Efforts to take PCs to the
masses in India hasn’t had a great record. Yet, Intel is taking new initiatives
in that direction.
The company’s chief
technology officer, Justin Rattner, said that he’s starting what he calls a
‘frugal engineering’ effort at its India facility. “It’s intended to bring high
technology to these huge populations, to those whom our products for the most
part do not touch today. And India seemed to be the perfect place to do that
kind of work,” he said.
Rattner said his lab was
‘kicking around ideas’ in the space. “We want to do very low-cost PCs, very
power efficient, very robust in the face of unreliable power sources. So we are
moving from a US/European audience, with hundreds of millions of customers, to
an audience of a billion or two billion. Give them online reach, but at a price
point that is unprecedented,” he said.
For this, he is even looking
at developing a new processor, a ‘Sub-Atom’ as he called it. Atom is currently
Intel’s cheapest processor and is used for netbooks, net tops, smartphones and
the company’s smart TV platform.
Rattner expects the India
lab to do a lot of rethinking on how to provide various functions on a chip.
“The India lab is currently working on absolutely leading-edge technologies, now
moving from 32 nanometre chips to 22 nm ones. What if we backed off, and used
chips of two generations back, say 65 nm ? Now, those plants are fully
depreciated, so the wafer costs are dramatically lower. But for a very high
volume, low-cost product, that technology may be sufficient. It’s a big mental
shift for Intel”, he said.
(Source : Extracts from
an article written by Mr. Sujit John in The Times of India, dated 13-12-2010)
