Rupert Goodwins' Diary - Holy Land Special

Just before Christmas, Intel shipped me and a handful of other European journalists out to Israel to tour the company's sites there and talk about a new chip fabrication plant that's just been announced. Here's what happened on the trip...

Tuesday 13/12/2005

Because it was the CNET Christmas party yesterday, I'd asked for a late flight today — you just never know. Intel took me at my word and booked me on the 10:30pm to Tel Aviv, getting in at an eyeball-clogging 5:35 am local time, 3:35am UK time. Thankfully, the pilot refuses to depart because the coffee pots aren't working — an hour later, they're fixed and we're off. Spend the flight chatting to a Palestinian Christian businessman next to me who's accompanying his daughter back from her university interviews in the UK. His views about religion in general and what it's like being a Palestinian living in Jerusalem in particular are not printable. This is, I begin to suspect, going to be an interesting journey.

Wednesday 14/12/2005

I'm not sure that Ben Gurion Airport at 0630 is best described as interesting, but the driver who's picking me and another UK journalist up from the flight is surprisingly cheerful given he's been waiting for an hour longer than planned. "That's nothing," he said. "They told me you were coming in yesterday. Then, I waited four hours."

We sympathise as best we can. The joke's on us when we get to the Tel Aviv Hilton, though, and make our way past our first (but by no means last) heavily armed security checkpoint. You get used to people of all shapes and sizes wandering about with large guns in Israel, inasmuch as you can: my companion is much taken by the local young women, who carry off the military fatigues and machine gun chic with aplomb.

It's half past seven, our coach is due to leave to take us to the first meeting at eight, and our rooms have been cancelled "because you were due to check in yesterday. You're no-shows." The receptionist stares at us incuriously, as if she expects us to say sorry for being a nuisance and leave. We make it plain that this is not an option. "I'll have to get the manager," she says in a tone that suggests we really should make a run for it while there's time. We stand our ground, the manager is summoned, we get glared at some more but we do get our rooms. Not that there's time for anything more than unpacking a toothbrush.

Our first stop is at the Haifa Intel Design Centre, a large R&D lab an hour from the hotel by bus — but then, everywhere in Israel is an hour away by bus. You soon begin to understand the tenacity with which the inhabitants of the place cling to what they've got — there really is nowhere else to go. The sheer smallness of the country is remarkable in other ways as well: Intel Israel employs 10 percent of the high tech workforce in Israel and contributes 2 to 3 percent of GNP.

"Take lots of pictures", my editor had said when I left. "One rule," said the PR on the bus, "No cameras". This is disappointing: doubly so when we get to the IDC. Israel is a surreal place at the best of times: through the filter of a gallon of BA coffee, no sleep and the after-effects of a particularly good party, the place appears directed by Terry Gilliam. So I'm not too surprised to see an enormous and very accurate 3D model of a Pentium seemingly floating in the lobby: fully four feet across and positioned at head height on a perspex stand, it glints in gold and silver and demands me to photograph it. In the end, after much noisy deliberation, we're allowed.

The World's Biggest Pentium prepares to devour a hapless journalist

Then the meeting starts...

"I only got five hours sleep last night," one UK journalist complains: I would have lynched him had more coffee not appeared. There is a classic ten minute hiatus while Intel's finest R&D managers are unable to work the video projector. Everything in the room is controlled from a splendid wireless remote: we turn the lights on and off, cycle the air conditioning and generally cause mayhem, but nothing appears on the screen. Finally the cry goes out: "Call Hagar Cohen!" Young, bespectacled Hagar duly appears, presses a single button and up pops the Powerpoint. I suspect he's the Harry Potter of Haifa.

The Haifa IDC is, it turns out, the place where the Centrino was designed, and all subsequent mobile parts including Yonah. Before that, the place was responsible for the Pentium MMX and, in 2001, Timna. Timna? No, I'd forgotten about that too, as Intel intended. Timna was an all-in-one CPU, with integrated graphics and memory controller — you know, like someone else's chip — designed to compete on price in what Intel calls 'the value market' and we call the cheap side of things. Unfortunately, the thing would only work with Rambus memory — you may remember Intel's ill-conceived fixation with the stuff — and weeks before it was due to be launched the project got canned on the grounds that you can't make a low-cost computer with hideously expensive parts.

That's not good for a young design centre's self-confidence, and they had to decide whether they were going to carry on doing big projects or just become one small regional unit among many. But the culture that gave us chutzpah was never going to give in that easily: they decided instead that the whole idea of trying to maximise performance at all costs was wrong and started to think about price and power consumption. Hence the mobile Pentiums, hence Centrino, hence Haifa getting its groove back.

The entrance to the Haifa Intel Design Centre awaits two new logos

Other things on Haifa's mind are UMPCs — Ultra Miniature PCs that look like PDAs and run Windows — which I think will be the form factor flop of the decade — and enterprise mobile phones. Here, Intel's on firmer ground, especially as wireless broadband becomes ubiquitous, but up against the stiffest of competition. It's also rather too fond of WiMax — Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, would you believe? — instead of 3G

Later that day, we're shuttled to PTK, which is a location easier to pronounce as an acronym than Petach Tikva, to hear about WiMax and cellular stuff which is interesting but not unexpected. The star turn of the afternoon, though, is Shlomo Caine who looks after Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Israel (what a mix) for Intel Capital. This is Intel's investment arm, and Shlomo's bit has done well enough to pay for Intel Israel's new chip fab plant. How it managed to do that, and how the market for investing in high tech companies looks to Intel, is an entirely engaging affair and deserves much more attention than a diary entry. Watch, as they say, this space.

In the evening, we return to Tel Aviv and dinner — through more checkpoints manned by what look like hippies with Uzis — with twenty European journalists clustered around a table groaning under piles of humus and mixed grills so heavily stacked they resemble pyramids of meat. Back at the hotel, I decline the management's kind offer of Internet access for twenty dollars and instead spend a pleasant half hour rummaging through Tel Aviv's ether in search of an open access point. This is successful — honestly, people really should change the default password on those wireless routers — and provides a nice sense of achievement for those few moments before I lapse into a deep coma.

Thursday 15/12/2005

It's Fab Time. The highlight of the trip awaits. Another hour in the bus and we're at Fab 18 in Kiryat Gat, which is where most of the Pentiums 3 and 4 came from. It's also next door to a large building site, which is going to be Fab 28: Intel announced this earlier in December and is spending billions on getting it ready for production in 2008: it'll be 45nm 12 inch wafers, double the size of Fab 18 and will, by itself, contribute another 2 percent to Israeli GNP.

"In that case," I ask, "isn't it a concern that it's all built on land that probably belongs to the Palestinians?"

This is perhaps not a welcome question, but I think it's worth asking. Kiryat Gat is not part of the occupied territories, being safely in the central southern bit of Israel, but it is rather unusual. The land the plant's on is explicitly mentioned in an annex to an armistice signed between Israel and Egypt in 1949, because the locals and some Egyptian soldiers managed to hold out during the fighting beforehand. That annex guaranteed the property and safety of the inhabitants of the villages there: as you might guess, this didn't pan out. Google 'Faluja pocket' for the details: be prepared for some fierce words and contradictory claims.

All this is unusually well documented. I normally regard Middle Eastern politics with a mixture of dread and resignation — nobody comes out of it well, and if Iran nukes up there's a good chance nobody will come out of it at all. I'm certainly not in the habit of poking my nose into the most sensitive affairs of a country which arms its hippies. But if you're going to have a significant percentage of your national product coming from a small plot of land, why pick one with significant issues? Why not put a farm there, and build your fab plant where the farm was?

The answer is that as far as Intel is concerned, all the deals it does over Kiryat Gat are with the State of Israel. End of story. It can't be a coincidence that the fab is there, but the normal rules of logic do not apply at that end of the Mediterranean. Your guess is as good as mine.

So we get back to fab plants. There's some light relief during another traditional part of any Intel fab briefing: a graph is shown that depicts the speed at which the yield rate is improving and how much better it is now than the last time they changed process. The graph has no labels: we ask what the actual numbers are and we are told that it's top secret.

Fair enough. Yield rate is the most important thing to a plant — it's the number of functional chips that come out at the end of the line. There are a million things that can go wrong and reduce the yield: with each wafer producing hundreds of die that cost around 40 cents each and sell for hundreds of dollars apiece, even a few percent change in yield makes an enormous difference to the bottom line. You certainly don't want your rivals to know, and the last people you'd tell are journalists.

This time, though, Intel had made one tiny mistake...

The graph was indeed denuded of real data. But on the wall outside the meeting room, there was a sea of awards that Fab 18 had won over the years from Intel HQ. One of these awards had caught my eye as we were waiting to go in:

"Portland Technology Development Partnership Award" it read. "Presented to FAB 18 in recognition of your leadership in ramping P858 technology". Beneath those words was engraved a graph — P858 Yield Performance — and this time, those axes were labelled. I nudged a German journalist standing next to me and his face lit up. The game was on.

It's not much. P858 is six years old, and the graph numbers — each level was labelled ISO and three digits — are meaningless without much more explanation than we'd ever get. But it did mean we got to hear the sweetest six words in a journalist's experience, when one of our number asked the fab manager "What are the yield figures in ISO terms?", the manager looked horrified and said "How come you know about that?"

Maxine Fassberg, Intel VP Tech and Manufacturing and woman in charge of the new fab, contemplates a suspiciously well-informed journalist

Photography was very banned, of course, so I couldn't get a picture of the treacherous award. However, one of our number did accidentally press the wrong button on his cameraphone and got a frustratingly fuzzy but pleasingly evidential picture, which I am delighted to pass on.

Hastily shot but still a smoking gun

The rest of the fab tour was glorious fun. We saw lots of people in bunny suits working on wafers, and enough mysterious lab equipment stacked from floor to ceiling to equip any ten James Bond sets. The air of science-fiction mystery was much aided by most of the signage being in Hebrew, which to an untutored eye might as well be Martian. At one point, most of the journalists and guides went into the gown room and put on the first stage of the clean room clothing — cap, galoshes, underjacket, gloves, thing that goes over your beard if you have one — which did nothing to dispel the sense of being off-planet.

There's so much more than I've got room for here. Fab 8, for example, which has produced parts that are in 25 percent of all cars worldwide and which should become Intel's first micro-electromechanical (MEMS) factory — real nanotech. The guided tour of Jerusalem after dark, where we seemed to be the only people in the city — and started to lose people, one by one, in the dark back streets, to the occasional sound of distant gunfire. The visit to the Western Wall, where you could go up and leave a message to God but you had to put on a skullcap first: I mentioned the coincidence between this and the gowning room to my Intel minder, but he merely looked at me as if I was losing my mind. He may not have been so wrong: Jerusalem Syndrome is always a possibility.

This and much more will have to wait for another occasion. If you like weird, you must go to Israel: it's much, much stranger than anywhere else I've been to.

Friday 16/12/2005

It was an anticlimax coming back to Heathrow and a London packing up for Christmas, even though the flight skirted around some of the most spectacular thunderstorms as it went past Egypt. There's no time to tell you about the Intel PR who got pulled going through Ben Gurion Airport security on the way back to the UK, because his laptop had something about it which upset a robotic sniffer, or the Intel test wireless network in some closed-off lab which leaked through to the briefing room and which... well, put it this way, people really ought to change the default passport on their wireless routers. A chap with Netstumbler and Nmap on his laptop could really go places, at least until the word 'Mossad' comes unbidden to his mind. Likewise, the kosher sushi bar can get only the briefest mention.

I must go back. Next year in Jerusalem!