How 5G and edge computing fit into the future of Intel’s traditionally chip-focused lineup

Intel is one of the biggest names in the tech world, with chips that quite literally are the brains behind most of the computers and servers that we use every day. But the world of computers is expanding and Intel is changing, too, with a focus on both edge computing that puts processing resources in the cloud and the power that’s available directly on the physical device. And at the head of that is Dr. Venkata (Murthy) Renduchintala, the chief engineering officer and group president of the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group at Intel. Renduchintala joined Intel in 2016, having previously headed up competitor Qualcomm’s chip business. Renduchintala is the person in charge of almost all of Intel’s hardware, from design to engineering to manufacturing. He joined Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and news editor Chaim Gartenberg for an interview episode of The Vergecast this week to discuss the present and future of Intel, including the company’s place in the development of 5G, the changing landscape of personal- and cloud-based computing, and what the next-generation of processors could look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Everybody, it's Sam from the Vergecast. On this week's interview show, our own Heim Gartenberg joined me to talk to Intel Chief Engineering Officer, Dr. Murthy Rendu Chintala. This one gets really deep. We talked about the state of the Intel roadmap, how he's managed to reset the company after jumping over to Intel from Qualcomm. This one gets pretty deep. We talked about the state of the Intel roadmap, how he's managed to reset the sort of engineering side of the company after jumping over from Qualcomm, how he manages that engineering team. And of course, my favorite question, which I'm kind of asking everybody, when he finds time to actually get work done? Check it out.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Dr. Murthy Rendu Chintala, Chief Engineering Officer at Intel and Group President. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Thank you. Good to be here.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  So a lot going on in Intel world. Heim Gartenberg is here with me. Hello. But let's start just at the start. When did you get to Intel? You were at Qualcomm before. This is, you've been there for a few years now. Just give me that story.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  So I started in Intel at the beginning of 2016 after having spent 12 years at Qualcomm. So moved up to the Bay Area in early 2016 and been there for, coming up to four years now.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  And when you first got to Intel, you made, you made some waves, right? There's been a big shift. There's like a new CEO. You were the new Chief Engineering Officer. The company needed to change. Tell me about sort of making that change happen.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, clearly, I wasn't hired by Intel to maintain the status quo. But at the same time, Brian Krasanich, the CEO at the time, had a very clear vision of how he wanted to transform the company and move it on from a PC-centric to a data-centric company. And I think he was very much looking for a leadership that could help him promote and accelerate that transition. And given my experience in the silicon space outside of Intel, I thought, I think Brian thought that my addition to the leadership team would be a good addition to the overall chemistry of the company and start bringing some outside thinking in. So very much towards moving Intel towards embracing and understanding how the outside

• 3:02Speaker 03

  world did things in terms of trying to mix the two ecosystems together in a, in a way that meant a net positive progress for the company.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  Let me push you. What does it mean to be a data-centric, for a chipmaker, what does it mean to be data-centric?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  It's to be immersed in everything to do with the storage, the processing and the distribution of data. It's to fundamentally understand that data is exploding around us. And the ability to provide the processing capabilities to deal with that data explosion, whether it be to process, to distribute it, or to store it, is going to be the key areas of growth for the semiconductor industry in general over the next few years.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  So I, these are my favorite kinds of questions. I, I understand what you're saying, but in practice, you show up, it's your first day, you're brought in to do this task, everyone understands it. Do you just like roll into the conference room with the KB Lake team and you're like, understand that data exists and like roll out again? Like, how does that take place?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, you spend a lot of time listening, learning and understanding. I mean, I think what's very, very exciting about the opportunity at Intel is it's a huge opportunity to learn. It's the first time I've ever worked for an IDM. It's the first time I've ever been in this industry space. So, you know, when you walk into a company like that, you spend your first six months listening, learning and understanding and getting to grips with what the company is all about, understanding the new culture, understanding how it works. And then trying to figure out how the experience set and the, and the skill set you have could be applied complementarily to the, to the.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Assets you have around you.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  One thing that that just struck me when you're talking about about data and and sort of the shift towards data from from the individual processor is that it sort of mirrors the shift that we've been seeing a lot in the general tech industry, which is sort of a more more cloud based approach. Your your games are no longer, you know, stored on your computer, your music, everything is is on the server. We're seeing, you know, game streaming services in particular, where where the processing power is offset elsewhere. And I wanted to kind of get your your take on that as it sort of fits with that approach.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually think that the that the end state is going to be a harmonious interplay between cloud and local processing. I think the demands for instantaneousness and low latency in a deeply immersive experience means that any experience going forward, whether it be gaming, VR, or or applications of that nature are going to be a a well architected mixture of on device processing and storage, as well as cloud based capability. I mean, I think if you look at your smartphone, for example, it's the ultimate cloud based device. At the same time, there's more semiconductor processing in that in that smartphone that I see across the desk from me than was maybe in a laptop two years ago. So I think it's a fallacy to

• 5:47Speaker 03

  assume that as the cloud grows and the cloud environment hosts more and more of what we've hitherto done on the device, the device becomes dumber. I think in many respects, the the areas that you specialize in the client devices just tend to be more different. So, display, graphics, storage tend to be much more amplified at the point of the experience

• 6:10Speaker 03

  consumption than maybe otherwise would be imagined.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  I'm glad you brought up smartphones because it's another topic that I want to ask you about. In particular, it's an area that Intel hasn't so much been a part of. The company just sold its its 5G modem business to Apple. And I'm curious where in this data centric approach, Intel kind of sees itself fitting into this mobile space, just especially as that's becoming an increasingly central part of the computing life.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, again, smartphones really were the, I think, the iconic devices that that created the mobile internet age that we're all experiencing now. And we have eight billion connected devices that really are key to the way we function today. But if you wind forward in the next five to 10 years, you're talking about a world that's going to have 100 billion connected devices, way beyond the smartphone, devices talking to devices without even human interaction in between. And therefore, it creates a completely different landscape where the amount of data that's going to be generated is going to just exponentially grow. And the infrastructure required to deal with that is going to have to completely transform.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So I think what you're really seeing now is the movement of people thinking about the mobile internet towards the internet of everything. And that's going to have seismic transformations in everything around us, not least of which is going to be the networks that service all of that. The edge and the compute at the edge is going to become more and more important, because the amount of data that will be generated just can't be consumed by traditional backhaul architectures. So I think it's going to be a transformative period for us. In fact, I think this transition to 5G is going to be more profound on the networking side than on the device side. And I think we'll see a transition that's as significant in the network as the transition was from analog to digital.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think of Intel as a traditionally networking company. I think if Qualcomm is a traditionally networking company, where you, is that part of the idea here?

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I mean, when I joined Intel, Intel was considered to be a company that made PCs and servers and basically had 90-plus percent share in a $60 billion TAM. What we've really tried to do is reposition Intel's position in the overall landscape to be a company that has about a 25% share in a $300 billion TAM, of which two-thirds is data-centric. And it's all about the transformation of the network and the cloudification of the network, where the technologies that were in the data center get distributed and integrated into the fabric of the networks we know of today. You go from a network delivered by bespoke pieces of silicon, each working together with

• 8:51Speaker 03

  single function piece of silicon towards a paradigm of what we call network function virtualization, the rise of the software defined network, where workloads can be virtualized and run on a general purpose compute engine such as a Xeon processor for that matter. Which is why, as you think of the future, you should think about the assets that Intel have becoming more and more relevant across the continuum of the network landscape.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  That's the vision of kind of network based compute that I've heard from Verizon, for example. I've heard it from AT&T. I haven't heard it so much from other 5G vendors, right? The carriers are kind of doing this in different ways. But you're saying that's an overall vision? Is that the vision you're pushing Intel towards? Is that where you go out and market and say, hey Sprint, build our network this way because our chips will be great for it? Or is this where the entire industry is going?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  I think this is where the entire industry will ultimately go, and Intel is catalyzing and accelerating that trend. I think what you're hearing from network operators is a different pace at which they're approaching that transition based on the legacy that they have. For example, if you're a network operator that's putting something in from the ground up today as a day one exercise, I think the approach you'd take would be very different and very radical. For example, if you're an entrenched operator that has a huge amount of sunk capital in 3G and 4G legacy. So I think what you're really seeing is sometimes it's much easier to move when you have less baggage of the past to carry

• 10:26Speaker 03

  with you. It's a bit like, for example, if you look for the rise of an operator like GEO in India where it's just basically completely swept the country, it's really because it's put a ground up network in that's been digital and no circuit switch capability from day one, as opposed to the legacy carriers that had to deal with circuit switch 2G and 3G as well. So I think at the end of the day, the economics and the ability to deliver network evolution swiftly and rapidly is going to mean that the movement towards software defined networking is going to be inevitable. The pace at which various operators will ultimately execute is going to be based on a function of how much they've already

• 11:07Speaker 03

  sunk in legacy networks, be it 3G or LTE, and how much are being started from a greenfield approach.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  So I want to make sure we talk to you about the chips in the laptops and how many cores they have, which is of paramount interest to me, but I want to just stick with networks for a minute. I ask everybody this question, I hope you can answer it. Is 5G a race?

• 11:28Speaker 03

  No, I think 5G is a-

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  No one says yes, by the way, so you're fine.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  I just don't understand it. What happens, like what happens if we lose?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  So 5G in my mind is an inevitable transition that will affect the globe and the technology around the globe at various paces. I think what you'll find is that smartphones will basically be the thing that catches the eye immediately because they're in people's hands, they're personal, but ultimately what will be the truly transforming experience is what happens to the network behind it and how that transforms to deliver a variety of services that you hitherto couldn't have even imagined of, where you're going towards situations where the network latency can support real autonomous services as opposed to you dial a button and you wait for three seconds and then you get a circuit switch connection. It's going to completely transform the experience.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  And it's not a race because at the end of the day, the victories come in so many different shapes, forms, and sizes, there isn't one game we're playing. It's a completely transformative experience of our digital lives and that's going to happen at different paces, at elements to our lives that have different importance to different people.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  But this doesn't sound like you're putting chips in consumer products. It sounds like you're selling a lot of gear to operators.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  I think, I think of it differently. I think that what you're really seeing is a greater and greater interconnectivity and coupling between what's happening at the network and what's happening in the devices. And the way in which the services are delivered and the way in which applications are started and where they're run is going to become a much more harmonious interplay between what's running the network and what's running the device. So I think you have to start thinking about a much more continuous type of mindset in terms of the whole kind of like client-server model we're used to. This is going to be a scenario where the client, the edge, and the network are going to work in harmony and in a synchronized manner to deliver a really immersive user experience. So I think it's going to be a much more unified concept.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  So you're saying that Intel wants to be not just the name on the box that you're holding in your hand, but the name on the box that you're not seeing that that box is talking to?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  I think the vision we have of Intel is being a solutions provider that powers your digital world. That's kind of like the way we're really trying to think of ourselves. How do we affect the evolution of the core network, the data center, the edge, the client environment, the inauguration of more and more autonomous agents into an environment where everything speaks to everything else and creates a harmonious synchronized continuum?

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Do you think of Intel as an actual operator, equipment vendor on the scale of a Huawei or a Siemens? Did Siemens own Ericsson now? They're all merging and unmerging. But that class of companies that the operators rely on, do you think that you need to build that class of equipment?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  I think we need to think about how we expand our customer base to include those kind of customers. So for example, today Ericsson and Nokia are going to be, are and will be, continue to be very, very important customers for Intel beyond our traditional PC customers. So as you expand from a company that's focused on a $60 billion TAM to a $300 billion TAM, then the industries and the customers that we're going to service is going to expand exponentially. And therefore, we see ourselves constantly engaging with customers that are new and bringing in new knowledge to us, and we have to serve them in different ways than we've served our traditional customer base. And that's how we grow and how we expand.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's the future. I get it. You're going to do cool network stuff. Let's talk about the extremely real present, which is this laptop I have in front of me. I'm going to just let Heim drive because he has a long list of questions about your current set of chips.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Okay, so Intel as a company is on a generational edge right now. We're finally seeing the first wave of the 10 nanometer chips, which had been anticipated for years. There's been a lot of drama, a lot of delays in rollout for these chips, and we're finally starting to see them. Just give me a quick snapshot of where the company is at right now in terms of that hardware and where it's going in the immediate future.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Well, Jaime, you're quite right. We're now seeing the first fruits of our labors on 10 nanometers with the Isolate chipset that came out, the 10th generation stuff. And we've been very pleased with how that's been received by the market. We're seeing not only the benefits of 10 nanometer technology that brings different power versus performance points for the products, but we've also got a whole barrage of new IP that had been node locked to 10 that now sees the light of day. So we've seen the Gen 11 graphics come out, where we've seen a significant improvements in the in the in the nature of the experience. We've also brought out technologies like integrated Type-C and Thunderbolt technology into the base architecture, and we've introduced for the first time AI instruction sense into

• 16:23Speaker 03

  the into the core instruction set of our computers to be able to accelerate AI tape capabilities. So I think what you're seeing with Isolate is the first in a very exciting lineup that's going to be rolling out through 2020. And we're putting in more and more differentiated IP, together with evolutions of our 10 nanometer technology as we go through 2020. So you ain't seen nothing yet. I think the the products we'll have in the in the course of 2020 are going to be very exciting, where we bring bigger CPUs, better graphics, better power versus performance and battery consumptions, really continuing to elevate the user experience with every platform we launch on an annual cadence.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  So I have to say two words, which is Moore's Law followed by a question mark. It is one of the questions that has come up, especially with the, you know, much longer development time for 10 nanometer. I know Bob Swain has already said that Intel's hoping to return to the two and a half year cadence for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer beyond. Is that realistic? And how important is that, that you that you fit to those timescales?

• 17:32Speaker 03

  So first of all, I think Moore's Law is alive and well. It's not becoming any easier with time, because, you know, developing deep sub-micron geometry at that two-year clip takes more and more innovation. But Bob's absolutely right to reiterate. That we want to get back to a two to two and a half year cadence. And the whole 10 nanometer experience for us is more of a of a big hiccup than in any way a reset on what we're really thinking. I would say that 10 nanometers was more a overconfluence of risk that made our ability to deliver on a two-year cadence. We missed a step effectively. But we're really, really focused on getting back onto that two-year, two and a half year cadence.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And the lessons we've learned on 10 nanometers have really figured into how we create that equation going forward to deliver that predictability. So with seven and with five, we're looking towards basically finding a much more appropriate balance point between scaling, cost, power, performance, and schedule predictability. And we're optimizing our challenges in each of those areas to to really up the probability that we can nail the two to two and a half year cadence. That's going to be a very big part of our of our roadmap construction going forward. What we're also doing is between those two and a half years delivering meaningful intra-node improvements as well. So that what you'll see is less of a kind of like a step function improvement in performance and more of a continuum,

• 19:00Speaker 03

  where you'll have essentially the guide rails of kind of like node geometry changes every two years. But we want to basically do incremental performance improvements during those years. That was a core lesson we learned when we were in the middle of the trials and tribulations with 10. We were able to generate a lot more performance out of 14. And what we did on 14 now becomes the new normal going forward.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  One of those things that that Intel did with 14 is something that's very interesting to me. Over the over the generations of the 14 lineup, we saw an increasing number of multi-core processors come out from Intel. And not just Intel across the industries, where we once had, you know, four cores was was the upper limit. We're now seeing hexacore and eight-core laptops as as standard consumer devices. On the desktop side, we're seeing, you know, 28-core, it's it's it's a core arm race across the whole industry. I wanted to know if you could talk a little bit about kind of the decision to branch off into that and

• 19:56Speaker 03

  True.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Why all the cores?

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's to some degree, it's a little bit of deja vu to me because I went through this in the smartphone industry some a few years earlier than the PC. So we went from kind of like single core CPU architectures to four core and then to eight cores. And the logic really applies that as you get towards the diversity of workloads we're dealing with today in the in the digital world we live with, there's a greater capability to be able to split workloads up and run them more efficiently and in parallel among multiple processes. You know, there's one school of thought, which was essentially you could basically run a single CPU with a higher and higher clock rate. And you get to a point of thermal limiting at that point, then the next scenario is you split up the

• 20:39Speaker 03

  workloads and run them over a number of cores at a lower frequency, which essentially gives you more throughput at a more efficient power level. And it's the same, it's the same logic coming through that what we're really seeing is the way the PC applications of today and the future of being architected, whether they be cloud based or native, are being architected in a way where they take advantage of this concept of multi-threadedness, where they can or being able to be split up across multiple cores. And therefore it catalyzes multi-core designs. So I think it's been the advent of multi-core designs with the advent of applications that can take advantage of those multi cores that are really fuel this going forward. And I think what's really happening now is that

• 21:23Speaker 03

  you're seeing more and more workloads that just need more and more compute. And to deliver that in a power efficient and a heat efficient way, it makes sense to to split the workloads up across a number of cores. So, you know, what you're seeing in the laptop and what you're seeing in the data center was was pre-informed by what we saw in the smartphone many, many years ago, where essentially you go from single core, high frequency to now multi cores going forward. And the future is going to be not just multi cores, but what we call multiple X PUs, where it's not just CPUs, but CPUs working can continue with GPUs and specific function ASICs for things like AI.

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• 23:08Speaker 04

  Another thing I wanted to just touch on is competition. Intel is up against more competition than it's had in possibly the last decade. AMD has this new rise in chips. Qualcomm has desktop chips for the first time. There are more people who are trying to sort of edge in onto Intel's traditional space at the same time that Intel is also looking to expand into other areas. So I kind of wanted to talk about the strategy of the reliance on the client computing group versus other avenues that Intel is working on. You mentioned the data-centric approach and how that fits together.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, the PC business remains incredibly important to Intel. It's a driver of a lot of value and gives the organization tremendous scale. And we're going to compete as effectively as we possibly can against all comers in that market. Now, first of all, I think competition is extremely healthy because it generally brings out the best of every company when it's faced with stuffed competition. And I can clearly see that Intel has reacted aggressively to the onset of competition. If you look at, for example, the financials of our client business and the operator Profit improvement year over year, it's been a stellar performer, primarily driven by a stimulus towards being absolutely agile to respond to the competitive vectors that we see,

• 24:27Speaker 03

  whether it be the ARM community or other x86 areas. What I will say, however, is that is a business that while important is also managed concurrently with our desire to basically move into the data-centric era. You know, in 2013, the PC business amounted to something like 70% of Intel's overall revenue. In 2019, it was more like 50/50 between the PC business and the data-centric businesses, while the business grew some 30% in terms of overall revenue between 2015 and now. So what we're really seeing is a continued focus on the client business and making sure that we maintain competitive ground and investing in order to do so.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  But we're also making sure that we play into that $300 billion TAM that Bob and others have talked about, where we need to play across multiple different fields and in markets where we're not the incumbent, where we're coming into areas where we're competing with strongly entrenched players and trying to pull together disruptive technology in order to be able to gain share there. So for us, it's really a case of holding, secure the PC franchise and supporting that with the right amount of R and D to deliver innovation in the area, but making sure that we also transform the company into this data-centric-focused player that we want to be that's playing in that $300 billion TAM.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  But that PC market's changing a lot, right? I mean, I know Apple will try to convince you that the iPad is the future of computers if you so much as blink at them. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that is an ARM processor. Microsoft just put out a Windows tablet, a Surface tablet with an ARM processor. There's a lot of activity in that zone towards, hey, we actually do need instant on. We do need integrated connectivity. We do need all the stuff that they tell me, the vendors tell me, comes with ARM.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  By the way, let me be clear. I mean, we absolutely need to innovate in the PC space to continue to maintain the success of our business. And that's absolutely what we're committed to do. So you're absolutely right. I think, you know, this whole concept of basically making a PC capable of being able to give you an uncompromising full day of productivity and not having to worry about taking a charger with you is fundamental. The ability to drive more and more immersive graphics, to be able to have that always-on-instantly-connected capability is taken for granted. But how do we do that in a manner where it continues to drive the thin and light form factors that we appreciate?

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  Wait, how do you do that?

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Well, again...

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you're the chief engineering officer.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Well, it comes down to mastering a multiplicity of different technologies. I mean, one of the things that we've learned is that even for the PC, the innovation model that used to be described by Intel as tick-tock, which was drive process and drive CPU architecture in and of itself, while important, isn't sufficient to drive a leading roadmap going forward. It needs to be augmented with much more mastery in a broader bandwidth of technologies. For example, things like interconnect, things like memory, things like the way we optimize and run software, graphics, these all become just as important. The way we architect our products become just as important. So we have to go from tick-tock, which was process

• 27:47Speaker 03

  and CPU microarchitecture, towards thinking about this being a game of multiple technology dimensions.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  Do you feel challenged by the fact that everyone still thinks of Intel as the tick-tock company? I mean, aside from actually tick-tock, which I don't think anybody confuses Intel with. But, I mean, that has been the story of Intel since I started covering tech. It's still the frame. That your roadmap fits into, is that the big change you're trying to make? Like, stop thinking of it this way?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Well, I would say it's not stop thinking about it, it's think about Intel as being much more. I mean, Intel has a tremendous heritage that I for one, respect tremendously. So it's not about moving away or redefining, it's about evolving and putting Intel on a broader, broader stage.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  But just to, the example you just gave about, okay, we, the shift to 10 was hard. We learned an awful lot about what we could get out of 14. That actually, to me, that flies in the face of process, like, right? That, that means we're not, you're not optimizing what you have before you move on to the next, which is like, the story of the tech industry, in many ways. But is there a part of you that just wants to say, we're, I'm the new guy-ish now, but we're gonna blow it all up and move, and move in a totally different direction? Or is it just a refinement of the existing strategy?

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think it's, I think it's basically making a good model even better. I mean, part of the reason why I'd like to think Brian brought in people like myself, and I myself have brought in people from the outside, is to bring some of the outside thinking and meld that with what's so good and great about Intel. And I think what, you know, the example you've just talked about, you know, the ability to get incremental improvement out of node transitions was basically taken for granted in the fabulous ecosystem. So myself and others coming in and basically starting to think about that being a modus operandi for Intel was just natural to us. It maybe wasn't as natural to the Intel folks, but, of the past, but when we sat down and discussed how we actually deal with some of the lessons we learned from 10, it was

• 29:47Speaker 03

  a natural outcome of that. And starting to think about delivering leadership across multiple technical ingredients just comes from having more vibrant thinking in the company. And talking to our customers and thinking about where their roadmaps are going from. So for us, and, and also reacting to competition and seeing how they're, how they're able to gain a voice in the market that we ultimately then wanted to respond to. So, I think it's all about making sure that we live by Andy Grove's parable about not being too complacent to lose sight.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Always be paranoid. That was, that was a very polite spin on always be paranoid.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  So is there a world where in two years Intel releases a 7-nanometer thing, but we also see 13th generation Intel chips that will still heavily rely on this improved 10-nanometer scale and have those as a concurrent thing? Like, right now I can buy a brand-new laptop, I can buy a 10th-generation chip, some of them are 14-nanometers, some of them are 10-nanometer. You're mixing the architectures to maximize on each. Is that a thing that's going to continue to happen going forward? Or is it going to be more of a reversion back to "out with the old, in with the new" that we've seen in prior years?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  I think what you're going to see going forward is a longer interplay between nodes. And it might not even be concurrent 10-nanometer devices shipping with 7-nanometer devices. It might be, for example, 7-nanometer and 10-nanometer living within the same SoC construction. I think one of the things you need to start thinking about is not being limited by the monolithic paradigm that we live by today. What's going to happen going forward is I think you're going to see SoC construction that uses advanced packaging capability to allow you to have a mixture of process technologies in the same package, so that you get benefits of logic scaling where it

• 31:43Speaker 03

  really matters and that where it doesn't have much of an influence, you don't have to do all the R&D work that slows you down in delivering all of that new cool processing IP. So I could clearly see a scenario where you could, for example, have 7-nanometer, or 5-nanometer, or 3-nanometer compute and GPU tiles working with I/O and mixed-signal technology that might be in an N minus 1 node, and running those in a heterogeneous SoC architecture, all delivered within one package. In fact, we've already sampled the first groundbreaking architecture of that guise already in the Lakefield product we delivered, where it basically has our I/O and a number

• 32:26Speaker 03

  of other mixed-signal circuitry in a technology we call 1222, with the compute and graphics being in 10-nanometers using a very, very Very novel, highly innovative 3D packaging construct to be able to deliver that all in one SOC. I think that's going to be the paradigm going forward, that monolithic becomes still an important part, but less of a panacea in the way we'll put our SOC roadmaps together going forward. And I think you should think about nodes living much more concurrently than the original paradigm of all out, you know, all in one node than all out of it with the next node transition.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  Can I, let me ask you a, it's either a dumb question or it's a, it's not. I don't know which one it is. But let me ask you, you talked about packaging, 3D packaging. And just before that, you talked about, hey, I worked at a fabulous company before and I came in and now I can just take that. I want Intel to take it for granted, but Intel owns the fab. You work on that part of it more directly than any other chip vendor that I can think of, besides from like TSMC, right? What is the advantage of owning the fab at this point? Is it that you can do innovative 3D packaging across multiple node sizes? Or is it you own the fab and it's cheaper? Like, what is the specific advantage of it at this point that you can leverage?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  I think I can give you a very objective answer, having lived on both sides of that equation. I think the empowering thing of the environment Intel offers you is really, there's really no technology that we don't have access to that can be applied to the delivery of a really world-class, customer-pleasing roadmap. If you look at what Intel has access to, it has process technology, it has packaging technology, it has memory, it has interconnect. We own the franchise and a cornerstone IP called the CPU. We're moving into basically become competent in the GPU space. We already have the FPGA space.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  We have the software assets to drive a developer ecosystem of 20 million plus users. So when you bring all of that together, the explosive innovation you can create with those teams working in a harmonized, synchronized way with no silos creates a roadmap that's just totally, extremely difficult to emulate in a foundry, fabulous relationship. We are trying to do this through contractual relationships where each participant has potentially different P and L motives. So the ability to deliver products like Lakefield, what we're going to be delivering in our roadmap going forward, where we're bringing all of those technology ingredients together to give a product roadmap, but we believe gives truly delightful customer experiences

• 35:00Speaker 03

  is nigh on impossible to deliver, I believe, if those assets aren't all controlled in a single company mindset.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  So is that what you thought when you were at Qualcomm, like, why can't they get it right? Right? Because you were at the other place and now you're, you have the place with the whole stack. Intel was not leveraging the full suite of capabilities to be ultra competitive in a number of zones. Now you're at Intel, you have control over all of that, I assume. Imagine there's some other managers involved, but you have control over all of it, I assume. Are you there? Because the evidence suggests that like it hasn't, that vision has not come fully to life, right? That it hasn't been ultra competitive.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Well, we're not there yet. You're quite right in saying that, you know, we've had to basically get over some basic execution flaws. So 10 nanometers is clearly one that we need to recover from and recover fast. But that's not to say the innovation around that hasn't been continuing at full steam. And I think, yeah, we will come to a point where all of those innovations come together at a point in time where we'll basically be able to show a really competitive and compelling roadmap that basically brings everything I've been talking about to stark relief. So I think, again, what we're really talking about is a transformational journey for the company that will take years to achieve.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  It's not just something a click of two fingers done within the transition of one product.

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  It's not how chip design works.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  It doesn't, no. You think of it today, it'll be in the market three to four years' time. So that's really what we're talking about. So when you talk about some of the, for example, I talked about a technology that we use in our advanced 3D packaging. It's called Foverus. It's going to be delivered in Lakefield. That was a research project for 10 years and it's how much work that needs to go into some of these technologies before they come to fruition. So a lot of the innovations we talk about have deep research precedence that needs to come to the fore to be able To fully exploit it. And I think I'm really excited by the arsenal of technology we have. And as we go through the continuums of our roadmap, hopefully it will come to come to light for all to see.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  The opposite argument is that one of the fabs can spend all that time and money investing in that stuff, researching that stuff for 10 years, and then they can sell it to a wide variety of clients, right? And that cost distribution that changes the nature of the worthwhile nature of that. That changes the nature of how much that investment is worth. Intel, you're going to put 10 years of investment into it, and you're your only client. Do you ever think about, hey, we should start doing some fab work for other companies?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. But I wouldn't discount that as a as a way we expand our relevance and our strategic scope going forward. But that won't mean we compromise what we need to do to deliver the design points we need for our products. So we see the foundry engagement being, you know, a strategic option that's interesting for us. But it will basically be integrated into a mindset where we won't compromise the design points that we need for our high-performance compute solutions. You know, the benefits of being an IDM is that you can focus the the optimization of your process technology to the products that you believe you can deliver disproportionate competitive advantage to.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  You're not really focusing on amassing so much volume that you define a process that is a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. So one of the things that the foundry is always challenged to is how do they design a process that is broad enough in applicability that they get as many customers as possible? And that basically means you have to have a fairly wide design point for that process, which basically says you're good at many things, but are you really brilliant at any one particular thing? Whereas in an IDM, with Intel's perspective, we can really dial in on the areas that really matter to us, which are high-performance compute, because we're not worrying about filling our fab full of, for example, low-power smartphone devices.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Now, there may come a point in time where we'll strategically broaden what we do to potentially service foundry opportunities, and we wouldn't discount that. I think where it makes strategic sense, we're very open-minded to that. But that has to come, that has to come at the right point in time, and that isn't today, but that might be sometime in the future.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've only got a few minutes left. I ask almost everybody this question. I'm very interested in how busy people actually expend their days. How is your team organized?

• 39:27Speaker 03

  So it's a pretty large team. It's about 65,000 people and about half of it is in our technology and manufacturing organization and the other half is in our engineering and product development organization. And it's an organization that is really run by people working very closely together in an environment where as a management team, we meet for a day a month for about a nine-hour kind of like review of all of our programs and all of our key technologies.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Is that where you make decisions or is that a bunch of slideshows?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  No, it's really a decision-making meeting that essentially the preceding month of work ultimately culminates in bringing all the issues that we need to sort out as a team and make sure we're on the right trajectory. But it's very much a scenario of how do you create a tight-knit leadership team with an organization that's very large and geographically dispersed. So it means building a lot of one-to-one relationships as well as team-oriented relationships. And it's the same paradigm that Bob Swan uses at the highest level. So really what I'm doing is just waterfalling a methodology that Bob has created within the executive leadership team and really using those same methods to promote that integrated leadership through the company.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  So you get to Intel, you listen, everybody says they listen first. I believe you listened. What was the first easy win you took off the board?

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Rationalizing what we were spending our money on. You know, when I came to Intel, we were spending a lot of money on the smartphone development programs. And really, you step back having come from Qualcomm and looking at the momentum and scale of operation that they have. And sometimes when you come in with that kind of like clear-eyed outside-in perspective, you can actually see that the challenge you've got ahead of you is a lot, lot stiffer than maybe the internal thinking had hitherto understood.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I came from there, like, don't do that.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's really a case of you can stand back and you can basically say, hey, listen, it's probably better to come. Cut our losses and just and just rationalize that this is not an area where where we're going to be able to come back in the final quarter and and pull off a victory and we should be spending our money on on wiser things like improving the performance of our of our PC platforms rather than continuing to try and make away of it in the smartphone area. So rationalizing that portfolio is something I did within the the first few months I was there and really make sure that we move forward. And it was tough, painful decisions, but ultimately, I think with the right business calls.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  What's the next easy win on the board?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Uh, it's to basically get back to a point where we're firing on all cylinders on our process technology. I think ten nanometers was a was a big hiccup for the company that we can't allow to be repeated again. So get the ten nanometer product volume rolling, delighting customers a little later than we had hoped for, but nonetheless out there delighting customers and make sure that seven nanometers follows rapidly behind it back towards this two-year clip we've talked about.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, last question. I'm gonna ask everybody this question in 2020. That's my my promise to myself. Here's here it is. When do you work, right? Because you're busy, you're you have to blow your time with me in in this podcast, you've got to go on stages, you got to plan ideas. When do you sit down and work?

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Uh, I kind of have a philosophy where, um, you know, I have a lot of interests outside of work that basically are also very, very important to me. I'm a huge sports fan. Uh, I I love my family, spend a lot of time with them. I'm a huge bookworm, love reading books, big classical music fan. Uh, and those things are important to me. And what I find is peak performance at work comes from basically getting work-life balance absolutely right. So in order to work hard, you have to relax hard. For me, it's all about intensity that when you're at work, you're really focused on the job at hand. And it's not about how long you put in, it's how how focused and how intense and how productive you are when you are at work. So for me, it's really a a scenario of, you know, from eight to six P M. It's it's all about it's all about intel.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  No, but tell me about eight to six P M. When do you read the white papers that your team generates? When do you do your email? Like, when are you alone with a computer doing work? Because I don't know when to do it. So my my goal is to ask everybody else and try to figure something out.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  So I kind of like, I kind of like, I get a lift into work every day. So I kind of like have 40 minutes where I kind of like read through my email as well as kind of like spend some time thinking about how I'm going to go through my day. The other thing is I try and, I try and run my meetings where no meeting lasts more than 50 minutes in the hour. I kind of like fail more than I succeed, but I do try and give myself those 10 minute times. And what I tend to do is I tend to never really sit at my laptop during the day because when I'm in a meeting, I'm in a meeting. Right? What I tend to do is kind of like graze on my phone in terms of anything absolutely mega urgent that needs my attention. And then anything else, I know, okay, that's, that's something I need to deal with.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  And then I kind of like batch process that either in the evenings or weekend catch-up times. You know, I love my work, so it's not like I feel like I'm sacrificing for it. So what I find is that when I'm at work, it's really about focus and it's about intensity. You keep an eye on things that make sure you don't miss anything urgent, but then you kind of like take an aggregate of what's in your inbox and then batch process it offline.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  You literally just described your own time management as a processor. I'm just letting you know that that's what, that's what your processors do. Okay. Dr. Murthy, thank you so much for joining us. I know you've got a hard hat. Thank you. I really appreciate your time.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Hey, my pleasure. Thank you for the time.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. My thanks to Hyam and Dr. Murthy Rendu Chintala from Intel. That was a great conversation. We'll be back later this week with the chat show, then the interview show on Tuesday as always. I love your feedback. You can tweet at reckless. Tell me who you want me to talk to. I love figuring out what guests I should have on the show and we'll talk to you soon.

• 45:54Speaker 08

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