Intel plans to beat processor glut by selling more chips

Call me skeptical, but I’m, well, skeptical of Intel’s plans to beat the processor glut by selling more processors.

In fairness, Intel CEO Paul Otellini is a) much smarter than me and b) arguing that even in a glut people will buy the top chip. Maybe.

I think a really strong reason to buy more CPU power is that the apps people need to run to do their jobs need that extra power. What I’m seeing on the desktop market right now is that the latest rev of M$oft’s OS does in fact need more CPU power…but not for apps. It needs that power for fancy UI tricks.

Will this really motivate the market-driving corporate buyers to shell out for upgraded hardware? Don’t know, but here are some quotes from the Computerworld article:

“We’re doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented, and then stopped doing after Pentium 4. Shame on us,” Otellini said. “We fell off it — mea culpa, we screwed up — and now we’re back on that pace.”

The company has announced a pace of upgrading its processor architecture and shrinking its transistor geometry in alternating years. That puts Intel on schedule to upgrade its 65-nanometer Core 2 Duo processor to a “Penryn” 45nm geometry chip in 2007. The following year, Intel will upgrade its Core microarchitecture to the new “Nehalem” model and in 2009 shrink those chips to an even smaller, 32nm scale.

“People won’t upgrade the OS on the machine; they will buy it on a new machine when they need to do that. I think people will like Vista as they play with it — it’s nicer and prettier. For those who use Macs, it’s closer to the Mac than we’ve seen for a long time.”

So why not, umm, buy a Mac? Otellini doesn’t care: Macs use his processors too.