Intel VP jump-starts mobility with a platform approach

Intel is no stranger to the mobile computing market. But historically, its notebook processors have been little more than scaled-down versions of its desktop CPUs. It took David “Dadi” Perlmutter and his Israel-based team of engineers to arrive at a different approach.

Perlmutter joined the Intel Design Center in Haifa, Israel in 1980, where he led the design team for the i387, the floating-point math co-processor for the 80386 CPU. Throughout the 1990s, Perlmutter went on to oversee development of the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium MMX processors, establishing the P6 architecture, which is the core of Intel’s processor offerings to this day.

The Pentium-M, code-named “Banias,” was the first processor Intel would produce specifically for the mobile computing market. But when Perlmutter’s team began work on early phases of the chip, mobility wasn’t what he had in mind.

“We were trying to do products for low-end PCs at that time. That was my business. But you know,” Perlmutter laughs, “engineers think about what they want, not what you ask them to. There were a bunch of engineers on my team here in Israel who felt that they could do something significantly different.”

Key to the team’s vision for low-cost PCs was the idea of developing not just a CPU but a tightly integrated chipset, including I/O and graphics components. It wasn’t long before Perlmutter realized how applicable these ideas would be to mobile computing. With the blessing of Intel’s top brass, he soon steered the project in this direction.

“Many things that happen — controlling the different display, and so on — there are all kinds of additional features that you need on a mobile PC that you don’t need on the desktop. And on top of that, it has to use much less power,” Perlmutter explains. “We realized that a CPU is not enough. We needed a mobile-optimized chipset.”

The fruits of those efforts became what we now know as Centrino, a unique product offering that combines a low-power processor, wireless networking, graphics, and other components into a single, mobile-tailored platform. Since the first Centrino-equipped notebooks began shipping in 2003, the initiative has enjoyed great success. Moreover, it has likely changed how microprocessor products are developed forever.

What’s next for Perlmutter and his team? “We have some ideas that we have not eventually implemented,” he muses slyly. “But I think [they are] good ones that we might use in the future.”