Can Intel kickstart the industry?

Intel sought to give the beleaguered IT industry a few shots in the arm at the recent Intel Developers' Forum held in San Jose, California.

The oft-repeated refrain, first coined by Charles Kettering during the depression of the 1920s, ran: "We'll see business come back when we once again make products that people want to buy."

The company kicked off proceedings with the introduction of the Pentium 4 running at a fairly hefty 2Ghz. It took 15 years to get to the first 1Mhz and 15 months to reach the second, trumpeted Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's platform division, at the glitzy launch event.

Just 24 hours later, we saw a demonstration of the processor running at 3.5Ghz - Intel expects the P4 architecture to scale easily to 10Ghz. A marketable 3.5Ghz chip is unlikely to appear for at least six months, by which time Intel will have switched P4 production to a 0.13micron process. The chip is made with a 0.18micron line width.

The Pentium 4 was something of a damp squib on launch, failing to impress the media and hardly able to hold its own against AMD's well-priced Athlon.

Intel had claimed that the real benefits of the Pentium 4 architecture would be demonstrated at higher clock speeds and with software specially tweaked for the platform.

The P4 may now leave the Athlon for dead but the introduction of a new Intel processor has traditionally boosted PC sales and helped the industry to turn in consistently positive growth figures. This time around, the dot-commotion and ebusiness madness caused a hole the Pentium 4 was unable to plug.

Intel executives, like the rest of the industry, are now peering into the abyss, and they're not used to it. "Nothing could be as bad as the last six months," muttered executive vice president of Intel's architecture group, Paul Otellini, who is hopeful of a return to healthier times. For Otellini, the immediate outlook is rosy, thanks to the combination of fast P4s and Microsoft's latest version of Windows XP.

"We'll be looking to demonstrate the benefit of the two technologies," he said, following the guest appearance of the vice president of Microsoft's Platforms Group, Jim Allchin, on the Intel main stage.

Recession? It's a downturn, actually

For the assembled developer and Intel 'partners', the hope is that the combination of these two products will fire up the punters enough to see them buy their way around the recession. Indeed the word recession was studiously avoided by all but the most brazen of speakers. Downturn is the favoured term, but by playing semantics the nervousness of the executives is made plain.

News that Gateway had been forced to lay off a quarter of its workforce, or that the imperturbable George Bush Junior was beginning to get the economic jitters, helped concentrate the minds of observers, even if Intel executives remained on message and the message remained positive.

Intel held an ace up its sleeve which it dealt later in the week when the covers were removed from 'project Jackson' - codename for what it calls hyper-threading.

Parallel processing is an obvious way of increasing the power of a computer, distributing tasks across a number of processors for simultaneous execution. Hyper-threading will allow a single processor to act like a pair or more of processors, enabling it to cope with parallel-processing applications.

Otellini announced that Intel's first hyper-threaded processors will be in the family of Xeon processors, codenamed Foster, which should appear in 2002. He claimed this progress would enable developers to start devising applications for parallel processing platforms, and called on those present to do so.

According to Otellini, hyper-threading is an example of a technology that makes processors smarter. "We have to think beyond megahertz and build better computers," he said, assessing constantly improving processing speeds as a given, thanks to the P4's scalable architecture.

Ironically, the suggestion that the marketing of PC processors may shift away from the megahertz race could benefit Intel's arch-rival AMD, which we can expect to lag behind in terms of raw speed quoted as the P4 gets into its stride.

Rounding off the selection of products Intel expects will excite buyers enough to kick-start a revival in the fortunes of hi-tech investors, is a mobile chip named after the famous Israeli site of Banias, planned to follow a 0.13micron mobile P4 part that will appear in the first quarter of 2002.

Banias will be a low-power, high-performance processor designed for the small form-factor mobile computer that will buoy up the PC industry for the coming years. At least we hope it will.