For years Intel has had its Developer Forum to showcase its latest techniques to a select audience. During those IDF meetings, roadmaps, product introductions and future music were shown, but after the canceled of the last IDF in 2017 Intel was looking for a new way to inform us. In 2018, the first Intel Architecture Day was organized for this purpose, and it promptly did not take place in 2019. This year, Intel Architecture Day, albeit in virtual form, is back again and Intel had plenty to say.
The company has been working on a large-scale transformation for a long time, from a primary chip maker to a ‘technology enabler’. This of course has everything to do with the fact that the golden age of Dennard scaling, say the simplest form of Moore’s Law, has not been possible for years and also the simple complication of chips, with more transistors, larger monoliths. dies and more cores, can no longer deliver the performance gains and energy savings that are needed.
Intel is therefore taking a completely different approach, which is not unique, by profiling itself as a software-first company that devises hardware solutions for workloads, instead of the other way around. We see such a kind of holistic approach to the industry in more areas, because simply throwing a mountain of computing power against a problem is not enough, especially given the growth in data and energy consumption of the IT industry. We have already seen a similar approach promoted by the imec research institute: a co-design process of hardware and software is necessary to meet the increasing demand for compute.
Intel has defined six pillars to support the company in its transformation to continue to make a relevant contribution in the coming decade and beyond. Those pillars are software, security, interconnect, memory, xpu architecture and process and packaging. We take a look at those six pillars, as presented by Intel’s Raja Koduri and many other engineers, discussing some in more detail than others.
