Intel App Show for Developers – IDF 2013 Day 1 Keynote Review [intelswnetwork YouTube channel, published on Oct 2, 2013]
Bob and Eric Mantion [Capt Geek] breakdown IDF13′s day one keynote and discuss why they believe this could be the best keynote in recent memory.
From: 2013 Intel Developer Forum Opening Keynote [transcript, Sept. 10, 2013] Brian Krzanich, CEO, and Renee James, President
Brian Krzanich: … to show just how far we’re looking ahead, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Intel’s newest president, Renee James. [The inserted images are from the presentation PDF]
Renee James: Good morning. For 45 years, Intel’s been inventing the future. For 45 years, we’ve been building the foundation of this industry, which is the silicon transistor, which you just saw. And for 45 years, we have been doing the things that everybody said can’t be done.
A YouTube copy of http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2013/sf/keynote/130910_rj/index.html
Now, we’re going to lead the industry into a new era of computing, an era of computing where everything computes. And we’ll transition from worrying about the form factor, or the look and feel of the device, to the real problems that computing has solved for us — compute that’s integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, and assists us in solving problems, like managing huge global cities, or finding cures through personalized healthcare.
We’ll be able to solve ordinary problems in extraordinary ways, and extraordinary problems will be solved in seemingly ordinary ways. It will be from the mundane to the miraculous, when integrated computing is in our future.
For the rest of this talk, what I’m going to do is give you a glimpse of some of the projects that are started today using integrated computing to solve really tough problems that are out there, and give you a glimpse of what the world’s going to look like, from our point of view. But first, I’d like to take you back to the beginning, where all good stories start.
Forty-five years ago, when Intel was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Bob was the inventor of the silicon transition and integrated circuits, and he gave us a mandate, to go out and do something wonderful. Gordon gave us the compass for that mission with Moore’s Law, and since then Intel has been on the relentless pursuit of the essential underpinnings of this industry, improving the silicon transistor.
All of you know this, because some of you have written it. Moore’s Law has been declared dead at least once a decade since I’ve been at Intel, and as you know, you heard from Brian, we have 14 nanometers working, and we can see beyond that. I assume you, it’s alive and well, and we’re going to enable many, many things with it.
One of the things that Moore’s Law enables is the mobility that all of you are using to tweet and surf and text while I talk. We’re going to talk about that.
All right, today we work in the nano-world, and for those of you that aren’t big aficionados of semiconductor technology, I thought I’d take a second and just explain to you what it really is like. We build transistors atom by atom. Not long ago, we actually didn’t imagine how we would build a transistor that was smaller than 22 nanometers, and now you’ve seen 14 working in Brian’s talk this morning. So, if you don’t know how small that is, consider this. A nanometer is to a yardstick — let me get my marble — as this marble is to the planet earth, that’s how small.
And we build billions of those transistors on every chip, and hundreds of millions of those chips a year. At our scale, what we do is as complex as putting a man on the moon was in 1969, or putting a rover on Mars in the 21st century. What we do takes fundamental scientific breakthrough. Just to make a single new feature or a new product, something for example like HKMG [High-K Metal Gate] or a 3D transistor, both of which were research projects until Intel had fundamental breakthroughs that moved them into high production and scale.
These are a few of the additional technological breakthroughs that people said they were barriers. You can’t overcome them, it can’t be done. And the fact is, we have, and we’ve done it so consistently that we make it look easy. Every time you turn on your phone, your tablet, your PC, it just works. It seems easy. And behind that are tens of thousands of people fundamentally making scientific breakthrough so that works.
These are the breakthroughs that fuel the entire industry, and they make the foundation of the compute platform that you as developers do your work on. And compute platforms and devices follow Moore’s Law as well, not just silicon transistors. They continue to evolve in power and features and performance, and it’s all based on that underlying progress that we make.
So, I want to give you some examples — they’ll be super fun. So, here’s one. I know all of you are going to recognize this. This — right, the DynaTAC 8000, Motorola phone. In 1980, this phone was built using 1500-nanometer technology, which was state of the art, for 22 nanometers today, right? Some of you remember this was your first cellphone, and it was super cool — not so much today. Today it looks like a prop from a movie. Wasn’t very pocket friendly. Battery life measured in — anybody? — minutes, exactly.
Okay, here’s state of art today. This is an Intel-based phone, it’s a Lenovo K900. And this phone is state of the art. Twelve days in standby, 12 hours in talk time. So remember, until 1990, most phones were installed in cars permanently, because they needed a power source, right? And all you could do was make a voice call. Could you imagine buying a phone that could only do a voice call today? No one would buy that, right? Making a call is not the most extraordinary thing that this phone does.
So, let’s talk about what’s extraordinary about it. It has more performance than Pentium® 4. It runs at two gigahertz, that phone, which 12 years ago was the fastest desktop computer you could buy. This is the fundamental advancement of what Intel does. It’s what Moore’s Law brings you, and it’s what we’ve done to make that phone’s performance seem totally mundane.
We’ve driven three breakthroughs in computing. The first one was very much about task-based computing. And the next phase — the one that I think we’re living in today — I call is lifestyle computing. I’ll talk a little bit more about why. The next phase is very much about integrated computing.
I’ll start with task-based. Task-based computing really started with origins with the mainframe. It was very much about the scarce resource, and your important task, and what you had to get done. In fact, Intel’s first significant products were memory products for working in mainframes.
The PC changed that. The PC democratized computing and allowed everybody to be able to do their own tasks. It was still very task-based. But, of course, the PC evolved. It evolved into the era that we’re in now, lifestyle computing. Lifestyle is very much about you, your data, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, to do what you need to get done.
I want to just pause there and think about evolutions in computing. They don’t come that often. When they do, at the beginning, we think it’s the next big thing. Everything that came before it, dead. But that’s not true. Right? It’s an evolution. Evolutions in computing don’t end. What happens is they continue forward, like the mainframe does today, and they evolve, and they adapt. You should think about each new phase in computing as not an ending but the beginning of the next frontier of where we’re going to go.
So the next chapter. What happens in the next chapter of computing? We think that familiar objects that occur in your everyday life get new capabilities. So I’m going to give you a pretty mundane example — a car headlight. What has been the greatest breakthrough in the car headlight in the last decade? Not that much. But now we can add silicon-based sensors to them and make them smart so they can detect the rain. Okay. But I don’t need to detect the rain. I need to actually see individual raindrops so that they can shoot the headlight beams around them.
What it allows you to do is, of course, safer driving, better clarity at night. Ordinary or extraordinary? Mundane or miraculous? Safer driving. When silicon can be made small enough, smart enough to transform a headlight, it can transform every other area of our life.
Quark – which Brian just talked about — is our new family of products that are targeted at integrated computing. And I use that term to be inclusive of Internet of things, of wearables, of traditional embedded. All of these new areas, and some of the older areas in embedded technology, that are getting smarter, and they’re getting connected. All of them will be connected, all of it will compute.
So let me show you a few examples of what’s happening today. The city of Dublin, Ireland — not the one in the East Bay — has a program that’s called City Watch and City Sensing. And what they’re doing is they put sensors into the street drainage system, which sounds pretty boring. But it allows them to monitor the flood warnings in the city of Dublin. And it alerts the crews to what’s happening.
But more importantly, it sends out some other information through their cloud servers. It sends out signals to the traffic system to divert [unintelligible] away from the high water area, and it also sends out a city map so that if you live in Dublin, Ireland, you can figure out what’s going on. And the citizens get to participate because, of course, there’s an app for that. There’s a City Watch app. And so they submit real time update reports. And they basically use all of that data together in a crowd sourcing way to put real time status as to what’s going on in the city of Dublin.
Most people don’t even know what’s happened. They don’t know that there’s sensors in their street. They don’t know that the traffic lights are timing or diverting them in different places, getting multiple sources of data real time, being put into a cloud service and sent out back to their smartphones.
Why is this important? Because by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population are going to live in these megacities — Dublin not being one of the biggest ones, of course. And something as mundane as a clogged drain becomes more than an annoyance. It becomes a systemic problem that needs the ability to fix it quickly, to manage massive amounts of data, to alert a huge number of populations.
Imagine, as developers, for you, what this means. Whole new platforms that we haven’t even thought about as compute platforms. Brand new kinds of applications that can be built. And managing [mega]cities is just one of those examples.
The other really interesting example — and there are so many that we actually had to pare it down so we could get it into this time slot — is in healthcare. 70 percent of these people that I was talking about that are going to be living in big cities, they’re going to be aging — as am I. We have these questions that we keep asking. Are we going to have enough hospitals? Will we have enough clinics? Will we be able to train enough doctors with this aging population?
They need more than just hospitals and clinics and doctors. They need care that’s affordable and is easy to administer. And the era of integrated computing allows us to offer some new answers to those old questions.
What if we’ve moved healthcare out of a hospital? [14:31]
[This – for some unknown reason – was left out of the published keynote at http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2013/sf/keynote/130910_rj/index.html
So here is that video part starting at [0:32] of this report: Amazing New Wearable Devices demonstrated by Intel President Renée James at IDF 2013 [Santa Barbara Arts TV YouTube Partner Global News YouTube channel, Sept 10, 2013] covering eveything, except the dimmed two paragraphs in the end.
] Brian talked about wearables, and you’ve seen kind of a glimpse of what’s coming. It’s going to be beyond jewelry and eyeglasses into devices like this one.
Let me show you this. This is a wearable from Sotera Wireless, in trials right now. I will put it on. I’m going to see if my heart rate’s really high here. What it’s doing is it’s taking a constant reading and transmitting reports wirelessly to a service. This is actually a real time EKG, blood pressure, and other vitals, just from a wristband. It is pretty big and unattractive but what this replaces is an entire — on this table, on the end — bunch of equipment that you would have to have in a medical clinic, and it gives you real time results to the doctor.
Here is another example of innovation in medicine by MC10. Through the magic of what silicon and transistor technology, in the future, this patch — this prototype silicon-based patch – could take the wonderful innovation shown by Sotera and perhaps even do much of the same in an even smaller package. This will be directly on your skin. This patch will perform all of the same functions that that wearable does today. This is from a company called MC10, and it’s a prototype right now.
So why is this important? That little patch thing is like a Band-Aid. You just peel it off and stick it on. So why is it important?
Because it’s a constant data stream that your doctor can see, that if something’s wrong it’s immediate, it’s up-to-date and accurate. And it allows us to move into the most exciting phase of healthcare that I think is in this frontier for us, and that is moving into customized care.
[14:31] Care that’s actually tailored to the things that are going on in your body. There are a tremendous number of other devices and other applications — injectables, ingestibles — that we’ve looked at. I didn’t have time for all of them today. But all based on a fundamental, foundational building block of this industry, which is the silicon transistor.
Customized care, with your own genomic data, is the pinnacle of healthcare. And we first mapped the human genome using an Intel high performance computer, a Xeon-based computer. That’s pretty exciting for us. And as you can imagine – as we like to talk about Big Data – there is one Big Data challenge.
I’d like to share how big a Big Data problem. One person’s genomic map is a petabyte of data. That’s 1000 terabytes for one person, enough to fill 20 filing cabinets of information. And through the work that we do, the advancements in price performance, Moore’s Law, what we do every single day, we’ve transformed the ability to sequence. And what used to take years in 2000 is now down to two weeks, and we’re working to get that down to days and hours.
But more importantly, a single sequence used to be $70 million. It’s now less than $5,000 to do one sequence, and we are on route to make that $1,000, which means personalized genomic sequencing is within our reach. And it’s moving faster than the rate of Moore’s Law.
But let’s think about the benefits of that. Why are we excited? Why am I excited about that? Why do we get up every day and say, you know what, working with Intel, working at Intel, it’s pretty excited because we get to change the world? Why?
One-third of all women and half of all men are going to be diagnosed with cancer, right? Early detection and treatment is the way to solve cancer in most cases, and it’s customized to that individual, it makes the profoundest difference in its effectiveness. And that’s where we can make a difference.
Using high-performance computers, the Knight Center for Cancer Research at the Oregon Health Sciences University is working on analyzing human genomic profiles and creating searchable DNA, customized DNA maps. And what I’d like to do is share directly from them with you what they’re doing. [17:15]
[Video plays.]
[19:21] Renee James: As doctor Drucker said, in this next era, we’re moving the biology problem to a computational problem in the treatment of cancer.
Computing doesn’t get any more personal than when it saves your life, so I’d like to share another story with you. And it’s the story about an Intel employee, in fact, one of our fellows, who’s here with us at IDF. He fought a 24-year battle with cancer. When he was a young man in college, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and he was given a few years to live. And he went through dozens and dozens of debilitating cancer therapies, and he was very brave, and he defined all his doctors’ odds with his longevity, but in the end, the cancer never went away, and his kidneys did eventually fail.
Recently, in his work that he’s been doing, he was visiting a genomic company, and they asked if they could sequence his tumor. And he said yes. He allowed them to do it. And what they did is they shared that data with all of his doctors. I’m not going to tell you the end of this story. I would like you to help me welcome Intel fellow Eric Fishman to tell his story.
Eric Dishman: Thank you. Alive and well. I think I’ve had more predictions of my death than maybe even Moore’s Law.
Renee James: [Moore's Law, alive and well, ladies and gentlemen.]
Eric Dishman: [Unintelligible.]
Renee James: Why don’t you tell everybody what happened the day that you showed up to your doctors and they had your tumor sequence?
Eric Dishman: It was just miraculous. At that point, I was so sick, I was going to the doctor twice a week. So it was my Thursday appointment, and I walk in, and they’ve got some of my East Coast physicians on Skype and some doctors on the phone, and all my doctors are working together, and I’m like, uh oh. And then they basically tell me that 90 percent of the drugs that they’ve put me on were never going to work because this genomic map had revealed this to them. And they basically admitted that they had mischaracterized and sort of misunderstood my cancer for over two decades.
Renee James: And then what happened?
Eric Dishman: Well, at that point, then they had the good news, which was we think we understand enough about your cancer, and it’s really Eric’s cancer, it’s unique, like the [physician] said, we’re going to put you on this drug for completely different organs and see how it goes. Four months later, I walk into my diagnostics, the technicians, you know, looking in shock at the scans, they do them again, and they’re like you’re cancer free, you can start the whole kidney transplant process at this point in time.
Renee James: That is miraculous. And I want you to share with us how now your work at Intel is about scaling that out, so that other people can have this experience.
Eric Dishman: That is exactly true, and scale is the thing. That’s one of the reasons I work at Intel. [I mean], probably less than 50,000 people on the planet have had access to the kind of whole genome sequencing that I’ve had, and that’s generated about 2.5 petabytes of data. If we had every cancer patient today having a whole genome sequence like once every two weeks, which is what they would ultimately want to do, we’d generate 500 exabytes of data, and that’s just in the U.S.
So as we think about this globally, how do we scale? So we’ve got our product teams in there working on the fabric, the storage, the compute, I mean, the whole system — how’s it possibly going to be done? On the policy side, we’re working on how do we deal with the privacy and the security and the ethical issues of sort of scaling this?
On the R&D side, it’s everything like you showed, from biochips to Big Data and solving breakthroughs there. And then, finally, on the sort of human and sort of education side, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to create a genome-ready workforce, train a million doctors on how to incorporate this data and move forward on getting biologists to understand programming and programmers to understand biology.
Renee James: Wow. Thank you for sharing your very personal story with the audience, and congratulations on being cancer free.
Eric Dishman: Thank you.
Renee James: Thank you. So 20 years of ineffective therapies at an expense and certainly the worry of what Eric went through, all of that changed by the benefits of personalized medicine and cost-effective integrated computing. Affordable genomics, cities that reroute traffic and alert you to problems — a few years ago, a lot of what I talked about seemed like science fiction, and today, you can see it’s in our near future.
It’s the future before us when computing becomes truly integrated into our lives. For 45 years, Intel has done the things that everybody said couldn’t be done, and we’ve invented the future time and time again. I’d like to close by saying, in the words of Intel founder Bob Noyce, I’d like to invite all of you to not be encumbered by history and to go off and do something wonderful. Thank you.
[End of presentation.]
IDF13 Day 1 Keynote Highlights & Takeaways [by CaptGeek [Eric Mantion] (Intel) on Intel® Developer Zone, Sept 10, 2013]
So, this is not my first rodeo (as the saying goes) – in fact, I’ve been going to IDF, on and off, for over 10 years, starting with my time when I was a semiconductor analyst. And, yes, I now work for Intel, so some may feel my opinion is biased, but, regardless, here it is anyway:
This morning was the best IDF Keynote I’ve ever seen
What made this morning better? If I had to summarize it, I’d say it breaks down into 3 things: Intimacy, Lifestyle, and Leadership. Let me explain…
Intimacy
The very first thing I noticed this morning was, before Brian Krzanich said his first word was how he was dressed. Not only did he not wear a tie, but he didn’t even wear a jacket. The tone was very casual, but not in a lazy way. When he spoke, on stage, he went right out to he front of it, basically as far out to the audience as he could, as if he wanted to say “I am one of you – I’m a Geek & I’m proud of it.” Now, someone will say that a slight shift to a dress code & positioning on stage doesn’t much matter, but I would completely disagree because, before joining Intel in 2005, I knew well the biggest criticisms of Intel. In one word, it would have been Arrogance. In three words, it would have been “Intel Doesn’t Listen.” Now, I think that is changing, which I think is a great thing. But it wasn’t just the lack of a jacking and where he stood – the subtleties continued when our new President, Renée James did her keynote. Not once did she hold up a wafer. Not once did she say the word Gigahertz. But, what she did talk about was how Intel was making life better. During Brian’s portion, he talked about the Intel Quark SoC, which is planned to be 1/5th the size of Intel Atom processors and 1/10th the power consumption. But when Renée spoke, she addressed the why wearables mattered. A great example was what I called a “Hospital-in-a-Patch” that didn’t look much different thank an anti-smoking patch, but would be able to monitor several of your medical vitals no matter where you were. While still in development, it shows the amazing promise of the not-too-distant-future. But she didn’t just pontificate, she brought out an Intel Fellow, Eric Dishman who told a very personal story. Arguably, it was the most personal story a person could tell because it was not only about his own 24-year battle with Cancer, but also how mapping his genome has led his doctors to a path that, thankfully, gave them the opportunity to tell him the magical words: “Eric, you’re cancer free.” I don’t know how you can get more personal, more intimate that that in a story. But it didn’t stop there. Then Renée was finished, Brian re-joined her on stage for the first-ever, “open Q&A with the CEO and the President of Intel.” This has never been done in the history of IDF, but I loved that it did. To me, it signaled change. To me, it was a message: “Yes, we know we make amazing silicon, but none of it means anything if we don’t have get hardware partners to put them into products and great software partners that make the magic happen. In short, Intel is nothing without our partners, so we want you to know that we care, deeply, about you. We want to have a closer, more intimate relationship with you and do amazing, wonderful things together…
Lifestyle
What is the difference between Ordinary and Extraordinary. Renée said it best: Intelligence. What happens when everything gets smarter? The simple answer is life gets better. Whether it is critical technology like the Hospital-in-a-Patch mentioned above or just convenient technology, as things get smarter, life gets better. For example, what if every parking meter was smarter? What if, before you leave your car, you put your smart phone next to the NFC sensor on the parking meter to register your phone. Then, if your meal is running long, it sends you a quick message of “your meter is running low, would you like to refill it?” and, with a simple press of the button, you can. How great would that be? When I was trying to explain the implications today at lunch, I used the table we were eating at as an example. What if, when you sat down, your table was your menu? Instead of the wait staff having to go back and forth, asking if you were ready to order, as soon as you were, you ordered. Also, the moment the kitchen runs out of “Catfish” then all the menus are automatically updated so that option would be grayed out. Also, as soon as you were ready to pay your bill, you could, right on the table, with the NFC on your phone. Or, if you wanted some help, you could just push a button like you do on an airplane & your server could come right out. But this doesn’t just help customers, it would help the restaurateurs as well. If you could save 10 minutes for every customer, a eating establish might be able to fit an entirely extra sitting in the course of a dining cycle. For the fixed costs of the chief & kitchen staff, that could be the difference between being profitable and closing your doors. But these types of “Lifestyle Computing” – or integrated computing, depending on how you looked at it – wasn’t just about tiny, minuscule computers, but also on the other end, the Big Data server rooms. For example, you want better healthcare, then your doctors need to get to know you better, and far better than you can do from just a form. They need to map your Genome, which, if your curious, is about a Petabyte of Data. For those not so familiar with these prefixes, that is around a thousand Terabytes or around a million Gigabytes. So, take that smart phone with 1GB of memory & put it in a pile with a million other phones – that’s the data required to map EVERY person’s genome. Multiple that by the 1/3 of all women and 1/2 of all men that will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and you get to the legal definition of a “butt-load of data.” But, never fear, the new i5 Xeon processors being launched this week are up to that task. So, your lifestyle computing – whether it is wearables devices or warehouse of servers, Intel has got you covered. And that brings us to our last category…
Leadership
It was subtle, but our new CEO – affectionately called “BK” in the halls of Intel – put all Intel employees on notice:
If it computers, we will lead
To me, that is vision. That is leadership. There was no squishy areas there, no caveats, no outs. It was simple, straight-forward, and to the point. If it computes, than Intel will do its best so serve that market segment as well as we can. Oh, and, if you missed it, in the future, everything will compute. Your grandpa’s favorite recliner won’t just recline, but rather it will watch him. It will monitor his vitals it will check to see if he’s been siting there past when he was supposed to take his medication and alert him if it needs to. And, heaven forbid, he should have a heart attack while sitting there in an empty house, he will be helped, immediately, even faster than if you were in the next room. In essence, in the future, no seasoned citizen will ever be sitting in an empty house again, but houses, furniture, kitchens, everything will be smarter and connected. Making your life, my life, and most importantly, the lives of the people we love, not only better, but, ideally, longer – as long as possible. Roughly a century ago, we were went through an important transformation – an electrical one. Instead of candles, we gained electric lights. Instead of washboards, we gained washing machines. Instead of a hand pump in your kitchen, we gained running water. Now we are on the cusp of the next transformation: Intelligence. Instead of an electric light, we’ll get a smart one – that turns itself off when not needed (like when no one is in the room) and turns itself on when needed. Instead of washing machines, we’ll get smart ones that analyses the soiling of your clothes and put in the right combination of detergent chemicals to optimize the cleaning. Instead of running water, we’ll gain smart faucets that automatically detects if the water coming out has a higher than allowable amount of harmful chemicals. It doesn’t matter what you pick – a bed, a pool, and gym, with greater intelligence comes a better life, just as electricity has been improving life for the last century or more. General Electrics’ age old tag line has been “We bring good things to life.” Perhaps Intel should adopt: “We bring better things to life,” because, as we lead in everything that computes, from wearables to phones to tablets to 2in1s and Ultrabooks to desktop PCs, and, of course, servers, life will get better, for everyone. And I, as one particularly proud Intel employee, doesn’t mind saying, that is a future that feels wonderful. Which, as it happens, was one of the pieces of closing advice from this morning’s keynote – a quote from one of our founders, Robert Noyce:
Do not be encumbered by History – Go off and do something WONDERFUL!
Q&A: Intel president Renee James on wearables [CITEworld, Sept 11, 2013]
After calculators, PCs and mobile phones, Intel is now jumping into wearable devices with an extremely low-power chip called Quark, which was big news at the company’s annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Leading the charge into the new market is Intel’s new leadership team consisting of CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James, who also articulated on plans to achieve fast growth in the mobile market while trying to reinvigorate PC sales.
It’s been an especially busy few months for James, who became Intel’s president on May 2 after running the company’s software unit as executive vice president and general manager of the software and services group. She is laying the groundwork for Quark chips to succeed in areas such as eye wear, personalized medicine and cloud services. In an interview with the IDG News Service, she talked about the wearable market, Quark and partner relationships.
IDGNS: Where do you see the wearable market going?
James: I think it’s way beyond wearables, I think it’s about integrated computing. I don’t think we know the boundaries of that. The silicon patch — the thought of just ripping something off like a band-aid, putting it on your arm, your doctor being able to know what your vitals are at that moment, that sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. That’s where we are at. That’s today’s outer boundary of where we are going with computing.
IDGNS: When do you see integrated computing becoming a practical market for Intel?
James: For Intel it is a practical market right now, we have different products and platforms that are being developed. That is why we introduced Quark. We believe in the things that you saw — they are not three, five or 10 years out, they are in the next 12 to 18 months.
IDGNS: Will you sell wearables directly to consumers? Intel is already planning to launch a TV service.
James: We tend to believe that our business model is best helping other people build things. It’s in these really highly integrated designs, you need to build one to know that everything is working systemically. We tend to build reference platforms, and we’re going to stick with that.
Insert of mine: nScreen Noise: Intel Media, UK kids love tablets 10/4/13 [Colin Dixon YouTube, Oct 3, 2013]
Lots of bad news for Intel Media’s OnCue virtual pay-TV operator service. Will it every launch? OfCom in UK says kids love tablets. Same in the US?
IDGNS: Quark is really low-power, but will it replace the Atom platform?
James: No. It’s the low Atom. You should think of Core, Atom, Quark. I love the Quark name, it’s so nerdy and funny. Quark is intended to look below Atom. It’s 10 times more power efficient, and it’s five times smaller. Atom is teeny, Quark is the smallest thing we’ve ever built.
IDGNS: Intel and low-power still raise a question mark today. How will Intel achieve low-power on Quark?
James: No, no, Intel and low power are not a question mark. We have lots of low-power products. It’s not a question at all. Maybe that was five years ago. If you look… at Haswell 22-nanometer, that product is a four-watt product with Core i5 performance and Core i5-level graphics in fanless [devices]. That’s the most [power-efficient] product ever built, anywhere.
IDGNS: Are you offering licensing or customizing Quark chips for third parties?
James: What we are offering is the ability to connect their intellectual property around ours. We also are offering fully designed products as well. It’s a broad range that we’re going to offer to customers in this category.
IDGNS: Intel is looking beyond Windows and moving to Android and Chrome for tablets and PCs. How is your relationship with Microsoft?
James: Our relationship with Microsoft is as good as ever. They are going to participate in IDF and you will hear from them about what’s going on with Windows 8.1. I think it’s just a matter of balance. Microsoft is not the only client operating system anymore. The same way for years and years Microsoft balanced between Intel and AMD, we’re in the same situation now. Our customers want choice, and we offer choice.
IDGNS: What’s the next big thing for Intel?
James: Integrated computing is the next big thing, I think it is the future of what we are going to do. It’s not going to be necessarily about this device or that device, it’s going to be about what problems we solve through computation. The final barriers, the things we don’t understand, and what does it mean to have a mesh network of connected devices with cloud services and how does it change what we think about. That’s the final frontier.
IDGNS: How important is your software background in leading a company that is traditionally focused on chips?
James: It’s actually more useful than people would imagine. It’s very relevant to the level of integrated platforms that we see people starting to build, even the way PCs are built now, servers, different workloads, what happens in the cloud. More so than ever on a forward-looking basis, the way computing is developing is going to be about the application, the workload, the right kind of compute for the right kind of task. The other thing is building system-on-chips and products today is very software oriented.
IDGNS: What is Intel’s direction in chip development?
James: The direction for us is to continue with “tick-tock” for the microarchitecture, but to consider how to do derivatives… using the system-on-chip methodology.
Intel President Renee James: Interview with the Wall Street Journal [Intel® Developer Zone, Aug 28, 2013] i.e. Intel’s own report 2 weeks later
Intel President Renee James recently sat down for a video interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler. In this interview, Ms. James discussed a wide range of issues around Intel’s computing strategy, anything from mobile to what’s coming up at IDF in September. You can watch the entire video below:
Intel’s New President Outlines Company’s Plans
[WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube channel, Aug 14, 2013]
Renee James sits down for a Big Interview with Rolfe Winkler. Photo: Getty Images.
On mobile:
Ms. James has been with Intel for 26 years, and worked closely with former Intel CEO Andrew Grove. She recently was named Intel President, and directs company-wide strategy with CEO Brian Krzanich. She noted that Intel wants people to know that “we love computing”, and aim to serve every segment, not just PCs.
Intel’s new focus is on mobile, especially on the Atom power line for ultramobility. There will be increased efforts on Android, with an equalization of efforts between Windows and Android. Everyone currently in this market space has advantages, and Intel’s is design and integrated manufacturing, the combination of process technology, and communications. It’s the integration that counts; the combination of all these elements that makes Intel the winner in the market.
In many ways Intel has led the exploration into mobility. James noted that “sometimes you don’t always know about the next thing being a disruption….it wasn’t the form factor, it was how people using computing changed – touch, voice, app models, all of that shifted. That combination with the new form factor really changed the way we look at computing.”
On IDF:
Intel’s premier developer conference is coming up September 10-12. There will be a lot of new things to see and talk about there as far as mobility, where Intel believes computing is heading, and future predictions on computer/human interactions.
On Atom:
Atom is a smaller, less expensive chip. James noted that the Intel point of view with this chip was that you didn’t need all the features and performance you need in more expensive chips since Atom is primarliy for phones, but now as mobile devices are becoming more important and prevalent, it’s also taken on more importance. Intel is building parts of Atom that come all the way up to the Core family with greater compatibility. All new Atom products run Windows.
On transparent computing:
People want their apps to perform no matter what platform they might be using. This aligns with the “Internet of Things” mentality; consumers want lower cost devices, but are also looking for compatiability with the rest of the software ecosystem.
On the shift to a more mobile computing ecosystem:
Mr. Winkler posed an interesting question: “As PCs are increasingly replaced by mobile devices, how do you navigate that transition?” Ms. James answered that Intel does not believe that PCs will ever be replaced, rather, different form factors will continue to emerge with the performance of the core product line in mobile devices. There are also different modes of usability in form factors such as the tablet, PC, 2 in 1’s, etc. It’s not a “one for one” replacement; James noted that these form factors are refreshing the market.
On form factors:
James noted there is a segmentation of tablets – the ones on the higher price point side generally offer more performance, and the ones on the lower price point side offer less. Intel has created Atom products that scale all the way up and down this ladder, with Haswell core-based products as well. These form factors overlap with price points, and some cannibalization is expected, but Intel is looking to create devices at every price point for more customer availability, opportunities, and innovation.
On Moore’s Law
When asked if Intel sees a finite ceiling as to how small chips can be produced, Ms. James replied that “we don’t see that”. There is more performance in a lower power envelope, and Intel has moved ahead multiple generations, becoming much more competitive in the mobile landscape.
How small can the chips actually get? James replied that Intel has “line of sight” for a couple more generations, but after that the future is unclear.
Data center
The data center arm of Intel is an important business, currently holding a 90% market share and bringing in substantial profits for Intel. Mr. Winkler asked about avoiding server upsets, and Ms. James noted that there is a market shift with new competitors, and the way you react initially is how the dynamic is going to go. She mentioned that “it’s good for Intel to have competitors” because it makes the company as a whole better. Intel is not waiting for the industry to change, and has already announced SOC server products based on the Atom family.
On Intel television
What does Intel plan to bring in the television space? James replied that just like everything else, television has gone digital. It’s delivered over an IP network, which is an opportunity for data to be broadcast to devices. Intel can bring tech integration and leadership to this area, making it more cost effective. It’s also a new market opportunity and area of growth.
Exciting times for Intel
This interview with Ms. James was extremely informative, and gave a great overview of where Intel is headed. Be sure to register for IDF 2013 and hear more from Intel leadership on the future of the company.
Which was reported by The Wall Street Journal as Intel Chips Away at Mobile, Wearable Computing [The CIO Report – WSJ, Aug 14, 2013] in the following way
As consumers shift spending to smartphones and tablets from PCs, mobile processors made by rivals have chipped away at Intel Corp.’s sales and profits. Intel in July reported $2 billion in profit for the second quarter, a drop of 29% from a year earlier, on sales of $12.8 billion, down 5% for the same period. The chipmaker, which once milked its Intel Inside brand, can no longer rely as much on PC chips as its cash cow. While PC sales decline, rivals building low-cost, low-power chips based onARM Holdings plc. designs dominate the mobile chip market.
Intel President Renee J. James admitted in an interview, Wednesday, that chips, as well as software for smartphones, tablets and embedded systems, are “markets that we need to go win.” Ms. James, who assumed her role in May after 25 years in various management roles at Intel, is particularly keen on Bay Trail, energy efficient chips she said will appear in tablets and convertible PCs this holiday season. Intel will unveil some of these products – and possible show off a wearable computer – at its developer forum next month. This is an edited transcript of a Q&A conducted with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors.
As you push harder into mobile, you also have to keep a strong hold on the PC. What is your strategy there?
We don’t see the PC going away overnight, but we do see a blending across the bottom end of [PC chips] and the high-end of the Bay Trail chips. You have to recreate the segmentation because [PCs and tablets] are overlapping now [with the proliferation of two-in-one, or convertible computers]. And 7-inch tablets and below are very much like phones and we have an objective in that market as well. By blending and having a shared goal for total compute, you start to think creatively about managing the transition. The suppliers and customers are the same.
How do you steal market share from ARM?
We believe we have better products, but we know we have better process technology. It will take us some time to get to the lowest end, but we have every intention of having products at every price point.
What was gist of the presentation you and new CEO Brian Krzanich gave to the board of directors on how to point Intel in the right direction?
We talked about getting back into the role of technology leader and really making sure that we’re leading into the next generation of where computing gets used. There’s a tremendous explosion in embedded computing, and the way people are thinking about computing, and we hear a lot about wearables, and there’s experimentation and new products like Google’s Glass. Our strategy is to win in every segment of computing and grow our share in overall compute. If it computes, we want to be in that market.
Do you have any wearable computers now?
None that are announced, but you should come to our developer conference in September. We’re going to be talking about where we see computing is going, where Intel is going, and a lot more about how we think computing will be used in the future, beyond the form factors you see today.
What are you doing to advance the Internet of Things?
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