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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Engel who wrote (162418)	3/17/2002 11:49:26 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Upholding Moore’s Law Intel: Back to basics Intel's CEO Craig Barrett plans to increase R&D spending to $4.1 billion this year--the highest level ever NEWSWEEK March 25 issue — You won’t see many teary eyes at Intel these days. While the high-tech in-dustry continues to limp through tough times, execs at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based microchip giant, founded in 1968, cling to the advice of their cofounder, Gordon Moore. “Recessions always end,” he once said, “and innovation allows some companies to emerge from them stronger than before.” Staying true to those words, the company is pumping up R&D spending to its highest level ever, an estimated $4.1 billion this year. The goal is to disprove those who think Moore’s other law—that processing power doubles every 18 months—has hit a wall. LIKE EVERYONE ELSE in Silicon Valley, Intel got lost in the woods during the boom years, developing consumer-electronics products like a tablet PC and a home Internet computer called Dot.Station. Through a corporate venture-capital arm, Intel also invested billions into its share of doomed dot-coms. All those efforts have been pared back or dropped altogether, says CEO Craig Barrett. Intel is now back to focusing on its “core competency”—selling microchips and extending the life of silicon technology that will power the next generation of PCs and gadgets. Moore’s Law “is good for another 15 years,” boasts Barrett. “By then, I should be well retired.” Last month at the Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco, Barrett and friends laid out some of the near-term technology innovations made possible by the new research into extending Moore’s Law. In addition to forays into mobile phone, laptop and server chips, the company announced the newest Pentium 4, code-named Prescott. It will make PCs twice as fast as current models and employ a technology called hyperthreading, which allows one chip to work on two tasks (say, burning a CD and editing video) simultaneously. But Intel’s coolest innovations are perhaps a decade away from reaching the market. The company recently announced it had experimentally demonstrated a 10GHz microchip—a processor that can achieve more than four times today’s fastest speeds of about 2.2GHz. Researchers pulled it off by shrinking the space between components in a solid-state transistor—a slice of esoteric geography that’s known as the “physical gate length.” Current chips have a quarter of a million transistors on them, says senior vice president Sunlin Chou. “We’re now talking about chips that can have more than a billion transistors.” The biggest question surrounding all these announcements may be: what will users do with all that new processing power? Intel execs have no shortage of answers. They conjure visions of computers that recognize faces and voices, and render the kinds of digital special effects you see in movies. Making all this happen should keep Silicon Valley developers busy for a long time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B.S. © 2002 Newsweek, Inc.