PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. (02/15/2000) - Kicking off the Intel Developer Conference here today, Intel Corp. Chairman Andrew Grove wowed the crowd with the demonstration of a 1.5GHz chip while expounding on the Internet's effect on business.
With much talk within the industry about which microprocessor manufacturer would be first out with a 1GHz chip, Grove brought on stage Albert Yu, Intel's head of research, to trump competitors with the 1.5GHz chip code-named Willamette.
Yu, waiting until the applause died down, told the audience that the demonstration was just "first silicon" and was not yet shipping. However, Willamette, a 32-bit processor that the company has been working on since 1994, will ship by the end of the year.
The major theme of Grove's speech focused on the effect of the Internet on both technology as well as business strategies. Grove brought on stage senior executives from companies whose businesses are based on high-speed performance across the World Wide Web.
Larry Page, CEO of Google, a company that sells its Internet search engine, told the audience that the company has grown from two computers a year and a half ago to 2,400 computers now and is adding 30 computers per day.
Page said he would like to see the entire Web put in RAM for better performance. When Grove seemed incredulous Page countered.
"It's only a couple of terabytes of memory," said Page.
Grove and the audience laughed.
Grove hammered mainly on what he called the Power of Ten, the exponential growth in the flow of bits brought on by information retrieval and e-commerce.
Grove said e-commerce, which is today a $400 billion business, will in about four years be a $7 trillion dollar business.
However, if there was any doubt about what was really on Grove's mind, an on-stage encounter with Sam Prather, a senior vice president at CommerceOne Inc., laid it to rest.
The executive told Grove that CommerceOne measures performance by number of purchase orders processed per hour. CommerceOne uses a four-way Xeon-based system to process 10,000 POs per hour and noted that the average American company processes a couple of hundred thousand purchase orders per year.
Grove's response was lightning fast. "I've multiplied that out and it doesn't look like a big enough market for Xeons," he said.
Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., is at www.intel.com.