Intel CEO Craig Barrett Talks Chips

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and have a wide-ranging discussion with Intel CEO Craig Barrett.

Michael Miller: There's been a fundamental shift in the way we talk about CPUs. A couple of years ago, everything was MHz and GHz. Now we're talking about chips differentiated more by features. Intel talks about the "T's" and multicore chips. How do you get these ideas across to customers?

Craig Barrett: We put it in terms of user-perceived benefit. Centrino came out, and it was a smash success in the mobile marketplace. I'm not sure that people talk about any Pentium M processor or any Centrino mobile technology notebook in terms of processor clock speed. It's more about what Wi-Fi protocols it supports, what the battery life is, and what the form factor looks like. When we brought Centrino mobile technology out, we moved away from just performance and more toward the four vectors of form factor, battery life, performance, and wireless. That's what people get excited about. Similarly, when we talk about the digital home, we ask what problem a device solves as opposed to how fast it runs.

Read the rest of this PC Magazine interview: "Intel CEO Craig Barrett Talks Chips"

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.