Intel chief outlines multi-core future

Intel president Paul Otellini yesterday opened the autumn Intel Developer Forum (IDF) with an upbeat assessment of the IT market, detailing the company's plans to bring dual-core processing to the mass market.

Although Otellini acknowledged that the past three years had been very hard, he expects chip sales in 2004 to outstrip the peak of 2000. He also committed Intel to the strategy of running two or more processors in parallel on a single chip.

"Intel has decided that we are going to drive parallelism, moving from how many chips in a computer to how many computers on a chip," he said.

"We will be shipping dual-core to desktop, mobile and server products in 2005. The fact that both prime [processor] vendors are moving in this direction will drive software support."

Otellini stated that over half of all Intel's processors would be dual-core by 2006, and that the company would then move to multiple-core chips with four or more built onto a single piece of silicon.

He demonstrated Intel's first dual-core Itanium, codenamed Montecito, during his keynote. The chip has 24MB of cache and 1.7 billion transistors, and is intended to drive renewed interest in the Itanium line.

But Otellini stressed that many of the new features being built into the company's silicon will depend on Microsoft's fulfilling its plans for Longhorn.

These include improved security and a technology called Vanderpool, which allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single computer. He showed a Vanderpool-equipped PC running four operating systems simultaneously.

Otellini also placed particular emphasis on the world's emerging markets as a driver for growth.

He pointedly welcomed a delegation from the Chinese government visiting IDF for the first time, and said that Asia would soon have a third of the world's internet users. This would pose a great opportunity for business, according to Otellini.

Using the example of the film Titanic, which has now been seen by over 700 million people, he said that with new technology a billion viewers a year for new films was within reach. But this would require a secure content protection system.

In June Intel published the first specifications for Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP, and Otellini announced that Microsoft would be building the technology into a future version of its Media Player.

"We are also working with Apple to get its technology using this [content protection]. Maybe it can think up a better name for it," he joked.