The Sale of the Chip Business Marks the New IBM Future

IBM Fishkill

In case you wondered about IBM completing the restructuring of its business, the company’s quiet announcement this week tells the tale. It unloaded a long critical part of the company, including its semiconductor factories in East Fishkill, N.Y., and outside Burlington, Vt., by paying GLOBALFOUNDRIES to take it off its hands for $1.5 billion.

Dumping the semiconductor is the latest step in IBM’s unloading its manufacturing activity in favor of a new world of cloud support. At this point, it is limited to manufacturing its Power systems and its Z-series mainframes — and it will no longer be manufacturing its own processors for them.

Once upon a time, the IBM microelectronics business changed the world by inventing chip-based memory that eliminated vastly expensive core memories. The impact was stunning. Paul Castrucci, one of the leaders of the development, said he once gave IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. the cost outlook: “You know, cores are 80 cents a bit. Maybe we’ll get this down to a penny a bit.” At that price, memory would cost $80 million a gigabit, while the going cost for a gigabit today is less than $2. No wonder the capacity of memory could quickly move from kilobytes to megabytes, gigabytes, and even terabytes.

IBM also created large storage capacity by creating the first disk drive, RAMAC (1958, with 5 mb of storage for $160,000). It also played a critical role in inventing the “Winchester” drive, the desktop and laptop hard drive. Like so many other inventions, IBM’s creations ended up as unprofitable players in commodity markets; IBM sold its drive business to Hitachi in 2002.

IBM has been a technology leader of processors, but the industry is dominated by the likes of Intel, Samsung, GLOBALFOUNDARIES, and TSMC, companies whose business depends on big volumes. IBM made an early stab at ruling the business through a partnership with Motorola and Apple in the PowerPC. It might have worked if Apple had beaten Microsoft, but instead Intel ended up with most of the market. Motorola dropped out and IBM, which was clearly losing interest, finally got out of 2005 when Apple moved the Mac to Intel. IBM went on making the Power processor for its own mid-range and up business computer.[pullquote]The death of IBM’s semiconductor effort is a sad event, but one long overdue. [/pullquote]

IBM also partnered with Sony and Toshiba to make the Cell processor, best known as the processor for the PS3 game console. But the PS4 was introduced in 2013 with a processor based on the x86 and designed by AMD. A chip similar to the Cell, the PowerXCell, continues with some specialized use, mainly in supercomputers, but it is a small market.

The death of IBM’s semiconductor effort is a sad event, but one long overdue. What can you say about the prospect for a business that is so bad you have to pay a competitor to take it off your hands? IBM continues to get out of commodity businesses, of which there aren’t many left, to focus efforts on high end services.

Some of IBM traditions go on. The company still is the dominant player in top end business computers and it makes many of the world’s supercomputers. IBM Research continues to be the world’s leading industrial scientific center. And while its efforts include support for many of the services that dominate IBM business, it still does basic work in scientific fields such as physics and materials research.

But the future of IBM’s business is services. The competition is hot, but so is the potential for growth and profits.

On the Impact of Paul Otellini’s CEO Years at Intel

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini is retiring in May 2013. His 40-year career at Intel now ending, it’s a timely opportunity to look at his impact on Intel.

Intel As Otellini Took Over

In September 2004 when it was announced that Paul Otellini would take over as CEO, Intel was #46 on the Fortune 100 list, and had ramped production to 1 million Pentium 4’s a week (today over a million processors a day). The year ended with revenues of $34.2 billion. Otellini, who joined Intel with a new MBA in 1974, had 30 years of experience at Intel.

The immediate challenges the company faced fell into four areas: technology, growth, competition, and finance:

Technology: Intel processor architecture had pushed more transistors clocking faster, generating more heat. The solution was to use the benefits of Moore’s Law to put more cores on each chip and run them at controllable — and eventually much reduced — voltages.

Growth: The PC market was 80% desktops and 20% notebooks in 2004 with the North America and Europe markets already mature. Intel had chip-making plants (aka fabs) coming online that were scaled to a continuing 20%-plus volume growth rate. Intel needed new markets.

Competition: AMD was ascendant, and a growing menace.  As Otellini was taking over, a market research firm reported AMD had over 52% market share at U.S. retail, and Intel had fallen to #2. Clearly, Intel needed to win with better products.

Finance: Revenue in 2004 recovered to beat 2000, the Internet bubble peak. Margins were in the low 50% range — good but inadequate to fund both robust growth and high returns to shareholders.

Where Intel Evolved Under Paul Otellini

Addressing these challenges, Otellini changed the Intel culture, setting higher expectations, and moving in many new directions to take the company and the industry forward. Let’s look at major changes at Intel in the past eight years in the four areas: technology, growth, competition, and finance:

Technology

Design for Manufacturing: Intel’s process technology in 2004 was at 90nm. To reliably achieve a new process node and architecture every two years, Intel introduced the Tick-Tock model, where odd years deliver a new architecture and even years deliver a new, smaller process node. The engineering and manufacturing fab teams work together to design microprocessors that can be manufactured in high volume with few defects. Other key accomplishments include High-K Metal Gate transistors at 45nm, 32nm products, 3D tri-gate transistors at 22nm, and a 50% reduction in wafer production time.

Multi-core technology: The multi-core Intel PC was born in 2006 in the Core 2 Duo. Now, Intel uses Intel Architecture (IA) as a technology lever for computing across small and tiny (Atom), average (Core and Xeon), and massive (Phi) workloads. There is a deliberate continuum across computing needs, all supported by a common IA and an industry of IA-compatible software tools and applications.

Performance per Watt: Otellini led Intel’s transformational technology initiative to deliver 10X more power-efficient processors. Lower processor power requirements allow innovative form factors in tablets and notebooks and are a home run in the data center. The power-efficiency initiative comes to maturity with the launch of the fourth generation of Core processors, codename Haswell, later this quarter. Power efficiency is critical to growth in mobile, discussed below.

Growth

When Otellini took over, the company focused on the chips it made, leaving the rest of the PC business to its ecosystem partners. Recent unit growth in these mature markets comes from greater focus on a broader range of customer’s computing needs, and in bringing leading technology to market rapidly and consistently. In so doing, the company gained market share in all the PC and data center product categories.

The company shifted marketing emphasis from the mature North America and Europe to emerging geographies, notably the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China. That formula accounted for a significant fraction of revenue growth over the past five years.

Intel’s future growth requires developing new opportunities for microprocessors:

Mobile: The early Atom processors introduced in late 2008 were designed for low-cost netbooks and nettops, not phones and tablets. Mobile was a market where the company had to reorganize, dig in, and catch up. The energy-efficiency that benefits Haswell, the communications silicon from the 2010 Infineon acquisition, and the forthcoming 14nm process in 2014 will finally allow the company to stand toe-to-toe with competitors Qualcomm, nVidia, and Samsung using the Atom brand. Mobile is a huge growth opportunity.

Software: The company acquired Wind River Systems, a specialist in real-time software in 2009, and McAfee in 2010. These added to Intel’s own developer tools business. Software services business accelerates customer time to market with new, Intel-based products. The company stepped up efforts in consumer device software, optimizing the operating systems for Google (Android), Microsoft (Windows), and Samsung (Tizen). Why? Consumer devices sell best when an integrated hardware/software/ecosystem like Apple’s iPhone exists.

Intelligent Systems: Specialized Atom systems on a chip (SoCs) with Wind River software and Infineon mobile communications radios are increasingly being designed into medical devices, factory machines, automobiles, and new product categories such as digital signage. While the global “embedded systems” market lacks the pizzazz of mobile, it is well north of $20 billion in size.

Competition

AMD today is a considerably reduced competitive threat, and Intel has gained back #1 market share in PCs, notebooks, and data center.

Growth into the mobile markets is opening a new set of competitors which all use the ARM chip architecture. Intel’s first hero products for mobile arrive later this year, and the battle will be on.

Financial

Intel has delivered solid, improved financial results to stakeholders under Otellini. With ever more efficient fabs, the company has improved gross margins. Free cash flow supports a dividend above 4%, a $5B stock buyback program, and a multi-year capital expense program targeted at building industry-leading fabs.

The changes in financial results are summarized in the table below, showing the year before Otellini took over as CEO through the end of 2012.

GAAP 2004 2012 Change
Revenue 34.2B 53.3B 55.8%
Operating Income 10.1B 14.6B 44.6%
Net Income 7.5B 11B 46.7%
EPS $1.16 $2.13 83.6%

 

The Paul Otellini Legacy

There will be books written about Paul Otellini and his eight years at the helm of Intel. A leader should be measured by the institution he or she leaves behind. I conclude those books will describe Intel in 2013 as excelling in managed innovation, systematic growth, and shrewd risk-taking:

Managed Innovation: Intel and other tech companies always are innovative. But Intel manages innovation among the best, on a repeatable schedule and with very high quality. That’s uncommon and exceedingly difficult to do with consistency. For example, the Tick-Tock model is a business school case study: churning out ground-breaking transistor technology, processors, and high-quality leading-edge manufacturing at a predictable, steady pace of engineering to volume manufacturing. This repeatable process is Intel’s crown jewel, and is a national asset.

Systematic Growth: Under Otellini, Intel made multi-billion dollar investments in each of the mobile, software, and intelligent systems markets. Most of the payback growth will come in the future, and will be worth tens of billions in ROI.

The company looks at the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for digital processors, decides what segments are most profitable now and in the near future, and develops capacity and go-to-market plans to capture top-three market share. TAM models are very common in the tech industry. But Intel is the only company constantly looking at the entire global TAM for processors and related silicon. With an IA computing continuum of products in place, plans to achieve more growth in all segments are realistic.

Shrewd Risk-Taking: The company is investing $35 billion in capital expenses for new chip-making plants and equipment, creating manufacturing flexibility, foundry opportunities, and demonstrating a commitment to keep at the forefront of chip-making technology. By winning the battle for cheaper and faster transistors, Intel ensures itself a large share of a growing pie while keeping competitors playing catch-up.

History and not analysts will grade the legacy of Paul Otellini as CEO at Intel. I am comfortable in predicting he will be well regarded.

Here’s to the NeXT 20 Years of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer

Saturday August 6th marked the 20 year anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first website. Whether he knew all that the web would become or not he still had the foresight to start the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to ensure that standards drove compatability. If it wasn’t for the W3C I am not sure the web as we know it today would exist.

Internet standards have been one of the central forces that got us to where we are today and will be one of the central driving forces that will get us where will go tomorrow.

Interestingly enough Berners-Lee published the first website on the World Wide Web using a NeXT Computer. For those not familiar with history NeXT was the company Steve Jobs founded after his departure from Apple. That same NeXT computer that Berners-Lee used also became the worlds first web server.

I say I find that interesting because here we have yet again another Steve Jobs creation involved in a monumental moment in our industries history.

The World Wide Web has changed quite a bit in 20 years but I believe the web will change in the next five years more than it has in the last 20. Several things will drive this change and the first will be new advancements in semiconductors.

Silicon Advancements Will Lead the Way
We can track a great deal of technological progress to the microprocessor; it again will be at the heart of the next generation web.

At a fundamental level with each new process technology we are able to pack more transistors onto a single piece of silicon. This is key because the more transistors on a single chip the more that chip can do. The more that chip can do the more the hardware and software community can take advantage of its power and efficiency.

I’ve heard a great quote from time to time and it goes like this: “a software engineer will never tell you that we have enough microprocessing power.” Basically if we build it the software community will take advantage of it.

When I analyze the long term roadmaps from both X86 providers and the ARM community, I am convinced that not just local software like operating systems and applications but web software and web apps will all be transformed.

What we are seeing today from visual computing, speech and voice processing, graphics and media is still only scratching the surface. Next generation silicon is what will make next generation software possible.

Don’t Forget About Web Standards
Standards are the second thing that I believe will drive the future innovations of web software. The bottom line is HTML and JavaScript are some of the most, if not THE most, important programming languages for our future.

The comittee’s that drive these standards and the companies who help define them play a critical role in establishing the technical vision for the future of the web.

As I said near the beginning of this article that without the web standards we woudln’t have the web today. Had we not had standards the web, like many other technologies, would have fragmented and cross platform compatability may have never happened. Could you imagine if each company had their own version of the web and only their hardware could access their version of the Internet? That is why standards were key to the early web and will be key to the future web.

The Invisible Internet
Still today in the consciousness of many is the concept of getting ” on the Internet.” We are getting close to a world where the Internet is invisible but we are not quite there yet. Someday this consciousness about being “online” will dissappear and there will be no online or offline.

The Internet will be so deeply embedded into nearly everything that we will interact with it on any number of levels and we won’t even think about it. Crazy and somewhat scary to think about now but I believe it’s true.

We have a long way to go with a tremendous amount of innovation still ahead of us. I am also interested in which companies will be the leaders in bringing us the future web. To the point about NeXT being involved in the first web page, i’m willing to bet a Steve Jobs creation will be in the mix with the future web as well.

I for one am excited to see what the next 20 years has in store for the world. In closing I leave you with a great info graphic on the history of the World Wide Web.

Click here to see the full image.

2012: A Year of Innovation?

One of the things I look at in order to get an idea of what the next years worth of innovations will bring is the semiconductor industry. Given what I am seeing from the various ARM vendors like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Marvell and TI as well as from Intel and AMD, I am encouraged.

The primary industry that stands to gain from new semiconductor innovations is the mobile industry. Namely the hot category of tablets and smart phones. That is not to say that the PC will be left out, for example Intel brought attention to the concept of “Ultra-Books” at this years Computex.
Continue reading 2012: A Year of Innovation?