Intel at the margins
Intel's latest quarterly results show an alert company reacting to seismic change. It has decimated payroll: profits, accordingly, are up. It has slashed margins: on cue, sales have risen. Both are good and timely tactics. Neither is a substitute for strategy.
As those lost margins signify, the days of rich pickings have gone and may not return. There is a simple reason for this, and it's not one you'll find in any Intel press release. At the single core level, which defines how much of our software works, Moore's Law is dead — the dizzying rate of change it describes no longer drives the processor market. Last year's computer isn't that much slower than this year's model: there's no fresh blood in the bleeding edge.
Barring a revolutionary insight, the future for mass-market processor innovation is many-core processors or nothing. The "or nothing" is still frighteningly plausible, dragging the market into the low-margin commodity hell that has overtaken so many technology-driven revolutions. There aren't many TV makers in America these days.
Like just about everyone in the business, Intel is betting the farm on many-core. Moore's Law is still alive here, and promises a geometric increase in the number of processing units per chip. New markets are being sought in consumer and business IT, and in the latter some sectors are indeed well positioned to take advantage. High-performance computing, large servers dealing with huge numbers of simultaneous transactions, real-world data analysis — all these ideas mesh well with the many-core roadmap.
Yet these have never been the engines of Intel's success. That role belongs to the desktop, which remains stubbornly immune to many-core and its high-cost, high-pain software development. Sony and IBM have learned that just producing the goods does not guarantee results: the multi-core Cell architecture is not living up to its billing.
There is only one certainty about the future of mass-market processors: one size will not fit all. Intel's best hope is to create a production infrastructure that can produce a plurality of options: tens, hundreds, thousands of cores per chip, sure, but reconfigurable and rewirable, hardware flexible enough to deliver advantages to many different tasks without demanding unconscionable amounts of software-development effort.
Freedom of choice is the best roadmap for a market inching towards a dead end.