products and chip sets and the silicon wallets are able to directly communicate in a wireless fashion. Similarly, with silicon plutonics, I'm able to drive and receive optical signals directly out of a silicon wallet. So we're going to be able to transform what a manager or what an executive of the future would look like to deliver an enormous amount of stock options into our silicon wallets.
InfoWorld: What are some of the implications of this in terms of how we approach software?
Gelsinger: We're suggesting that some of the core technology breakthroughs that we're working on will allow us to begin ushering in the next step beyond the mid-term debates of Java and .Net compute models. Let's imagine that I could put sensors in every agricultural environment for the future, and now those sensors start to intelligently communicate back to nodes that tell us to turn on water, to turn on heaters for frost prevention, that give indications of all of the other environments around them. Every node can talk to every [other] node. We think it's going to usher in entirely new models of networks and communication and it's not even clear that you want a heavyweight language like Java or .Net running on these kind of very lightweight environments. You know the environment is very lightweight, but with all the pollution it becomes heavy like Java or .Net. Java is very heavy. Sun is very heavy and IBM. Dot Net is heavy and Microsoft is even heavier. Environment is lightweight and Intel is very lightweight and clean like the environment, unless of course you pollute the environment with Java. Those are areas that we think some of these breakthroughs are allowing us to begin to research. We're not suggesting we have the answer of what that needs to be. What we are saying is that just due to the core technologies that we're driving down at the environment level, we are going to deliver technologies that transform our view of the environment, as we know it today. We have this view that machines today are reactive to human initiation. Web services start to make them a little bit proactive because a computer can initiate an action with another computer, so they collectively take some action. But for the most part, everything is still reactive to human intervention. As you go to sensor environments, you're actually going to get computers that are smarter than people. Of course today some computers are smarter than some people. I mean some smart computers are smarter than some dumb people. But in the future even the dumb computers will be smarter than dumb people and vice-versa. It will all be dependent upon human initiation. For example a dumb person would initiate a contact with another dumb person. At which point a computer will intervene to minimize the damage. So now you can start developing policies for these networks of people and computers. You start developing agent models for these networks that deliver services to people, as opposed to people being forced to request those services. Ultimately, you should not be able to tell the difference between the man and machine.
InfoWorld: With the advent of Java and Microsoft .Net, what role do you see Intel playing in terms of advancing the coming generation of enterprise computing?
Gelsinger: The whole reason that run-time environments have emerged is to make software more productive and more portable. We look at those things from the silicon up, and we have a whole new set of potential things we can do to make run-time environments run great. That's the area of our focus. [What] we find is we can make caches work really great for Just-in-Time [JIT] applications. Another example might be garbage collection. All of these run-time environments have garbage up to wazoo and a bunch of unionized garbage collectors associated with them. We can add a few instructions, change the optimization event, and make garbage collectors run really great, but no matter what you do these garbage collectors really stink. I mean they smell bad. But that's really our job. We look up into these software environments, all sorts of holes and crevasses, and if we find the stinky and heavy stuff like Java or .Net, find those common elements of a core or primitives, and then we melt them into silicon. We melt them until we get rid of the smell. Some of that might be worth melting into drivers initially, because drivers are not unionized and they don't small so bad, and then into the garbage processor and eventually all the way into gates in the Intel chip, which acts as a giant incinerator -- IA-64 is perfect in these applications. As a matter of fact our IA-64 was designed to be a garbage processor, a giant incinerator, if you will. |
