In speeches they gave in early March, AMD chairman Jerry Sanders
and CEO Hector Ruiz took Intel to task for failing to deliver "true
innovation" and for holding back innovation by the rest of the PC
industry. These claims centered on Intel's dominant role in developing
new PC processor and platform technology. Sanders and Ruiz seem
to believe the PC industry would be making faster progress if Intel
weren't quite so powerful.
I think it's clear that Intel is a highly innovative company.
There's no doubt Intel has contributed many important technologies
to the PC industry over the years. Without Intel's work, the PC
would be much less powerful and flexible—and much more expensive.
But Intel's efforts aren't entirely beneficial. I believe Intel
often takes too narrow a view of market needs and therefore overlooks
opportunities to make its innovations more valuable. For example,
when Intel realized the PCI bus was becoming a bottleneck for system
performance because of the bandwidth PCI graphics cards consumed,
Intel solved the problem by introducing the AGP interface.
Intel failed to recognize, however, that graphics cards are just
one of several demanding peripherals on the PC platform. Instead
of developing AGP solely for graphics, Intel should have created
a more flexible high-performance interface that could be used for
graphics, storage controllers, and network interfaces. Intel's failure
to solve the greater problem delayed development of high-speed peripheral
interfaces for the PC platform, delays lasting to the present day.
Even now, Intel's mainstream PC chip sets offer nothing better than
the old standard 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus for expansion slots. This
baseline PCI implementation became a bottleneck for many peripherals
almost two years ago, and, for most customers, the solution—PCI
Express—is still a year away.
InfiniBand was Intel's first attempt to truly replace PCI, but
it had the same problem AGP had: it was too specifically adapted
to storage and networking to be useful as a general-purpose expansion
bus. InfiniBand survives, but only for limited applications.
In some cases, Intel refuses to accept the importance of work
done by other developers. Intel was very slow to pick up on PCI-X,
which became necessary because of Intel's misdirected work on AGP
and InfiniBand. Intel should have introduced 64-bit PCI, followed
by PCI-X, for its mainstream systems starting in 2000, but the company
chose to use these faster buses in workstations and server systems
only.
Sometimes, Intel refuses to license its technology to other companies
that would use it to benefit PC buyers. Intel is famously reluctant
to license its processor front-side buses, especially to competitors.
I can't fault Intel for this policy, however; its primary duty is
to its shareholders. Although an open licensing program might help
the PC industry, it would probably hurt Intel. Intel has no obligation
to adopt self-destructive policies, no matter who benefits. Intel
is entitled to control its proprietary technology and to profit
from it.
Today, Intel offers some of the best processors, core-logic chip
sets, and peripheral chips on the market. In other areas, such as
802.11 wireless networking, Intel is lagging behind other companies.
It will surely invest what is needed to catch up with other 802.11
developers; it is already participating in most of the 802.11 subcommittees—and
leading some of them.
Intel is extending its influence beyond the PC market into the
cell phone and consumer-electronics markets, but it is not in a
position to dominate these markets as it has dominated the PC-processor
business. I hope the company learns from its mistakes and adopts
a more thoughtful and cooperative attitude. If it tries to force
stopgap solutions and half measures into consumer products, as it
has done in PCs, it is likely to find its efforts at innovation,
along with its products, rejected by the OEM community.
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