Transmeta (Semiconductor) (TMTA)

[weaksidehelp]

Vinod Dham: "high chip speeds of no use"

great find by fatspidr of Yahoo Board:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=15692115

The Times of India OnlinePrinted from timesofindia.indiatimes.com Infotech

Faster chips don't call the shots now: Vinod Dham

TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2002 10:04:06 PM ]
BANGALORE:

Vinod K Dham, the billionaire super-inventor of microprocessors, the father of the Pentium chip, whose demoniac speeds made PCs exciting to American homes of the 80s is not given to making hyperbolic statements. This time - the electrical engineer who in 1999 was named as one of the top 100 most influential Asian Americans of the decade makes a concession.

" The golden era of microprocessors is over. These extremely high speed chips are of no use to the average user. Most of the applications can do without such high speed chips. Users are begining to learn that instead of paying for chip performance, they would rather have other functional features like a larger monitor, more memory etc," Dham told this paper in an interview.
The 52-year-old scientist, who lives in the Silicon Valley, was in Bangalore to launch his VC firm, adds that Intel, the company for which he crafted the Pentium and perfected the 386 and 486 range of processors, has "hit a wall."

"Unless a new application emerges which needs massive power, their chip performance will idle. It's only in Intel's interest to sell these things as high-end necessities. The reality is that the world does not need it,"maintains Dham who worked for 16 years in the company before joining NexGen, a start up in 1995. Two years earlier, the scientist whose father came as a refugee from Rawalpindi, had been named as one of the top 25 executives in the computer industry in America.

Dham "redefined" NexGen's processor, making it Pentium compatible and commercially viable. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel's rival, excited by the Indian scientist's work acquired NexGen and then Dham created another splash with K6. Here was the world's fastest microprocessor and it was not by Intel.

"For the first and perhaps the last time you had another company which had scored over Intel," says Dham who was also the co-inventor of Intel's Flash memory technology. This helps in easy and fast information storage in devices like digital cameras, video games etc.

Everytime Dham crafted a breakthrough micro chip, he would dedicate it at the feet of a Lord Ganesh statute which rests on his work desk. Says Dham: "Sometimes I just cannot explain my fame. How did I manage to do it all especially when there were millions of brighter chaps around? I have no answers."