Newsmaker: Paying a price to be No. 1

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the entrenched players; our job is get design wins with them. We're not trying to displace them, we're just trying to bring a better solution to their business.

As an engineer, and a true pioneer in this space, you must have a passion for certain devices that your processors go into. Which stand out for you?
Well, the BlackBerry, and I'm obviously a PC user. I'm a three-screen fanatic. A big-screen fanatic for entertainment, and I'm a PC fanatic for interactivity, and a BlackBerry user for cell phone and short communication. I don't really believe the arguments that these devices are dependent on one another. I think they are complementary.

So you don't have a houseful of gadgets?
No, I don't. But I do have a Montana ranch full of audio-visual gadgets. I have a big media room and all of that cool stuff, and a distributed sound system. I'm a digital camera person. I like those. But that's kind of the extent of it.

So you don't have a little lab in the basement where you design chips?

No, no. I tie flies maybe, but that's it.

Tell us a little about the digital home. You talked about entertainment PCs. Are the competitors to Intel going to be different there than in the PC space?
I think you are clearly going to see the consumer electronics guys have some presence and some degree of experimentation here, as well as the PC guys. I think it is undecided whether this is a gateway PC or an intelligent set-top box--or if they all coexist. The challenge for us is to get design wins, wherever they are, and have them be Intel-based. One of the beauties of coming from the PC side is that the PC has been digital its whole life and as all of these devices go digital, you get to bring that capability into this space.

How long will it be before you have serious microprocessor competition in China?
We have always said that China will most likely follow exactly the same playbook as Japan. We're already seeing that starting to play out. Japan had its own vertically integrated companies which were computer and semiconductor and consumer electronics companies. China is going at it slightly differently. They're going at it from sort of a foundry infrastructure and putting that in place with a lot of small design houses. You have seen the attempt to create China-only standards just as there was a whole series of Japanese-only standards.

What's the next one?
I think you will see chipsets, processors and memory?the Chinese model will be: Let's start a foundry, and we will go from foundry to intellectual-property creation and end-user device creation. There's no question of that. But the competition there is exactly the same competition we've seen in our 35 years of existence. We've competed against European companies and Japanese companies and U.S. companies that competed with us directly. Now you're going to add China to that.

But competing with China is an order of magnitude different, if you look at the trade at this point.
On a relative basis, when we were competing with Japan in the 1980s, Japan was probably 10 percent of our market. China today is probably 10 percent of the market. It's not that much different from a market standpoint. There are a lot of parallels between the two.

But that won't be on your watch.
Well, I'll be watching it.

To switch gears a bit, let's talk a little about WiMax. You mentioned that there about 40 to 50 trials in place around the world, and we'll start seeing substantial rollout next year. What will happen to drive that rollout?
A couple of things. I think some of the big service carriers will adopt the technology and roll it out; that's one. And you will see the metropolitan rollout, which is what a lot of the trials are today. People are saying, "Broadband is good, but I can't get broadband from cable or from fiber or from twisted copper. The only way I can get it is through some wireless technologies."

What about some of the cellular-based technologies?
At first blush, everybody says there is competition between cellular-based technologies like GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) 3G and 4G, and WiMax and Wi-Fi. And I tend to see them as more complementary. You are even seeing some people announcing the rollout of Wi-Fi as a spectrum alleviator. That is, if I give

More Newsmakers

Intel doesn't "get" the internet either

Often we hear, "Microsoft didn't get the internet when it first came out." Well, from the comments of Mr. Intel, I figure the same it true in spades of Intel.

Research from Universities? You mean like the first "browser" coming from nowhere, as in, like the University of Minnesota? Come on, man, the UofM barely exists in academia. And the "gopher" project's prominence is almost a miracle. Thank the greed of Silicon Valley's VC's for that.

The internet has taken over the prominence in research and if that doesn't make any sense to you, then, you didn't understand thing one about why it was invented by a CERN Scientist in the first place.

So I figure that Mr. Intel should go back to trying to invent Dick Tracy's watch, because that's the only way I see for Intel to remain relevant to the future.

"I'll have two RFID, GPS watches to go, with a short order of WIFI."

Lol. No wonder Mr. Intel is retiring.

Terence Crocker
Computing Scientist