“There will be more action in multi-threading, multi-core environment”

Intel CEO, Craig R Barret was in India before handing over the reign to Paul Otelline next year. While he diplomatically fielded whether India would see an Intel fab unit, he declined to announce the location of the next manufacturing facility. 

The simultaneous processing of multiple instructions, otherwise known as parallelism, is gaining importance in both 32-bit and 64-bit computing environments and even Paul Otelline recently said that the design paradigm has shifted at Intel, and all resources are being dedicated to multi-core processors. Can you share more information on this? 

Yes, simultaneous processing of multiple instructions is gaining importance in the industry and Intel is committed towards increasing the multi-threading capabilities of its processors. There will be more action in multi-threading, multi-core application environment. Dual-core chips are designed to significantly increase performance without increasing power consumption and it is specially useful for 64-bit Itanium or the mobile desktop architecture scenario. 

Could you elaborate on future product roadmap for Intel?

While we crossed-over to the 90-nanometer technology in microprocessor shipments during the third quarter, we are also ready with the next generation 65-nanometer memory chips and expect to introduce it during the second half of 2005. We already have two microprocessors designed on 65-nanometer process, which is currently being debugged and getting ready for manufacturing next year.

Apart from Wi-Fi and Wimax, what networking technologies are going to form a major focus for Intel?

Intel is involved in technological research and development, be it ultra wideband or bluetooth, 3G technology or the recent upsurge of Wimax as a wireless broadband standard. Large-scale trials for Wimax are going on and Intel is the leading silicon provider for it. We see great potential in all these technologies and are involved in increasing the mass adoption of these cutting-edge technologies. This apart, we see a lot of potential in wired Ethernet connection technology for the near future. I feel future technologies would revolve around high rate optical technologies and high speed Internet connection.

Will home networking see mass adoptions like mobile phones and broadband?
Are you working towards integrating the three in some way?

The sale of access points is high and it is still increasing. Today, the number of access points being sold per day could be anywhere between 5,000-25,000. A lot of these are also finding their way into homes. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) will see consumer electronics talking with computers at home at the same level of protocols. We see it coming in a big way in 2005.

What are your expansion plans for India, particularly the Bangalore development center?

We have hired 800 additional workers this year in India, bringing the employee ranks in the subcontinent to 2,400. It's a 50 increase in employee base. We have an expansion plan and are now moving from a software engineering focus towards the hardware and product design focus for the development center in
Bangalore.

While Intel has pumped in $302 million additional investment in its manufacturing plant at Shanghai in China, are there any plans of setting up a chip manufacturing facility in India?

I am not saying no. India is one of the several countries that Intel is currently evaluating from a manufacturing perspective. India is one of the three countries competing for our next manufacturing plants. Besides India, the other locations that we are evaluating are based in eastern Europe and Latin America.

The reason we have made additional investments in China are because the country has further developed its manufacturing, utility, customs, transportation infrastructure and ease of movement of products from and to the country. I have seen an infrastructure increase in both countries substantially. Also, governments are putting a lot of emphasis on the infrastructure, particularly in the IT education infrastructure. Whereas, India has moved much ahead in software development and engineering.

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