Q&A: Craig Barrett defends the company's shift in emphasis from clock speed to multicore designs as he outlines his final six months as chief executive.
Intel Corp. has set the pace in the microprocessor industry, cranking out chips that operate at breakneck computing speeds. So when the company, under the direction of CEO Craig Barrett, began steering away from its speed-fiend image and toward multicore and partitioned designs, people took notice. In an interview with Executive Editor Stan Gibson and Editor in Chief Eric Lundquist at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., last week, Barrett explained the company's recent strategy shifts and his approach to the final six months of his tenure.
The cancellation of the 4-GHz Pentium 4 is symbolic of a shift from faster clock speeds to different architectures, such as dual core. What event raised the flag that you had to move in a different direction?
Paul Otellini said a couple of years ago at the Intel Developer Forum that there's more to life than gigahertz. Prescott [4GHz] was the tail end of that architecture. It gets more and more difficult to crank that performance out, and you have to look at other enhancements.
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