Stacy Smith and William Orton
Stacy Smith and William Orton
When do you accept the future?
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Intel makes some amazing chips. Living in Chandler, AZ, I have several neighbors and friends that work there and I always like to root for the home team.
In the area of pure performance, Intel has created many corpses. Sun Microsystems. SGI. Data General. Zilog. DEC. All of these companies pitted themselves against the mighty Intel and they all failed and ended their life as a appendage to some other company. The amazing part is all of these companies were able to innovate and create stunning products. I still remember doing real time 3D rendering on an SGI back in 1991. Simply amazing at the time. Mega pixel display. Full Z-Buffering with fog effects. 24 BIT color. Dude, it was stellar.
I can purchase nearly the same quality now for $500. And it fits in the palm of my hand. And it makes calls. And it runs on batteries that will easily last a day.
There was a time when Stacy Smith looked at the world of communications and he had it all. Western Union could get a message to any point in the world faster than anyone else. They had transatlantic cables laid connecting the United States to Europe. They connected the East Coast to the young West Coast of the US. Western Union was printing money.
In 1876, Orton, then CEO of Western Union, was offered all of the IP behind voice telecommunications by Alexander Graham Bell. He turned it down because it was a toy. For $100,000, Orton passed up controlling the future of telecommunications for 100 years. Within 2 years, Orton recognized his mistake. NOTE: I hear many tech writers and commentaries referring to the iPhone and iPad the same way. An iToy.
In a Reuters article published today, Stacy Smith, CFO of Intel, mulled over the thought of Intel becoming a contract foundry for companies interested in using Intel’s advanced manufacturing processes.
"If Apple or Sony came to us and said 'I want to do a product that involves your IA (Intel architecture) core and put some of my IP around it', I wouldn't blink. That would be fantastic business for us. Then you get into the middle ground of 'I don't want it to be a IA core, I want it to be my own custom-designed core,' and then you are only getting the manufacturing margin, (and) that would be a much more in-depth discussion and analysis"
- Stacy Smith, May 2011
The problem is, the world is shifting from powerful desktops and laptops to small and light portable solutions like smart phones and tablets. While Intel has been pushing the boundaries of speed and performance for the past 10 years, the software, truth be told, has not. The most popular OS on the planet is still Windows XP with over 2X the share as the next nearest competitor, Windows 7. A 10 year old OS running on 1.3 GHz hardware designed for the times. The current hardware is an order of magnitude faster and can be almost 1.5 orders faster on heavily threaded code.
The reality is, the hardware performance is fast enough but Intel still draws too much power. The current ARM designs are nowhere as fast as Intel’s top of the line Core i7 and Sandy Bridge lines. Heck even the slowest Atom chip will outrace the fastest dual core Cortex A9 out there in most operations. But there is one area ARM excels at. Power consumption. ARM sips power in comparison to the performance driven iAPX series Intel offers.
Intel designed for performance while plugged into a wall.
ARM Holdings designed for getting as much done as possible with as little power as is available.
Two different design goals. Two different outcomes.
I wonder if Intel regrets selling its communications and application chip division in 2006?
I wonder if Intel is brave enough to come out with really impressive ARM designs to compete with NVidia, Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm? Seriously. Can you imagine an 8 core Cortex A9 with an Power VR SGX543MP8 taking the same die area as Apple’s current A5?
I wonder if Stacy Smith feels much like William Orton did in 1876?
Western Union had the best telecom managers in the business and was raking in profits to fund expansion. It attracted the best and brightest engineers for generations. Western Union probably passed on hundreds of other inventions and ideas, and rightly so.