Question

“Intel Centrino in 2007: A New “Platform” Strategy for Growth” discusses an extremely important strategic and organizational change for Intel by the creation of Centrino. The development of Centrino was part of Intel’s right hand turn toward different performance measures. It required the company to alter its strategy away from optimizing only on clock speed as the performance method for discrete processors, toward interrelated features that sought to balance features including reduced power consumption and wireless communications. This strategic shift, together with the introduction of new multi-core architectures, fundamentally changed the company’s definition of success for the future.

Regarding the “Intel Centrino in 2007: A New “Platform” Strategy for Growth”, answer the following

QUESTIONS:

1. What was the role of IDC as a geographically peripheral center of competence at Intel?

2. What were the external and internal forces that gave rise to the Banias process project in Israel?

Answer 1

1.
The first IDC of Intel at haifa was established in the year 1974. Along with Haifa there are branches in other cities like Yakum,Petach tikav and Jerusalem.
At IDC about 60% of the employees are engaged in cutting edge R&D activity and the remaining in the manufacture of micro-processors, which power the computing devices.
As a 'geographical peripheral center' it is the largest development center outside the US, with nearly 10,000 employees.
Many of the Intels high performance processors come from the Haifa development center, specifically the 6th gen processors and the 7nth gen processors.
The team develops new processors which are fastest and strongest. Evey year computing power is increased by a rate of 10% from the teams at IDC. Specifically the big core improvements in physical design,architecture,connectivity, energy efficency ,hardware and security security are driven from IDC.
IDC plays a core role in driving Intel to the next generation of cutting edge computing that is both fast and energy efficient.

2.

The first Intel product from Israel was Banias, know as Pentium M micro processor. Introduced in 2003, banias started the note book era. Also the processor is energy efficient.

External forces that gave rise to Banias project
a) Severe competition from AMD, Intel wanted to have a competitive advantage other than speed of the processor. This would differentiate Intel products in the market and thus ensure more sales.
b) Increased awareness among customers for low energy consuming processor. Banias chip design is aimed at improving performance of chips and their energy efficency, thus catering to the new demands of the consumers.
c)To maintain competitive edge in processor market other than speed. The other features are security,connectivity, energy consumption etc.

Internal forces that gave rise to Banias project
a) The IDC team had experience in working on earlier projects which were aimed at energy conservation. But the earlier projects did not make it to production line. This expertise of the team was tapped and Banias project was initiated.
b) The IDC team was also working on increasing performance of Pentium 3 processors and had prior exposure in the fiels as well.