Intel's second-in-command Venkata Renduchintala is feeling at home with his new company after he switched over from Qualcomm
Venkata Renduchintala is president of Intel's Client and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses and Systems Architecture Group.
Intel
is now more than just a PC company. At industry events, the company's
keynotes feature drones flying around, robots walking on stage and
musicians creating tunes from wearables. The chip maker is helping BMW
build an autonomous car, will sell modems to Apple, and is leading the
development of next-generation 5G cellular networks. For all these new
markets, it will provide chip and data-center technologies.
The
transformation is happening partly under the leadership of Venkata
Renduchintala, president of the Client and Internet of Things (IoT)
Businesses and Systems Architecture Group at Intel. As Intel's
second-in-command, he helped cut struggling products like mobile CPUs
and sharpened the company's focus on IoT, servers, and connectivity.
Hired
from rival Qualcomm late last year, he's an outsider trying to rid
Intel of its historical resistance to change. He's also bringing fresh
ideas and wholesale changes to Intel, which promises to bring a new
dynamic to the Silicon Valley institution.
IDG News Service spoke
with him on a range of topics including VR headsets, IoT, autonomous
cars, competitors and the decision to cut products. This is an edited
version of the discussion.
IDGNS: How have you settled into your new job? What drew you to Intel?
It's
been a really interesting process of acclimation. It's a great mixture
of feeling, like an organization where I think my experience and my
interests can really help the journey [CEO] Brian [Krzanich] wants to
undertake with the company. The scale at which Intel can play is
probably going to be very difficult for others to match if you look
across, client, networking and the data center groups. The goal is to be
able to think as one Intel.
IDGNS: There have been
questions on how you would fit into Intel, which has a closed culture
and history of promoting executives internally. Many people hired from
external companies haven't worked out.
One thing that's really
important to understand is that Intel is a company of tremendous
heritage. I'm not coming in to fix anything. I'm coming in hopefully to
add another dimension and an important ingredient to the management team
that Brian has at his disposal. It requires me to respect what Intel
has been able to achieve and the caliber of the management team and the
brands assimilated. I don't think Brian hired me to maintain the status
quo. I think what he wanted was a strong ingredient of outside-in
thinking complementing the original thoughts. I'm feeling very
comfortable now in being able to feel like I've got a good bunch of
colleagues who know where I'm coming from; we can speak straight to each
other and we can actually have really good discussions of meritocracy.
IDGNS:
You had to make some decisions on cutting products Intel has worked on
for years as the company's priorities were reset. How tough was it?
When
you come into a company you have a degree of objectivity that isn't
tainted by your attachments to the genesis of certain projects. For me
it was a fairly structured, objective discussion where you make
decisions in a transparent and open manner. As long as you can walk
people through your thinking, you can take what was very controversial
and make it very logical. I'm passionate about technology but I'm also
passionate about profitability and how the two are married in a
seamlessly reinforcing way.
IDGNS: What's the reasoning behind cutting mobile processors to focus on modems?
First
of all, we rationalized what we were spending our R&D on. We had a
couple of mobile SoC products that I don't think were worthy to continue
to conclusion. That doesn't mean to say we're no longer doing mobile
platforms. On the mobile platform side, my commitment is to talk less
and do more. When we have something to say we'll talk about it.
On
the modem side, it's a fundamental technology and this is where I think
it comes down to being as indelible for us as our competence in CPU or
GPU. We've set ourselves up with a very interesting road-map, but more
importantly, we've established a degree of credibility, relevance and
importance as a key technology partner with a number of key players in
the industry that I think is really important.
IDGNS: What are your top priorities and goals?
I
have three uber-level goals. One is to continue to drive our client
computing business to a position of stable profitability in the face of a
slowly declining [market]. I think we're doing well in that area. The
second is to grow and scale our IoT business from something that's very
interesting to something that's really substantial in the longer term.
The IoT business for us is a microcosm of the entire company coming
together -- we're creating a type of all-for-one, one-for-all mentality.
The third is to maintain a degree of vibrancy in the technology
leadership of our entire systems architecture organization. It's
developing all the core technologies that really moves the competitive
needle forward.
IDGNS: Intel's untethered mixed-reality
headset called Project Alloy was big news at IDF. What are the
expectations from Alloy and how are things going?
The whole point
of having tetherless VR is a big deal. Everything we're doing in Alloy
we're going to open-source. We can take VR and evolve it from the very
rudimentary definitions today of [VR] in a smart phone that you clip
into some kind of visor. You can move it to a capable, embedded PC
that's driving two to three teraflops of computing and generate a really
immersive experience. That was really it -- taking ideas out from the
lab, productizing them, solving all those problems of integration,
figuring out how RealSense and depth camera fits into all of that,
figuring out how to do merged reality, and saying "now go scale the
ecosystem."
IDGNS: Is the VR headset the new PC?
I
think it's another very interesting growth opportunity for the PC. I
think it can generate a specific class of products in its own right. It
will generate different segmentation points and probably a custom piece
of silicon built on the PC platform that amplify the use case. So we're
very excited about the whole VR space.
IDGNS: Intel hasn't
given up on Moore's Law, though many believe it is reaching its end.
How is Intel preparing for a future when manufacturing reaches atomic
scale, and how will chips look beyond Kaby Lake?
Nobody inside
Intel is coming anywhere near the kind-of-like fatalistic conclusions
about where Moore's Law is. Intel has had a stellar track record in
delivering node generation like clockwork. Maybe we've moved from a
two-year to a two-and-a-half-year cadence, but we already see light at
the end of the tunnel. We will continue to drive process technology and
nobody is calling timeout on anything. We're working hard on
7-nanometer, we're talking about pathfinding for 5-nanometer. All of
that is in the throes. We made a great announcement on Kaby Lake --
that's using an evolution of 14-nanometer transistor geometry that gave a
substantially improved user experience compared to Skylake. We're going
to continue to do more of that as we continue to drive process
leadership.
IDGNS: Are you happy with your current chip line-up -- Kaby Lake for PCs, and Atom for IoT?
We
have a competent portfolio of products. I'm in no way shape or form
concluding they are complete and aren't going to be benefited from
augmentation. For me I think it's really wanting to understand the use
cases a lot more. I don't see an IoT strategy for Intel being one where
everything is delivered by Intel. It's integrating a number of different
technologies that could be indigenous to Intel, or could be created by
other companies, but managed in a way where people could look at Intel
as somebody providing the overarching framework of integration.
IDGNS: IoT is a big part of Intel's future. What's the strategy for that market?
That's
a significant business. I think we're just starting. As you see the
advent of autonomous driving vehicles, you see robots and drones start
to ship in scale: those are very high value opportunities for us. We
characterize our IoT interests into three verticals: industrial,
transportation and retail -- all of them have an end-to-end dimension
where we're providing a client environment, the networking
infrastructure and the data analytics platform that drives all of that
through industry partnerships.
IDGNS: Would in any way the
ARM foundry deal help Intel achieve its goals in IoT and other areas?
Would you be open to the idea of taking an ARM CPU license, as an
example?
Open to? Yes. My view is fairly straightforward -- that
Intel's IoT plan has to not only be able to harmoniously integrate
Intel-based microprocessors and MCUs, it has to be able to aggregate and
harmoniously integrate a plethora of different types of MCUs, whether
it be ARM-based, MIPS-based, or proprietary MCUs. All of them have the
ability to monitor, sense data that they want to get on to an
information highway of some kind. Our ability to [support] many
different client environments is going to be a necessity in any vertical
IoT strategy we have. There are many areas in the ARM ecosystem where
Intel can pragmatically play in for its own benefit. I'm a big believer
in paying respect to established ecosystems.
IDGNS: Self-driving cars are a big deal for Intel. Could you talk about projects in the pipeline?
Our
goal is to provide the type of computing power that dwarfs anything
that exists in a car today, but basically make it mainstream. What we're
doing on our Xeon Phi processor for machine learning and deep learning,
what we're doing in computer vision and also supplemented by radar and
lidar. Being able to aggregate that data, generate intelligence, make
decisions on it with assistance from machine and deep learning
algorithms -- that's all happening as we speak.
IDGNS: How do you see the autonomous car market evolving?
I
see the first explosive area to be in the urban transportation
environment where services like Uber and Lyft will evolve and develop.
There's going to be a lot of experimentation and path-finding to do in
addition to technology creation. We're probably talking about a decade
away. Stamina to invest is going to be really important; those that
have the stamina to stay the course are going to win big.
IDGNS: Nvidia is approaching the automotive markets aggressively with its GPUs, how will you compete?
I
have a great deal of respect for Nvidia. But every time I think of
Nvidia, I think about Californian wine where they can make great wine
but it contains only one grape -- great Cabernet Sauvignon or a great
Chardonnay. I love French wines and French wines are blends where you
need to be great at growing Cabernet, great at growing Merlot, great at
growing Cabernet Franc. The art is in the mixture. That's the benefit
Intel has. We have GPU, we have CPU, we have custom silicon, we have
embedded storage, we have FPGA. Nvidia's going to basically say "I've
got GPUs and I've got GPUs and I've got GPUs." Great strategy, but it
doesn't give anywhere near the extensibility, flexibility and
scalability that Intel is able to offer.
IDGNS: How will 5G influence changes in the way devices are made and work?
5G
is as much about the transformation of the network and the
infrastructure as it is the client environment. [There is] going to be
an even greater demand from mobile broadband bandwidth, people are going
to want tens of gigabytes per second, if not hundreds of gigabytes per
second. We're going to see much greater pervasiveness of client devices.
If you talk about autonomous vehicles or delivering health services
over a mobile network, you need to be able to make life or death
decisions based on that. The network has to transform and the data
center becomes a much higher order entity that's focused on massive data
analytics that orchestrates that entire network.
