Pentium pile-up -- It's the road and not the car, stupid

Pentium pile-up -- It's the road and not the car, stupid
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

WASHINGTON, NOV 21: In 1965, Gordon Moore, a legendary engineer who co-found Intel Corporation, proposed a new theory on computing power. Known as Moores Law, it said silicon chips double in complexity every 18 months. Moore was charting a graph about the growth in chip functioning when he realised that each new processor contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and was released within 18-24 months of the previous edition.

Moores Law has proved remarkably resilient. The number of transistors on a chip has increased thousands of times over the years, from a mere 2,300 on the first commercial 4004 chip in 1971, to 9,000 on the 8080, to 110,000 on the 286, to 1.6 million on the advanced 486 at the turn of the 1990s. In 1993, Indians Vinod Dham and Avter Saini rolled out the first Pentium with 3.1 million transistors, and the procession has continued. This is why a computer that cost Rs 80,000 two years ago costs around Rs 50,000 now.

On Monday, Intel unfurled Pentium IV, its latest monster processor with 42 million transistors laden on a silicon chip, nearly doubling the Pentium III's 28 million transistors. The event has renewed the debate on Moores Law: How much smaller? How much further? But more important, the rollout has kindled discussion on whether computers need to be any faster than they already are. In the age of the Internet, of what use is more crunching power in a box, when the pipes carrying the information are clogged?

It's like owning a Ferrari and having no decent roads to drive on, says Vinod Dham, the Indian chipmeister known as Father of the Pentium Chip, whose feats at Intel fetched him accolades, a table at a White House banquet, and a place in the company museum in Santa Clara.

Dham left Intel in 1995, and briefly thereafter he worked at the rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where he confected the K-6 chip as the two companies fought to produce the faster chip (the lead has kept changing hands; Pentium IV now beats AMD's Athlon.) But he has since moved on. In 1997, he joined Silicon Spice, a start-up with a fundamentally different philosophy, working in the area of telecom chips aimed at speeding up communication between devices, instead of within a PC. Earlier this year, Silicon Spice was acquired for $1.6 billion by Broadcom, a Silicon Valley pioneer working in the same area.

An aggressive new-age high-tech company, Broadcom's recent growth and voracious appetite for cutting-edge companies shows which way the wind is blowing, not to speak of where the celebrated Indian digerati are headed. Among Broadcom's recent buy-outs, besides Silicon Spice, are several Indian-led companies, including the Bangalore-based Armedia Inc, Santa Clara-based Sibyte, and San Jose-based Stellar Semiconductor Inc.

Co-founded by former Intel engineer Tushar Dave, Armedia pioneered a chip that instantly decodes a vast flood of digital video in highly compressed TV signals. Its technology resulted in a $65-million buyout by Broadcom. Sandeep Gupta's Stellar, bought for $ 135 million, creates technology that reduces the amount of information needed to create digital images and graphics over the Net. Such technology will boost the quality of such services as movies-on-demand and online computer games. Sibyte, co-founded by Amarjit Gill, is developing a new generation of high-performance processors, including its flagship Mercurian chip, for networking and communications applications.

Thanks to the roster of acquisitions at breakneck speed and Indian techies such as Dham, Dave, Gill, Gupta on its rolls, Broadcom is one of America's hottest companies (its market cap reached $60 billion less than two years after it kicked off). But Intel is not the kind of company that rolls over and plays doggo. Famed for its bare-knuckle approach, the Silicon Valley giant says the Pentium IV is designed for where the Internet isgoing. It will have the ability to speed up three-dimensional graphics, as well as much faster video and audio processing, editing, compression and the like.

The big question though is what will you do with PC capacity without the bandwidth? For now, Intel's philosophy is if you have a great showerhead, the water supply is bound to get better sometime. The Indian techies seem to know better. The digital plumbers are out on the links.