Wired: Intel CTO Justin Rattner Talks Architecture and AMD Rivalry
Intel CTO Talks Architecture and AMD RivalryBy Bryan Gardiner 10.09.07 | 12:00 AM
Excerpted from Wired Online
Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, says the company has higher-end components on the shelf but won't release them until the market is ready.
Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner isn't buying AMD's claims that the chip titan swiped key technologies from AMD and applied them to its own forthcoming processor designs. In fact, he says, many of the changes the company has in store for new chip architectures like Nehalem and Larrabee have been in the works for years.
During Intel Developer Forum last month, Wired News sat down with Rattner to discuss why "enthusiasts" are so important to chipmakers, what he thinks about tri-core processors, and why sticking to older architectures helped Intel get a leg up on its rival for close to a year.
Wired News: Paul Otellini's IDF keynote theme focused on moving from the extreme into the mainstream -- aiming products at the high end and letting those features trickle down to the average consumer. Are you still using this MO in the multicore era, given the fact that quad-core still accounts for 2 percent of the market after close to a year?
Justin Rattner: I think it's pretty traditional in the computer industry that you tend to innovate at the high end, where developers and users are more willing to deal with the unknown. I spent a decade in high-performance computing, and the users of those machines wanted to be at the bleeding edge.
That was just the name of the game. We're more than willing to perform heroic acts of programming to eke out a little bit of performance. That's nothing new. You can go back into the history of computers and they always seem to start doing something incredibly demanding for a very narrow audience and then broaden out over time.
WN: I bring it up in the context of the generally accepted fact that there's a wide gap now between the capabilities that multicore hardware offers and the ability of the software community to capitalize on that.
Rattner: Well, did you ever think how long it took Microsoft to deliver a 32-bit operating system? We had (a 32-bit processors) something like a decade before Microsoft figured out what to do with it. I think that's reality.
If you think you can wait around and the software developers will suddenly come to you and say, "Wow, I have applications that really need four cores, could you just build one?" and you'd say "Oh, OK, we'll get right on it." That's never worked.
We've always had to put these architectural features in first, whether it be the number of cores or virtualization or a lot of security things. Eventually programmers discover these things and realize that they are actually pretty useful and they start building to the architecture.
But I think hardware always has to lead and, yeah, it's a big gamble. You build a $4 billion fab and you hope sometime soon somebody figures out how to use this thing.
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