...in a factory that caused these issues and I don't think it was because they were pushing the envelope. It was just something that happened and it could have happened with a less efficient technology.
But to ignore the output side of it — the "how much power do I need?" side — is crazy, so we've done a couple of very simple things. In the last two years, we've moved the industry from 65 percent efficiency in power supplies to 95 percent efficiency. It used to be that those power supplies in a PC — particularly a desktop — were wasting 35 percent of the power. It was just going as heat. We've also worked with the notebook industry and as of the Core 2 Duo platform — this year's platform — we've reduced power taken by the screens by 40 percent by using ambient light sensors.
The third thing is we reduce the power taken by the chipset, the memory and the processor by intelligently turning off parts of the device so it uses less power. A final part has to be collaboration with the software industry. There are a lot of really dumb things that happen today. You have everything from the operating system to applications pulsing the hard disk every 30 seconds or so, which kills your battery. It's not that you need the hard disk, it just goes "are you there?" So you've got to holistically look at designing for power efficiency, because the idea isn't to ultimately have a cap on the amount of power, it's to get the most out of it.
The [revised] Energy Star standards are a big improvement in setting energy standards for consumption, but one of the things they do is they say is: "OK, here's the limit of how many watts you can take in sleep state". The problem with that is, if you added 1W or 2W to sleep state it may be able to be woken up by a remote call, and that means you could put it in sleep state for six hours more a day, so it would drop down to 6W from 60W for six hours, instead of saving 2W at the low end. So you've got to be intelligent in designing this. You don't want it to leave it on, you want it to go to sleep and then wake up.
Why did Intel shut down its Cambridge labs?
Basically we went through a structure and efficiency taskforce — looking at everything from how we build product to how we design product to how we deliver product — the whole environment. It's always hard with anything that involves having people leave, it's difficult — but we put a great deal of forethought into the right structure. We were getting too fragmented in the physical location of our research, so the overhead of communicating between research teams was getting too high — we were trying to move to smaller numbers.
How would you rate the UK as an environment for research and development?
The UK is still generating good ideas and that's seen in the number of investments we've made in the UK. That's because they've got some very cool ideas that are coming from smart people, and the openness in the UK to [talent from] Europe, for example, has helped that, in that it's allowed a free flow of ideas and allowed it to attract the best and the brightest.
The concern point is the poor results in maintaining technical education in the UK. There's an almost deliberate streaming by the schools out of mathematics and sciences based on the fact that those are harder subjects so if you want to the right league tables you'd better only have the good people in it. And sometimes people deliver at a different level.
I think deliberately encouraging people to stay in the sciences is absolutely critical for the long-term success of the society, because they are the people that are ultimately going to create wealth. I think this is something that the government recognises and they have made some steps towards fixing, but it has to be a major priority for the government to continue to focus on how we keep people in the sciences.
How is your antitrust case with the EU [accusing Intel of trying to limit AMD's market share] going?
We continue to co-operate with any inquiries we are getting. We continue to be confident that we act very much within the law. We train our people incessantly to ensure that that's the case and we act appropriately and I think that's been vindicated over the years. We are a company that has had, at times, market positions but has not been abusing them. I could point to a long history of open standards that we've supported. We have clearly supported that openness where other people could use those standards and compete with good products.
So what is your take on AMD at the moment?
AMD is a company that is developing reasonable products and I think has improved its management in the last few years and we respect them as a competitor. I think, though, the challenge for them is moving towards a platform mentality that takes holistically the whole ecosystem of software and innovates at that level. That clearly is our approach and we are quite happy with the way that's moved, but we expect competition.
