The manufacturing techniques in the silicon world will nonetheless work to reduce costs. Currently, many optical components are customised and can be difficult to manufacture, as opposed to computer processors, which can be mass manufactured once the design is worked out. With integration, optical equipment that costs $10,000 now will sell for less than $1,000 in a few years, Gelsinger said. Merging communications with computing will also help Intel from a business standpoint because it will essentially allow the company to use its existing resources to colonise new markets. The company, in fact, has already begun to move high-end communications projects in-house. Currently, Taiwan's TSMC manufactures many Intel communications chips because these chips originally came from companies Intel acquired. However, Sean Maloney, general manager of Intel's Communications Group, said this week that many of the newer chips will be made on Intel's 130-nanometer manufacturing processes. Research between the two fields overlaps, cutting costs again, Gelsinger said. Many of the compiler and tuning technologies used on Pentium processors, for instance, also work, with some adjustment, on the XScale line, the core chip architecture of the communications line. Along with expanding the scope and direction of its research, Intel continues to expand its reach in the scientific world. Along with conducting experiments at its own research labs, the company performs research at Intel-funded "lablets" associated with the University of Washington; the University of California, Berkeley; and Carnegie Mellon University, and funds a number of other projects through grants. Increasingly, an incremental amount of the company's research projects will migrate overseas. The company's research grants "are too heavily biased in the US today," Gelsinger said during the interview. "The US graduates about 50 percent of what US industry needs." Foreign engineers also need jobs. When the company opened offices in Nizhny-Novgorod, Russia, it received approximately 100 applications for every position. "We hired strongly qualified applicants with PhD.s for about one-fifth (the cost of their U.S. counterparts)," Gelsinger said.
See Chips Central for the latest headlines on processors and semiconductors.
For further coverage of upcoming UK and international events go to ZDNet UK's Events channel.
Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Go to the Chips Central Forum.
Let the Chips Central editor know what you think by email. And sign up for the weekly Chips Central newsletter.
