IDF Spring 05: Pat Talks
HEXUS.net gets round the table with Pat Gelsinger
In a round table with Pat Gelsinger he stated today that the P4 will carry on being the enterprise desktop solution. Intel have also stated today that they will be taking the P4 into 2006 and scaling it down to 65nm. However, after this the future of the netburst architecture is not certain.
Intel want to grow the Xeon 'industry standard' servers, and also to increase the revenue of the Itanium. IBM has said that they have Power as their strategy for their server level. Intel believes that Power is the key competitor to Itanium. Sun, HP, NEC are picking either Power or Itanium as their RISC serving solution.
IBM are a significant partner of Intel and they have a large number of Xeon solutions which are on the market; Intel are also competing with Itanium on the Power platform. Intel bought out the Itanium design team from HP. Intel are certain that the HP strategy is still to carry on with the Itanium platforms.
Intel believe the movement from HP to use the AMD solution was a loss and will work hard to deliver better products and sell the products better. This will involve trying to win it back with these SKUs. Intel will be delivering Twincastle in the next 2 months which will give very compelling benchmarks to help win these back.
Pat sees Cell as the emotion engine which was developed for PS2. He believes that it will deliver the same thing to the market; however the Emotion engine never made it in to workstations and desktop market. This engine was great for the PS2 but it is not a complete solution on the software and programming on this 8 parallel processing parts.
Intel will be aggressively delivering multi core with full support for parallelism and multiprocessing – Intel will be delivering these and have partners in place to help get the software in place.
One challenge which could occur is the socket/license model – Microsoft have stated they will do this per socket, so multicore CPUs are not going to be held in the same light – Intel believe that Microsoft may well follow as the virtualization will carry the same thing.
Intel are seeing a growing support for the Itanium platform, with SGI, NEC etc. No one believes that this Itanium / Power market place will not die out - there will always be 50% of the market ($10billions of revenue over the coming years).
Intel will deliver I/O AT, AMT, and VT to mobile and desktop clients – in order for corporates to take full advantage of these. Currently Celeron is between 30 and 40% of the desktop PC market, since it is a very price sensitive part of the market.
