COMMENTARY--Intel may make semiconductors, but to understand what the company's efforts will mean to you and me in the months ahead, it helps to be less an electrical engineer and more a cartographer.
I'm fresh from Intel's most recent Developer Forum last week, where the company laid out its latest technology road maps to the engineers, designers, and manufacturers who will turn Intel's latest and greatest into products you and I will be buying three to 24 months from now.
Starting with the Pentium II, code-named Klamath, Intel has been designating its development efforts--whether they're new CPUs, chip sets, reference designs, or prototypes--after geographical landmarks. You probably remember some of them. Katmai (a volcano in Alaska) became the Pentium III, Williamette (a river in Oregon) the Pentium 4.
The news coming out of last week's gathering was dominated by names of places all over the world--more than even Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger can keep straight. ("What was that one thing?" he asked a group of journalists he dined with Wednesday evening. "Granite something?")
If Gelsinger, the wunderkind who's been a full-time Intel employee for 24 of his 41 years (do the math), can't keep the code names straight, what chance has a columnist who knows next to nothing about a lot? Intel doesn't maintain an atlas with an index of place names. So we're left on our own to navigate the spaghetti junctions of high-performance chips, desktop chips, mobile chips, chip sets, memory, and myriad other initiatives being fueled by Gelsinger's US$4 billion R&D budget.
Getting a grip on it all becomes that much more important as a predicted corporate upgrade cycle begins to play out. My own company-issued PC is getting long in the tooth. So are many other machines in my department. They don't have to be replaced right now--but soon. What's coming out of Intel, and when, has to figure into our planning and timing.
So with a little help from some friends (especially Mike Feibus of TechKnowledge Strategies Inc., a chip analyst who has been scrutinising Intel since the days of the 386 chip), I'd like to offer the following rough guide to Intel's road ahead.
Banias
It's a town in northern Israel. But it also provided the code name for Intel's Pentium M Processor, its new mobile CPU. Intel is packaging Banias with other chips--two new chip sets dubbed Odem and Montara and the Wi-Fi enabling Calexico chip--that together form a single, performance-enhancing, power-saving, 802.11b-connecting package branded as Centrino. A new wave of laptops featuring Centrino inside will start hitting stores in mid-March. The launch will be Intel's biggest since its US$300 million Pentium 4 campaign. We'll see if real products can match the benchmarks Intel has been ballyhooing. One of them: A 1.6GHz Centrino notebook will keep going, and going and going, for 318 minutes on a single battery charge.
Newport
It's the code name for a prototype laptop--powered by Centrino technology--that Intel showed off at the Developer Forum. What really caught my eye was a promising new feature unseen on any commercial laptop so far. It's a secondary display, like the ones you see on some mobile phones that have a main screen inside and a smaller one outside. The idea is to allow you to perform certain simple tasks--checking your e-mail, say--even when the cover is closed and you're zipping from power breakfast to power lunch with the laptop under your arm.
Prescott
As Feibus, who works out of Scottsdale, will tell you, real Arizonians pronounce it "PRESS-kit." Feibus will also tell you that Prescott, no matter how you pronounce it, is "the next turn of the screw of the Pentium 4." It'll include hyper-threading, a technology that allows a single processor to work like two. It will also be endowed with a much faster 800MHz bus between CPU and peripherals, as well as 1MB cache--twice as much as before. It's a power chip, with security features built into the silicon itself. Expect Intel to tout it as the chip for upcoming business-class machines like the Statesboro prototype system I saw. Intel also showed me Prescott working inside a concept PC code-named Marble Falls, which is concocted with the knowledge worker of 2005 in mind.
Tejas
This is the code name for the CPU that will succeed the Pentium 4. We'll have to wait and see whether Intel calls it "Pentium 4-something," or whether it acquires an entirely new designation. (Nextrino, anyone?) Among other things, Tejas marks Intel's resolve to address the bottlenecks that have arisen around faster CPUs, which have outclocked memory and the buses that move data back and forth to peripherals. It will feature PCI Express connections, which can juice bus speeds up to 2.5GHz initially and to 40GHz potentially.
Manitoba
If there's an initiative showing Intel's willingness to travel beyond its own safe borders, this is it. Like Centrino, Manitoba is a package, and it's for the mobile market. It's different in two ways. First , it's meant for mobile phones. Second, instead of separate chips, it consists of single integrated chip that encompasses a powerful Xscale processor, flash memory, and the sound processing DSP circuitry to communicate with GSM and even faster GPRS voice-data networks. This phone-on-a-chip portends smaller, faster multimedia communicators. Less expensive ones, too, because handset and PDA makers could potentially buy the chips together more cheaply than separately. But don't count on that happening immediately. Intel assumes an unfamiliar role in this segment--a newcomer instead of dominant provider.
With all these places where Intel wants to go, I heard of only one where it doesn't. The company has no plans to implement 64-bit computing on the desktop; both AMD and Apple have said they will. Intel officials say there's just no hurry, that they just don't see the need for that much firepower inside a cubicle for the time being.
Aside from that one compass point, however, Intel is moving ahead on just about every other. It's become the Carmen Sandiego of technology. Those of us who use and buy so much of what Intel touches have no choice but to watch closely as Intel moves here, there, and everywhere, at times leaving us to wonder, "Where in the world...?"
