Moore's Law, which says that solid-state transistor density doubles every 18 months or so--resulting in faster processors and denser memory as well as lower costs--is good for at least another 10 years, according to Intel's regional vice president for sales and marketing, John Antone.
In Bangkok for Intel's Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro platform introduction last month, Antone explained in an interview how the next one billion computer users would be enabled--one village at a time--with a combination of cheaper hardware, network access and programs that engaged governments and shaped their educational curriculum in particular.
Speaking of a reinvigorated Moore's Law, named after a prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore over 40 years ago, he said that Intel's latest 45-nanometer transistor had a gate that used a new element called hafnium that significantly improved the electrical characteristics by cutting down leakage current.
Historically, transistor gates have been grown out of silicon dioxide by exposing silicon to oxygen, which was where glass came from, he said, adding that glass was an insulator but that it had been getting harder and harder to grow really fine glass.
"So in these 45 nanometer transistors we actually deposited hafnium...It's more like a metal, so the switching capabilities are significantly better than the capacitance associated with silicon dioxide."
Antone said that Gordon Moore himself had called this "the biggest breakthrough in processor technology in 40 years".
"We've demonstrated the 45 nanometer, which will begin production in the second half of this year, we've talked about and shown pictures of 35 nanometers. I believe the we've put a road map out for 10 years that goes down below 10 nanometers," he said.
"When we start falling behind with lithography, then we'll start running into challenges with Moore's Law. But we can see our way through at least 10 years...if you can see it, you can build it," he said.
"The MIPS are going to go up, the MIPS are not going to stop, in the graphics engine or in the CPU engine, and memory...whether it is DRAM, XRAM or Flash memory, it's going to be under Moore's Law--so pick your point in time and we can do a lot more with 10-times all these things for the same price," he added.
Speaking of the incredible changes the industry had seen over the past four decades, he said the only thing that paralleled the amount of change would be the environmental and economic changes in Thailand.
Most of Southeast Asia had been like Thailand, he said. "The Philippines probably has been a bit more spotty. Vietnam is definitely on the rise...incredible, where are we going to stop?
"India is nothing short of chaotic, but the growth and the change is still incredibly dramatic and that's a billion people. China is not monolithic. After you get past the coastal cities, if you keep going either north or inland, there are hundreds of millions of people that don't enjoy the same lifestyle.
"And yet the Chinese are committed to paving their way and having networks out to all those sorts of places, so we really are in the process of taking a billion people into the modern world--or five billion people into the modern world--and the technology has got a hand in making all that happen, and that's exciting to talk about as well."
Antone spoke of how, with programs such as Intel's Teach to the Future and International Science and Engineering Fair, the company had been working on "bits and pieces of programs for 8 or 10 years" and he said that Intel had now collected them together and they had become a lot more formalized. "Governments have given us a lot of feedback on how we've formalized the program," he said.
Observing that there had been a lot of interest in Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop per Child" US$100-dollar notebook computer project, he pointed out that inexpensive devices were only part of the problem."You can give a device away, but if nobody uses it, you haven't solved any problem, right?"
While the device itself needs to get cheaper, Antone said that we needed to have networks available as well, and the network access had to be cheap. "Teachers need to not be afraid of the device, because once you get a kid on the Internet, he'll sort of self-teach, and go his own way. And there is nothing scarier to an educator than a kid going his own way.
"So it needs to be incorporated in the educational system in a constructive way so that teachers embrace it and use it versus saying 'this is bad, I'm not even going to give the kid a chance. I'm going to lock it in the closet because, the minute he has it, he's going to go out of bounds, I lose control, I don't like it."'
The Intel general manager for Asia Pacific said that there were ways to do
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