Word: intell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...iPod?" Otellini asks, and his answer sounds strange from the mouth of a man with the well-manicured looks of a successful accountant. "It's my music machine, man. That's what you want. This," and here he gestures to a laptop across the conference room at Intel headquarters, "is my content machine. That [desktop] PC is my productivity machine. You have to start by thinking about the things people want to do with computers and work backward...
That may sound like a simple enough statement, but it represents a profound revolution in the way the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker--long the powerhouse of Silicon Valley--does business. Forty years ago this April, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that given advances in transistor miniaturization, computer processors should double in speed every 18 months. Not only did Moore's law become the most trustworthy truism in technology, it was also the rock on which all Intel marketing was founded. Why did you need a PC with an Intel Pentium II processor? Because it was four times as fast...
Until last year, that is, when Intel delayed production of its latest Pentium 4 chip and scaled back its proposed speed from 4 GHz to 3.8 GHz. That was partly owing to technical complications; pack too many transistors onto a microchip, and you have magnetic resistance and overheating issues that require bulkier fans and suck up more battery life in your laptop. But the bigger problem is simply that most of us no longer have such a need for speed, at least when it comes to everyday applications such as e-mail, Web browsers and spreadsheets, which work just...
...Otellini, who will become CEO in May, that reality has the makings of a crisis. And in fact the Pentium 4 issue was only one of a whole host of mishaps and missteps that Intel found itself confronted with in 2004. The LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip for high-definition TVs, a pet project of Otellini's that (as president and COO) he had announced with much fanfare in January 2004, was abandoned in November when the cost of production became prohibitive. Waggish engineers made a disco ball out of defunct LCOS chips for Intel's holiday party...
...Perhaps more wounding was the fact that longtime allies seemed to be abandoning Intel. Microsoft announced that it would turn to IBM for the chips for its next video-games console, the Xbox 2, though it was Intel x86 chips that powered the original Xbox. Kevin Rollins, the new CEO of Dell--the world's biggest manufacturer of Intel PCs--mused publicly about the possibility of switching to AMD chips. (Rollins has since decided to stick with Intel.) Craig Barrett, the current Intel CEO, who will step down in May, went into mea culpa mode. "This is not the Intel...