Speech Summaries

Patrick Gelsinger Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Intel Corp.

A Vision Of Computing's Future

Patrick Gelsinger, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Intel Corp., began by discussing where Intel is going and its vision for the future. Intel is focusing on the theme of convergence, bringing together computing and communications technology. A key part of this conversion is wireless technology -- "Radio Free Intel" in particular. This product will make radio extremely cheap and integrated, eventually replacing copper completely. Mr. Gelsinger predicted that copper and low-cost optics will be cheaper and easier to maintain. Together, these technologies will influence the emerging Organic IT field.

Mr. Gelsinger predicted virtualization of everything with Organic IT -- from computers to storage to communications. In the future, everything will be based on a homogenous infrastructure with the right kind of communication. As for computing, clusters and threading will be consistent with compute-on-demand.

The large-scale costs of Organic IT result mainly from operational, human costs and not from hardware. To decrease these growing operational costs, companies will need to overbuild their hardware. The trend with Organic IT is for overall distributed computing. Mr. Gelsinger predicted that this will probably not occur for another 10 years, and that Organic IT will not develop in a big way until this happens.

Questions And Answers

Q: Intel naturally would have us increase our hardware for any problem. How does overprovisioning help the management issue? Wouldn't it be better to utilize existing hardware more efficiently?
A: If you really want to deploy next-generation technologies, everything is going to become virtualized. It helps to look at this from an abstract level -- every time you look at abstraction, costs are increased. Virtualization is great, but you need more hardware to run it. This process doesn't save money immediately with hardware. Initially, companies will save on things like paper. In the long run, virtualization abilities will cost more.

Q: Organic IT blurs the boundary between hardware and software. Many major software providers have both of these businesses, but Intel only has hardware. Do you see this as a handicap?
A: Intel has 27,000 engineers and almost 5,000 software engineers. What we do is deliver hardware that is bundled with silicone technology. Much of the work at the software layer is below the hardware that we provide. We combine the software into our hardware, so this is not a handicap. Intel is the largest compiler team on the planet -- it's all related to the hardware and how to deliver it.