Via ZDNet
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Continuing our look in more detail at the 2013 predictions from analyst Mark Anderson, the question of processors and Intel vs ARM is an interesting proxy for the bigger question of "what do we want a computer to be?"
Despite the successes of three generations of Core processors, Intel has plenty of problems to tackle.
Anderson put it bluntly and raised questions about both the business
and the technology of CPUs ('CarryAlong' is his term for tablets,
phablets, netbooks and other devices that are portable enough to carry and use all day):
"Intel: Long Live the King, the King is Dead. The
chip royalty ladder is flipped, as Intel becomes increasingly irrelevant
in the world of general computing, while CarryAlong and mobile
chipmakers (led by Qualcomm and ARM) are the new William and Kate. For
most observers, Intel in 2013 is a component supplier for servers. The
best way out of this cul de sac: a new CEO with tech chops."
Quantum barrier
Intel is unbeatable in the laptop space today, but the combination of
the popularity of tablets and the laws of physics at 19nm scale and
below makes you wonder where they will be in five to 10 years' time.
I've wondered if Intel started favouring operations over chip
technologists for leadership when they noticed that they were hitting
the wall on Moore's Law and had run through Dennard Scaling so much
faster than predicted.
(Moore's Law, of course, relates to the number of transistors on a
wafer and the cost of the fab to put them there, while Dennard Scaling
has to do with keeping the power efficiency of those transistors as good
as the previous generation.)
The hi-K metal gates introduced in Sandy Bridge and the tri-gate derivative
in Ivy Bridge are making a huge difference in today's Intel chips, but
it took 10 years to get that into production. Moreover, a new material
is needed to help deal with the fundamental issue of not having enough
electrons to get a clean signal to switch the transistor between one and
zero without quantum-level effects weirding out the transistor - and if
there is such a material, it's still in the labs.
Intel needs to optimise the processes now to make enough time to do
the next piece of fundamental science; however, as you hit the quantum
level, that fundamental science is a lot harder.
In the meantime I see Intel deliberately continuing to cannibalise
itself with Atom because that's preferable to being cannibalised by ARM -
and at least uses those fabs that were so expensive when you built them
a few years back when they were state of the art. I also see it missing
out on LTE, still, which has to hurt its ability to compete in the
smartphone market. And if rumours that Haswell chips don't launch until the middle of 2013
are true, Intel would be about six months behind on its usual tick-tock
cadence of shrinking a die one year and rolling out a new architecture
12 months later.
Could Intel knock the internal politics on the head while it's at it? I don't understand why CloverTrail isn't yet available in large numbers, but the battle between the Silicon Valley and Israeli chip development teams
on direction could be one reason why we don't yet have a Core chip that
can support Connected Standby (CS) in Windows 8, even though the power
levels should be low enough to make that work.
Connected Standby, Ultrabooks and GPUs
Look at the 17W TDP (thermal design point) of some Ivy Bridge Core
models, the promised 15W TDP of Shark Bay Ultrabook processors and then
forward to the 8-10W TDP of Haswell, when we might finally get
on-package CMOS voltage regulators and support for S0ix active idle -
and that's what you need for Connected Standby.
To be fair, it's possible that the reason we don't have Core chips
with CS already is that it requires everything to go to a low power fast
wake state, not just the CPU - and that's easiest to do when you
control all the support components by building an SoC; System on Chip by
definition means integration and less variation to deal with.
(Qualcomm's huge success has been about not just building a good ARM
chip but building it into an integrated platform that can be used to
churn out dozens or hundreds of smartphones in a year.)
The Ultrabook programme also gives Intel a way to kick OEMs into line
to make them use low-power components (maybe even screens with enough
attached RAM to cache what you're looking at on screen when it's not
changing fast enough for the GPU to need to be awake), although that's
going to face the usual resistance from OEMs who want the choice to
carry on with their race to the bottom on $200 tablets and $300 PCs.
Meanwhile, there's Intel's continuing inability to understand that
producing graphics drivers that are robust enough to reliably do
hardware acceleration is crucial. Notice how few Intel GPUs have been
certified for hardware acceleration by Adobe or compare the hardware
acceleration you can get in IE 9 and 10 with a 'real' GPU compared to
Intel integrated graphics. Offload to GPU is one way to get around
Moore's Law (a GPU has far more cores than even the most multi-core of
CPUs and they're simplistic and only applicable to easily parallelised
problems, but offloading to special purpose hardware is another way ARM
systems punch above their weight).
Intel is stuck between the rock of physics, the hard place of mobile computing, the Scylla of expensive fabs and the Charybdis of business models.
Maybe that's why it's trying so hard to become a software company
with services for developers. It's been adding NUI concepts like voice
recognition and gestures as well as location services under the Computer
Continuum umbrella to the language support and development tools it's
long offered, and putting its own virtualisation layer under any
operating system running on an Intel PC. And, yes, all that does put
Intel into competition with an even wider range of industry players...
AMD takes ARMs against the sea of Intel
Inside ARM: The British success story taking the chip world by storm
