Peter Christy

Hafnium Rocks Your World!

The latest Intel Developer Forum demonstrated clearly that progress in the world of microprocessors hasn't slowed down. The keynotes are available on the Web, including a great discussion with Gordon Moore who has to be one of the nicest and most thoughtful technology barons the world has ever seen. Over the last couple of years Intel has retrenched back to a company that really focuses on the core computer offerings and that roadmap has lots of life in it that includes continuing architectural improvements to support bigger picture topics like virtualization, the continuing evolution to multi-core architectures as the means of increasing computer power while saving on electric power, the pending integration of high-performance graphics onto the CPU as well as the integration of a lot of standard radio technology. Moore's Law progress won't cease in the next five years for sure. BTW, Hafnium [Hf] is an element that is at the core of Intel's approach to continue to make transistors smaller and smaller.

As The Chip Turns

Steve Jobs might be strange but he sure isn't stupid.  When Apple moved from IBM to Intel for CPU's for the Mac a lot of people wondered whether this was in the best interests of the Mac cultists since Intel iconoclasm was always part of that. Apple understood that since Intel now had the power minimization religion the Intel processors would overtake IBM in power efficiency. It turns out there are other powerful benefits. When Intel brings out a new CPU now it tends to have architectural visibility (e.g. more cores, virtualization capability, …). The pipeline between Intel and the customer on the Windows side is long and hard often requiring some support in Windows and then by the ODM and computer vendor.  In contrast, here in Silicon Valley Apple and Intel have a small team of bright engineers and if it is to Apple's benefit they can easily be the first to market with a MAC that leverages a new Intel CPU. Intel loves it because the not-to-price-sensitive MAC purchaser is a great way to take advantage of Intel's newest. So expect to see some share growth for Apple in areas like laptops especially given the fact that you can run Windows virtualized if you want.  And speaking of competition, we would guess that AMD is in for a pretty hard time now that the CPU competition has moved to mine-has-more-cores-than-yours (naa, naa, naa!). AMD is better than Intel at many things but getting new processes into volume production is not and is not likely to be one of them. Smaller features and more transistors is the way you get more cores, and Intel seems destined to win those battles for the foreseeable future.