Intel CEO Opens IDF 2013

September 10, 2013, IDF, San Francisco—Brian Krzanich declared that it is different being at IDF as the CEO for Intel. Nevertheless, the company continues to move along and innovate.

The increasing rates of change and innovation now exceed those of the last 30 years. The company’s vision and strategy is to continue on the 40-year trend towards more personal and connected. So far, every transition in technology has led to increases in volume, and now the transitions are coming faster.

Process scaling is the major underlying driver for changes, and one outcome of those changes in dimensions is the move from discrete CPUs to SOCs. Now computer architectures are envisioned for increased functional integration to enable greater connectivity and communications. Increasing the functional integration requires more innovation and the ability to integrate more capabilities into a single chip.

Intel has an advantage here, since they have the financial resources, people, and technology to lead in this space. As a result, part of the strategy is to continue to lead all segments that they operate in, which now includes servers, PCs, tablets, and phones. The next area is now the question for the company.

The datacenter is changing, and the biggest driver is cloud computing. Software-defined systems and server rack scalability are all part of the new infrastructure. The processors for these new functions span Xeon E5 to Atom CPUs. PCs are trying to go on a power diet while increasing functions and capabilities. The latest Haswell architectures now offer operation for as little as 4.5W.

Intel has developed a 14nm process with first silicon in a number of products. These chips will be shipping by the end of the year. The benefits of this new process are a reduction of power consumption of 30 percent over the existing 21nm process. The end-products that will benefit from this power reduction include PCs in the latest 2-in-1 form factors, which combine PC and tablet functions. In tablets, the Atom and iCore based platforms will show up in sub-$100 tablets for Christmas this year.

In other processes, they have produced a smart phone chip in 22nm that includes an LTE modem. The LTE advanced functions increase data speeds to up to 70Mbps and will be increased to 150Mbps with the inclusion of carrier aggregation functions next year.

The internet of things will require very low power, connectivity, small size, and security. They are introducing a new processor family called Quark that is 1/5th of the size and 1/10th of the power of the Atom family. This new processor is going to be opened for customization in an (Intel) synthesizable format. The company expects developers to provide the final area domain expertise to extend the reference designs and add to the software base.

Following Kzranich, Renee James, Intel’s President, talked about how Intel has developed technologies over the past 45 years. The most recent advances included the 45nm high-k process in ’07, the 32nm with Hi-k and metal gate in ’09, and on to the latest 3-D 14 nm parts. All of these advances led to more transistors, but the roadmap is getting shorter. The technological barriers are driving Intel to look at ways to continue the innovations.

A smart phone today has more compute power than a Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz. The complexity of a phone chip is due to the difficulty in making the technologies and in meeting the demands from consumers for a more connected lifestyle. The result is that the manufacturers must integrate more to meet the demands.

From mainframes, to changing PCs that do their own tasks, and greater lifestyle demands call for more personalization and integrated compute. Intel is poised to address all compute functions. for example, in Dublin Ireland, the city has wired sensors that provide real-time updates of all city functions including traffic. Residents can see where traffic is congested or where a storm push is causing flooding. This demonstration project shows the possibilities of the wired city, and is scalable to the mega-cities to add millions of sensors to their infrastructure to manage the data, people, and the city itself.

In healthcare and delivery, sensors are enabling people to move out of hospitals to their homes through real-time health information. The ability to deliver constant streams of data can provide a new level of constant, customized care to patients. Big data also figures into this scenario. The human genome is about 1PB per person, and a searchable DNA map facilitates personalized, precision, computational care for your specific treatment.

Eric Dishman, of Intel, told his personal odyssey with cancer. He was getting nowhere in his treatments for a decade, until he got his DNA mapped. Then the doctors discovered that his genome was not compatible with the on-going treatments. When they changed his treatment regimen, they got good results. This type of medical response is now scalable to large numbers of people, although the data challenge is to address all of the genome sequence data; 1PB per person times 4B people.

After the talks, the floor mikes opened for general questions which Kzranich and James answered, a first for IDF.

Quark?
Quark is positioned under the Atom and targeted for embedded and wearable devices. This microcontroller is synthesizable, so is configurable and scalable, and is supported by an open software environment. It will be expanded to a full family of chips over time. The basic core is fixed, and developers can add other IP for better functionality. The chips will have to be fabricated at Intel. Some small amount of process modification is possible for the chips.

Accelerate adoption of apps?
Software partners like Microsoft as well as the platform manufacturers are developing computers like the 2-in-1 hybrids to enable new functionality and new interfaces. Other OS will become touch enabled over time and some machines will have dual boot capabilities. Intel is working with developers to include touch functions. In addition, the latest chips have optimizations for Windows 8.

Broadwell 14nm?
The Atom is working in 14nm, and the bigger CPUs will move to 14nm next year.

Integration, datacenters, and cloud?
The Internet and IT datacenters exist, so refinements in datacenter performance for software like Hadoop are being implemented. The basic platforms and software are increasing functionality and services.

Graphene?
Intel is investigating other materials, but they are all years away. Proof of function is not that same as a cost-effective, reliable manufacturing process.

Transform performance with changes in power in a range from 17W to 48W?
Scaling within the silicon is hard. Lower power CPUs are possible in fanless systems that are capable of moving more information over time. A 5-10W CPU could be put into turbo mode for a short while for bursts of compute, but a scaling from 17 to 48 watts performance is not likely.

For personalized health, privacy and security issues?
Security is a multi-level issue. For personal information, detection and clean-up are the main functions. Moving to the data management level calls for detecting the bad areas, but eventually will move to known-good environments and users. The computer has to consist of a platform, software, secure supply chain, and policy issues, all of which must be related to privacy.

Tablets?
The company is getting into this space. The Bay Trail CPUs will offer the performance and power benefits needed to change the user interfaces through increased integration.

MEMS?
Intel will go there. There is a lot of R&D going on in the space and the various sensors will be integrated into the CPO SoCs in the future.

CPU going into SoC results in smaller volumes?
Moore’s law states that the industry will always go for the lowest cost transistors, and the lowest cost transistors enable low priced models. Fewer skews are possible through recent reductions in throughput times of 60 percent, and reductions in planning ties by 8o percent. The fab can now change over in 1 week. All of the fabs are running the same processes through the copy exactly program, resulting in greater flexibility for the company.