Monday, December 5, 2005
Energy conservation hasn’t always been something that is top of mind for electrical engineers designing and building new chips, but their customers are thinking about it quite seriously these days.
Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini delivered that message very clearly to the Churchill Club last night as part of a wide-ranging interview about everything from the changing color of his cubicle at Intel over the three decades he has worked there to the future directions of the company. But it was energy consumption among end customers rather than just the heat dissipation problems of developing chips that sounded a new message for the company.
“Energy consumption at the chip is one of the most critical things the industry needs to change,” Otellini said. “For the server farms at Google, electricity costs are outpacing hardware costs.”
Otellini also said that parallelism is the only way to deliver more performance in the future for the same or less power. He said operating systems already are capable of handling multiprocessing, and that multithreading—a limited version of parallelism—already is available in hardware. “People have always wanted more performance,” he noted. “The only way we can deliver more performance in the same power envelope is with parallelism.”
In addition, he said WiMax will prove to be the “big brother” to WiFi and that it is a step in the right direction toward globalization of the Internet. “It’s not out of the question to think about a single global network. You could have a standard that works across the world.”
While conceding that won’t happen anytime soon, the concept of a single global network has been smoldering across Silicon Valley for years. The hurdles are twofold: providing sufficient bandwidth to deliver video and other services, and eliminating some of the government regulations that restrict access through national standards that vary from one country to the next.
By: DocMemory
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