Future needs new chips, fast wireless, Intel’s Gelsinger says

SAN FRANCISCO – The “tera” era of the computing world is approaching, and the semiconductor industry is going to have to rethink many of the architectural approaches it has taken to build today’s processors in order to handle the vast datasets of the future, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Intel Corp., in a keynote address Thursday at the Spring Intel Developer Forum here. 

Gelsinger traditionally takes the last day of the biannual conference to tell attendees about the company’s plans for new technologies and products in the coming five to ten year. In past years, he has talked up everything from software-defined radios to biosensor networks, but this year he focused on Intel’s fundamental role as a chip architect.

“We’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the digitization of information,” Gelsinger said. As more and more information gets recorded digitally, processors will need to handle terabytes of data and deliver tera bits per second of bandwidth, he said. One terabyte is equal to one trillion bytes.

In order to handle that much data, computers will need to adapt, search through large amounts of data for relevant information and reach a conclusion based on the whole process, Gelsinger said. Performance will increase through shrinking transistors and other innovations, but an architectural change is necessary to handle the tera era, he said.

It’s not just processing power that needs to increase in order to reach those goals, Gelsinger said. Memory, interconnects and storage will all need to scale alongside processing power in order to realize this vision of the future, he said.

One way Intel is working to enable the tera era is through the use of architectural techniques such as helper threads. Helper threads increase the performance of single-threaded applications by executing as many tasks as possible in parallel on a single processor. This technique becomes even more effective as multicore processors roll out, Gelsinger said. Multicore processors integrate more than one CPU (central processing unit) onto a single chip.

Another method is the use of software-defined radios to allow users to quickly switch between wireless connections to communicate as effectively as possible, Gelsinger said.

This vision of the tera era won’t likely appear before the end of the decade, but it is coming, and the industry needs to prepare, Gelsinger said.

Prior to Gelsinger’s talk, Intel Executive Vice President and General Manager Sean Maloney updated the audience on the future of Intel’s communications business. This business endured a difficult year in 2003, having to write off $600 million in goodwill after realizing in December the communications business wouldn’t grow as fast as previously thought. The flash memory and applications processor business was folded into Maloney’s wired and wireless networking group late last year.

Maloney announced a 90 nanometer flash memory product during his first keynote as head of the combined Intel Communications Group. According to Intel, the product will be the first NOR flash memory product released at 90 nanometers. Samples with densities of 64M bits will be available in April, with volume production starting in the third quarter. The 64M bit chip will cost US$10.26 in quantities of 10,000 units.

Intel also updated its vision for WiMax, the metro-area wireless networking standard that the company thinks will help solve the “last-mile” problem of broadband penetration. Only Japan and South Korea have more than 50 percent of their households using high-speed connections to get on the Internet, and WiMax could help increase that number, Maloney said.

Wired broadband connections are costly to install and maintain, but WiMax will jump over all those hurdles, Maloney said. Consumers should be able to install an antenna on their homes that can access WiMax signals during the first half of 2005, and the technology should be advanced to the point where connections are possible without an antenna by the end of 2005, he said.

WiMax products are expected to roll out over the course of 2004, he said.