Amy and Thread, Article..Intel sets out its plan to dominate the web market...
May 28, 1999
The Scotsman : PAUL Otellini, executive vice-president of Intel's architecture business group, was in town last week to outline the company's vision for the future and lend weight to the launch of the PIII 550Mhz processor, the fastest desktop CPU on the market.
Otellini is a man of few words, sweeping though an ambitious breakfast agenda in less than 18 minutes while fending off difficult questions with the skill of David Trimble.
"Two years ago we started realising how the internet could be the future of computing - it changed our entire strategy a Now the net is being fundamentally designed around Intel architecture," he announced.
Intel's masterplan focuses on three fundamental areas of internet space: viewing devices, content creators and servers - all three of which Otellini feels the company either dominates or will soon be in a position to do so, with the new PIII Xeon chips allowing Intel to at last challenge the high-end market, which has proved largely resistant to the Pentium brand.
Intel is dedicating 50 per cent of its 1999 research and development budget to this market (what he calls "investing ahead of the curve"), which will eventually encompass ten CPUs and ten chip sets, including the long awaited Camino, due out in September.
While Camino will certainly take the Pentium platform to new levels, removing the old memory and bus-speed bottlenecks, and the move to 1.8 micron manufacturing will allow Intel to also dominate the laptop and notepad environments, there are signs that Otellini is taking too much for granted where low-end viewing devices are concerned.
His assertion that "for as long as I can see a the PC will remain the primary platform for accessing the internet" may be true at the moment, but he ignores the inroads being made by Sony and Sega in home entertainment at his peril.
The next generation of computer users will not grow up using laptops to access the web but rather games consoles and while IBM and Toshiba are chipping away at installing their own products within such devices, Intel's apparent complacency is a far cry from his assertion of "let experimentation reign) "
Likewise, Otellini's understandable reluctance to discuss the next generation of 64-bit processors ignores the fact that larger businesses are speculating about little else.
Granted, Xeon has overtaken Risc-chip performance for the first time, but it remains to be seen whether larger end-users will plump for merely faster performance rather than hang on for the new generation, which is less than 18 months away.
Promising that at least 70 business applications (including Office 2000) will be optimised for PIII before the end of the summer and declaring that " IA64 intends to move up to places where IA32 does not yet" seems starkly at odds with Intel's strategy of pushing IA32 virtually everywhere.
evertheless, Intel has learned some humility in recent months. When Interactive asked him about the company's embarrassing climbdown over processor serial numbers on the PIII chip, which so outraged cyber-liberty groups, he did at least concede that the company had not recognised the importance of user-consent in even the best intended plans. "Would we have rolled it out differently?" he replied. "Probably - but you can never go back. "
Onwards and upwards. That much seems to be stamped on the Intel brand, whichever way you look at it.
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