BANGALORE, India — Intel Corp. chief executive officer Craig Barrett predicted Friday (Aug. 3) that a detailed third-generation wireless I/O specification would be completed and ready for ratification within the next 120 days.
Speaking here during a four-city Asian tour, Barrett said, "I'm very comfortable with it 3GIO. It will be the protocol of the future." Asked about the competing Hypertransport technology backed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Barrett said 3GIO technology has "substantially more headway." Commenting on other technologies, Barrett said, "Ethernet is going to be the technology of the future. Ethernet seems to be the chosen technology."
Barrett called the current industry downturn a business slowdown, not a technology slowdown. "I don't think technology will slow down at all," he said. "An economic recession is not a technology recession. This is a lesson from the last 20-to-30 years. Technology advancement continues. Moore's Law continues unabated."
On possible alternatives to CMOS, Barrett said, "Nobody knows what is going to replace it. It has at least 15 years ahead of it." Barrett predicted that memory systems costing less than flash will start appearing in a few years.
Intel expects to invest about $7.5 billion in capital equipment and $4 billion in research and development this year, Barrett said. "We are investing for the future, not for the next quarter or next year," he said. Intelligent companies will continue to invest though the entire high-tech sector has been hard hit, said Barrett, who stressed that peak Internet traffic has not ebbed during the current economic slowdown.
On the PC front, Barrett said the industry has bottomed out and that there's no inventory overhang. He said that no one knows when the downturn will end, but given that such downturns usually last between six to 15 months, "We are, statistically speaking, halfway through it."
Intel will continue to invest in India by increasing its engineering staff and through its venture capital fund. "The increased sophistication of software engineering work going on here — I am very impressed by it," Barrett said.
He repeatedly stressed that the Internet will become a vehicle for business just as it is now a vehicle for information. "The Internet runs on silicon," Barrett said while demonstrating the transmission of a high-definition broadcast video over an IP network, and scaling video created on a PC to wireless handheld devices.
