Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief technology officer at
Intel, answers questions on emerging technologies that will affect
corporate computing.
Of the interconnect technologies Intel is working on, which ones
are likely to have the biggest impact on corporate
computing?
The five that I'm really excited about are optical, high-speed
Ethernet, 3GIO (third-generation I/O, the replacement for PCI
architecture), Serial ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) and
Infiniband. These redefine connectivity in the enterprise and in
the data centre in a fundamental and dramatic way.
What other technologies are likely to have a significant
impact?
Our goal with the Itanium processor family is to rearchitect the
data center of the future. Today, that's filled with proprietary
RISC-based machines, and our job is to move those to standard
building blocks.
Will the IA-64 processor commoditise the 64-bit server market as
the Pentium has done in the IA-32 space?
[With IA-64], we're trying to deliver a building block for big-iron
machines. It's not that those other ones are bad; they're all
different, they're all incompatible. They're all forcing investment
in areas that no longer are the things that IT cares about.
Intel has announced the 2GHz Pentium 4 processor. How fast can
you go?
We're on path to deliver multibillion transistor chips in the next
decade, operating in excess of 25GHz. We're going to keep pushing
away at clock speed. However, clock speed alone will become less
and less a determinant of performance as we look forward to things
like hyperthreading.
How will that work?
Hyperthreading is the idea of doing more than one thing at once. In
today's applications, when you finish one set of instructions, you
go on to the next set of instructions and so on. In the future, we
[will] have the transistor budgets and the technologies to have one
microprocessor doing more than one thing at a time.
This is reasonably well established in servers or high-end
computing. We want to bring this into the mainstream of computing.
You'll see the first implementations start to emerge next
year.
What optical technologies are you developing that will affect
IT?
Optical redefined long-haul networking over the last decade. Over
the next decade, [it] will have dramatic implications for
metropolitan and campus data centres. We want to get to the point
where we're building direct optical interfaces onto our silicon
component.
That's a long-term vision, but where an optical interface component
might cost $10,000 today, over the next decade, I want to make it
cost a penny. I don't see [Intel building] optical transistors and
things like that in the near future, if ever.
Will applications need to change to leverage
hyperthreading?
Maybe. If Microsoft builds in the ability to have an operating
system and a networking stack and the printing daemon running in
parallel, and it's all part of the operating system, then the
application could benefit from hyperthreading without requiring any
modification to the application itself.
Imagine if I were running one of these cool, new dynamic runtime
applications like a Java or a C# application and the garbage
collector, the [just-in-time compiler] and the dynamic runtime
environment [were] separate threads running in parallel with the
application. So my new C# application wouldn't need to be
restructured for multithreading, but the underlying dynamic runtime
environment would be.
The third example would be to put these capabilities directly into
the compiler so that the compilers automatically generate those
threads. So the application doesn't need to be rewritten; it just
needs to be recompiled. However, to get the greatest benefit from
hyperthreading, yes, you would need to rewrite the application. But
you're going to benefit from this well in advance of requiring this
restructuring of the applications themselves, by any of the first
three paths.
What will a typical server look like in three to five
years?
I see us building four- or eight-way machines that are clustered
together to build really big machines. So I have a rack [of] 16 4u
(1u equals 1.75 in.) slices, and each slice is an eight-way
Itanium, and each of those is using hyperthreading.
I might have four threads running, so within a slice, I could have
as many as 32 threads of execution going on. In a rack, I have 16
of these, and they're all clustered together using technologies
like Infiniband. That's the mainframe of the future And that will
blow away the price performance of anything that the alternative
approaches will offer.
What will the desktop look like?
Key technologies will allow us to repartition the form factor of
the PC things like 3GIO. And when you've done that, you can all of
a sudden start separating. I can show you a system of the future
where my computer is actually under the desk, and I have all of my
I/O capabilities on top of the desk or even integrated into the LCD
monitor.
I see form factors continuing to decrease, power efficiency
becoming more critical, flat-panel displays becoming dominant and
technologies like speech and audio being good enough that they are
meaningfully deployed. The move to speech, pen and vision computing
[will] really explode.