Global chipmaker Intel Corporation is developing a new generation of silicon wafers to make your everyday life simpler.
Looking beyond the world of enterprises and businesses, Intel geeks are working on novel architectures that will make processors with billions of transistors to handle your daily chores, be it personal or professional.
"The next generation of our embedded chips will have a gamut of applications that will take care of our day-to-day activities at home, office or while travelling. Their functions will be richer than what modern multi-gadgets and consumer durables are doing for us at the individual or collective level," Intel South Asia Managing Director Ramamurthy Sivakumar said on "the next wave of silicon technology" at an industry-media conclave in Jaipur.
Highlighting the benefits of convergence of information and communication technologies (ICT) and their multifarious applications in a flat world, Sivakumar said each individual would be a potential customer for the trillion-dollar global ICT industry, as enterprises and businesses have been over the decades.
"We are already witnessing how the mobile revolution is impacting even a commoner and how the power of computing is creating new communities through the worldwide web (WWW) and wireless devices.
For instance, the phenomenal growth of YouTube hosting over 100 million videos a day, Yahoo getting about three billion page views a day and billions logging on to the Internet daily for information, search, chat, mail, games and entertainment indicate how individuals are becoming customers for the ICT industry in a globalised economy," Sivakumar pointed out.
With technology, business proposition and user value as the new mantras, the $39 billion Intel's research and development (R&D) labs worldwide are designing new platforms on which software mounted chips will be able to undertake perfect vision correction, provide instant translation of voice, text and data from one to other or many languages and enable speech recognition.
"As innovation has to touch every aspect of life, it cannot be limited to technology, but should have business value with universal benefit to end-users. Apple's iPod and iPhone are examples of the new mantra.
On the personal front, the next generation chips will be able to take over the activities of daily life such as house-keeping, cooking, washing, shopping and even driving advanced autopilot cars, akin to flying modern aircraft with fly-by-wire and remote-control systems," he said.
"In line with the Moore's law, which has held us in good stead even three decades after it was laid down by our co-founder, we see the power of computing doubling every 18-24 months for another two-three decades, as the next wave of silicon transistors will become part of our existence, implanted in the body or head to monitor health, dietary habits and behaviour," Sivakumar hinted.
Underlining the significance of accessibility and affordability of technology, Sivakumar said while competition and volume growth would make products cheaper, the challenge for all stakeholders would be to bring down operational and maintenance costs to ensure higher performance with lesser power consumption.
"The emergence of wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Wi-Max along with mobile Internet devices (MIDs) will make access to products and services not only easier but also affordable, as ICT becomes an integral part of life from individual to enterprise level on a global scale," Sivakumar said.
