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August 25, 2005
Less is more
Forbes.com is running another good one. This time it's about Intel marketing "performance per watt" instead of raw processing power. Less is more.
In case you didn't notice, and couldn't ask Gilles, chip manufacturers, especially Intel, have been having trouble increasing raw processing power lately. When they do manage to increase processing power, the chips get hot as the blazes, meaning they radiate huge amounts of electricity in the form of useless heat. As a result the marketing dudes' laptops burn fingers of people clicking to the next slide, and knock down battery life from hours to minutes. Even more seriously, they make it hard to cool labs and data centers, so big customers cannot use the chips.
Intel fought that for a while, because they'd worked so hard for so long to sell everyone on the need to have really high speed processors. Think planned obsolescence.
Now even their marketing dudes have capitulated in the face of stubborn reality. Unfortunately if you think about this whole thing for a nanosecond or two, the answer to this marketing campaign is for people to buy older chips, or hang on to the old ones they have for longer. (Chips used to consume less power.)
I get this picture of Otellini going to a meeting of Intel investors. The investors say, "Profits are down. You didn't meet your target. What are you doing about it?" Otellini says, "We have a new marketing campaign. Less is more."
Posted by Mark at August 25, 2005 08:16 AM