Google, Apple, or a smart startup could disrupt Intel, which increasingly looks awkwardly poised as the world’s largest maker of microprocessors.
That’s the view of Dave Ditzel, a veteran microprocessor designer. I talked to him about the microprocessor landscape after an interview for his upcoming paper at Hot Chips.
Ditzel led Sparc designs at the former Sun Microsystems before founding his own startup, Transmeta, that designed an x86-compatible chip. Most recently, he spent a little time at Intel on a microprocessor design that apparently got the axe from Brian Krzanich, Intel’s new CEO. So he’s been around the block and has something of an underdog’s perspective.
Google may undermine Intel’s x86 in servers with its work with IBM on the OpenPower Consortium, Ditzel said, and he makes a good case. The search company could probably save a lot of money and maybe even gain some performance/watt advantages if it could come up with a custom Power design for its data centers.
We know from seeing job reqs that Google has been hiring circuit designers and other kinds of chip engineers. Google’s head of data center server technology leads the OpenPower group and has shown custom Power board designs.
I’m skeptical because I know Google tries everything and has the cash to do it. Nevertheless, Ditzel helped me see it also has the motive to make something real here that could deprive Intel of many hundreds of thousands of Xeon sales a year.
If Google gets something working, it might motivate Amazon, Facebook, and other big data center companies to follow. These folks represent 20% of the server business — the hungry 20%.
Apple could put one of its next-generation A-series SoCs in a MacBook Air in the not-too-distant future, Ditzel said. Once it got the SoC up and running on its full Mac OS, it could easily spread use of the chip to other Mac notebooks and eventually desktops.
That’s not a game changer for Intel, but it’s another loss of x86 sockets and part of a scenario of death by a thousand cuts.
Finally, Ditzel said there’s ample opportunity for a startup to do something really kick butt in microprocessors these days.
