Intel: Death to all wires
Published: 22 Apr 2004 10:45 BST
You've mentioned lots of innovations that are coming to Intel's processors, such at 64-bit extensions to Xeon, but haven't spoken about NX, [No eXecute, a memory protection technology] which seems to be far more important. Why is this?
There's an optimistic panacea view of NX. The view that this patches all worms and holes is somewhat optimistic. NX will solve a certain class of attack. There have been lots of attacks which this wouldn't affect. Part of our hesitation to deploy this technology more widely is that it does create problems. People do make use of this behaviour [modifying executable code at run time] in real programs. There's a whole validation programme to go through, plus we're waiting on Microsoft to deliver their parts of the toolkit. If major enterprise applications are broken that's a problem.
Could you do something similar to how you deployed HT technology, with the capability present but not enabled?
It may be present and not enabled today. We built the basic capabilities into the architecture a long time ago.
Intel is pushing ultrawideband (UWB) wireless as a technology, but there's been a split in the industry over standards. Can you tell us why this has happened?
It's been an ugly political battle at the IEEE. The good thing about the IEEE is everyone gets a vote. The bad thing is that everyone gets a vote. If we can't go through the IEEE directly, we'll develop a standard independently and then go back to them. We're part of Multiband ODFM Alliance (MBOA), which is committed to standardisation through the IEEE.
Is UWB just another wireless networking technology, or will it be more than that?
Every in-room wire, except the power cord, should go away. Wi-Fi will be very stressed by an uncompressed high-definition video stream. I'd take down all of my Wi-Fi by doing that. UWB can handle that easily. You'd have to get very creative to exhaust 500Mbps within a room.
Are you saying that UWB can replace all cables?
Ultimately that will be our goal. Get rid of the wires. The only exception will be the connection to the display panel itself, which needs around 1Gbps for an uncompressed signal.
In your keynote speech, you talked of the industry having an "irrational exuberance". Have we got past that stage, and learned the lessons of it?
Is nanotech today in a period of irrational exuberance? Is biotech in a period of irrational exuberance? Is UWB? It's a very natural tendency for us to get exuberant about things. Very often it's the only way we can get the press to write about it. Until you've fired someone, you can't make good decisions about hiring someone. Bad times make you mature. People are going to be very thoughtful about their investment in development. We're not going to stop taking risks, but we're going to be deeper in thought about our risks.
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