Intel doesn’t do diversifications. Everyone knows that. Now and again it tries one, just for fun, a bit of video conferencing, ASICs, consumer products, wireless chips, a stab at NAND flash, but it soon pulls out to show that it’s only teasing.
But has Intel made the wrong call on its core business - PC microprocessors? Multi-core seemed a sensible way to go when heat put a stop to increasing frequencies as a way to improve performance, but could multi-core be a technological dead-end?
“The challenge of writing software for programming general purpose computing applications is generally recognized in the scientific computing community as the biggest single unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, computing problem”, says Chris Rowen, president and CEO of top multi-core specialist Tensilica.
Asked what that means for the business strategies of Intel and AMD trying to get more performance by adding more cores to their x86 architecture chips, Rowen replied: “It means they will find the utilisation will be poor, until we find this hypothetical breakthrough. Until then, the value of the addition of a tenth, or eleventh or fifteenth processor core will be problematical.”
Of course Intel has acknowledged the trickiness of this problem by helping to fund centres to study it at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
But what will Intel do if the ‘hypothetical breakthrough’ doesn’t happen?
That would certainly give the marketeers who run Intel these days a challenge.
Could they get away, perhaps, by simply pretending that more cores equals more performance?
Could a $1 billion ad campaign, telling such a porky, do the trick?
I have an awful feeling it might.
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