Interview: Intel’s Richard Huddy

THE GRAPHICS CARD MARKET

Over recent years the graphics card market has been flooded with endless models from both AMD and Nvidia, with a huge gulf in performance between the top and the bottom. It’s something that Huddy believes makes things complicated for consumers and Intel’s goal is to “make the low-end discrete graphics cards pretty close to obsolete”.

Intel’s method of doing this is to integrate the graphics onto the CPU, providing decent gaming in one package. It’s something the company is completely focussed on, having ditched plans to try anything else.

“At one point we were looking at a discrete card, but now we’re putting a lot of effort going down the alternate GPU route [an integrated GPU on the CPU] and the discrete card has gone away as an aim now,” said Huddy. “This year it really doesn’t make sense for a $50 or $60 card, as the graphics are so powerful in Ivy Bridge.”

INTEGRATION

It’s the integration of graphics and CPU that plays to Intel’s strengths, but the company also believes that this combination gives it a competitive advantage.

“Sharing memory bus and cache gives an advantage that discrete cards can’t give. CPU to GPU transfers here are very fast, and you may only get 10 per cent of that with discrete cards,” said Huddy. “There’s no doubt that our CPUs are best in the world, tightly coupling that with quality GPU is really a big step forwards.”

Intel has, in recent times, also changed its approach to integrated graphics, making them more important, as Huddy explained: “We used to take a small amount of die space for the GPU, we’re now asking how much die space does the GPU need?”

Intel has put more effort and emphasis on graphics, giving the GPU more space on the die

A GPU isn’t just important for games and its architecture makes it useful for other tasks, such as video editing, where certain tasks can be offloaded from the processor. Using the GPU for other tasks is something that Intel is very keen on.

“It’s a big deal to us, and Intel has Quick Sync Video [hardware and video decoding technology],” said Huddy. “We’ve moved away from the idea that pure x86 is best for everything. Video processing has special needs that don’t fit with this view.”

This change in view about the x86 architecture is an important one for Intel, as it opens the company up to new ideas and can make tasks faster. Huddy explains that sometimes the old way of doing things, such as increasing clock speed to get a faster processor, can cause problems: “Sometimes just pushing clock speed actually reduces performance, as you’re just heating up the PC.”

FIXED FUNCTIONS

Creating technology such as QuickSync for hardware video encoding and decoding is called fixed-function technology, as it’s designed to do one job. Adding more fixed function technology to its chips is something that Intel is looking at more and more.

“We fit in more fixed-function hardware to run specific tasks at high speed,” said Huddy. “We’re looking at integrating more and more fixed function hardware.”

This kind of fixed-function technology has become more and more important, culminating in Intel’s new tablet processors, which have more integration than ever seen before.

“We have chips so that everything Microsoft wants exposed on Windows 8 is exposed,” said Huddy.

Huddy was also keen to point out the advantages of its processors on Windows 8 tablets, as they’ll let “all x86 applications” run. By contrast, as Huddy explained, “It’s rather different from the ARM version, where it’s not clear what will run.”