Rupert Goodwins' Diary - Holy Land Special
"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.