Meet the People Who Make Your World

After ten years of conducting interviews with many of the greatest innovators in modern technology, I'm proud to offer these discussions as no one has ever seen them before. When these talks first appeared in CPU magazine, they had to be sliced down for space. But now, thanks to ebooks, I've been able to go back to the source material and replace the gems and fascinating tangents that were formerly lost. Moreover, most interviewees have generously contributed follow-up discussions.

These people aren't locked in the past. They're still here, still changing the world, and (usually) still giving us glimpses showing that the best is yet to come. I'll share some great passages from the "Architects of Tomorrow" series below. If you like what you see, grab the complete books here:


Good reading, and prepare to be inspired!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Intel's Burns Saw 7 Years Into the Future

One of the factors that has made Intel the undisputed leader of computing processors is its ability to think long-term, see the future it wants, and then make that future happen. Sometimes, things don't go according to plan. (The names "RDRAM" and "Opteron" come to mind.) But overall, the chip titan has done extraordinarily well at charting its own destiny. I was reminded of this by a particularly prescient passage from my 2004 interview with Louis Burns, then Vice President of Intel's Desktop Platform Group, in which he already knew which way the living room computing winds would blow. Keep in mind that there's an Intel processor at the heart of the first-ever Sony smart TV launched late in 2010.


CPU: We’ve argued in CPU’s pages whether the future of PVRs and convergence in general would hinge on multiple PCs in the home or one uber-PC connected to a number of clients, such as set-tops and media players. What do you think?

Burns: You’ll actually have both. On a worldwide basis, I can see a house where there’s an EPC [entertainment PC] in the living room and that’s the only PC. In a dorm room, that would be a good play, or a small apartment in Korea. In a big house, there could be a really nice PC in the office or den, and over back in the family room, there’s a smart TV which sources information from the den box, and then some of the bedrooms have their own PCs. There’s this very cool product out that we call a MyRoom PC. It’s a Gateway 610 [Gateway 610 Media Center PC; MSRP starts at $1,499.99] that we designed from the ground up inside of Intel, including the industrial design aspects of it. It looks like a 17-inch flat screen TV that’s got a great quality sound system built into it. It’s a full media center PC with wireless keyboard and mouse. This is a really cool device because it was designed with a convergence of CE stuff and PC stuff. You can visualize that living in a bedroom. So I can see the one PC and a bunch of devices or I can see lots of PCs and fewer devices, and there’ll be combinations in between.

One of the things that we’re working on really hard is that when you take these devices out of the box at home and plug them into the wall, they should self-identify themselves and say, “Hey, I’m an entertainment PC and I speak this or that standard.” Then it looks for other devices, like that smart Sony TV you bought, which is saying the same kinds of things. They start to identify themselves to each other and the network self-configures. One way of looking at this is if people have to roll a truck to do the installs or if people have to have an IT expert, whether that’s a neighbor or relative, then we’ve failed. It has to be that simple. The 610 from Gateway is a great example of out of the box, up and running, in less than five minutes. And no wires, because wires are just a pain in the ass.

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