Intel and AMD Think Outside the Box

Everyone in Washington DC is indoors today because of the season’s first snow, or venturing only within an easy snow-shovel’s carry from the front door. DC always comes to a near-halt with even a dusting of snow, so with a foot or more last night and today, folks are immobile.  Here are my photos of our snow fun today, and below to entertain the snowbound I have three separate videos of innovation from Intel, Microsoft, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Microsoft gives Intel a ride

For once, Intel shares space on a Microsoft bus, and not the other way around. (For the more typical arrangement, see Wikipedia’s straightforward history of the Wintel platform, still “the dominant desktop and laptop computer architecture”).

I’ve been following some of the output from this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, and noticed this very cute paragraph from the always interesting blog by Intel’s VP for Corporate Social Responsibility, Will Swope:

Earlier today I had just 12 minutes to get from a hotel on the “far end” of Davos back to the conference center. The session I was exiting had been organized by the World Economic Forum, so they organized vans to assure that the participants could get back to the main conference center. I was on the phone when I walked outside (feeble excuse for what I’m about to write), saw the van, and climbed in. At that time, Craig Mundie turned to me and said, “Will, this is the Microsoft shuttle.” He was quite gracious, would not let me leave, made room, and they gave me a ride to the center. Embarrassing…geez, you think?

Will, that’s not embarrassing!  But it does show that Craig Mundie’s a mensch.  Don’t know how to be a mensch? Guy Kawasaki can help you out.

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My other computer is a Cray

Fact: The annual ACM Gordon Bell Prize is about to be awarded at “SuperComputing 08” (or SC08) which takes place November 15-21 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas. The convention is “the” international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. The Association for Computing Machinery makes the Bell award “to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing,” in honor of Microsoft’s legendary Gordon Bell, one of the pioneers of supercomputing.

Required Reading on Innovation and Patents

FACT:  If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s tremendous books (“The Tipping Point” and “Blink“), then you probably read the New Yorker magazine just to get his articles.  He has a new piece this week, “In the Air: Who Says Big Ideas are Rare?” in which he describes the phenomenally appealing work of the legendary Nathan Myhrvold and his current gig running “Intellectual Ventures,” often mistaken for a VC firm.  Gladwell recounts the facts that Myhrvold “graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions.”  It is what he’s done since then that grabs the mind, particularly if you’re interested in invention and innovation:

Punk Rock & Moore’s Law

Fact: Intel’s CEO says “We have new processors that have 250 million more transistors, and yet are 25 percent smaller than today’s version and don’t require more electricity to run.” (Interview published 2/1/2008 )

Analysis: Moore’s Law: immortal, or destined to be broken?  Punk Rock: dead, or in revival?  And why were Johnny Rotten and one of the legendary Traitorous Eight in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on the same night back in 1989?

Once-and-future Sex Pistol John Lydon (Rotten) was there after playing a gig up the road, and I happened upon him in the bar, where he proceeded to buy round after round of Heinekens for me, him, and his roadies. He latched onto me because he wanted to talk about American politics, and to his delight I reminded him of some caustic things (surprise) he had had to say over the years about politicians like Reagan and Carter. That just got him started, and we wound up laughing pretty drunkenly into the night in the Fairmont’s swanky lobby bar.

But earlier that evening, I had shown up at the hotel with friends to attend the Silicon Valley Business Hall of Fame dinner, where Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, was being honored along with others….