Intel Developing New Chip Designs in India

An anonymous person noted that "Intel Corporation, the $39-billion largest chip maker in the world, is developing new chip designs and processors at its India development centre to roll out the next generation of notebooks and servers, says a top company official."

Comments

The TFA is more accurate

[Gopal.V]

TFA clearly says

"is working on new chipsets for the small form-factor notebook ...Validation work on server processors 5300 and 7100"

As much as I'd love India to lose the cheap indian labour tag and actually find its place in the R&D world - this could be summed up as premature ejaculation. Validation work (aka quality assurance) is not really what I'd consider worthy of mention, but chipsets are indeed a step forward - if indeed they are being designed here, not merely run through QA.

People here are comparitively cheap, but that does not automatically mean that "You get what you pay for", unless you do shop around for a bargain.

Re:The TFA is more accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you work in C7?

I used to work in pre-silicon verification at Intel as well. There's a good reason senior engineers aren't doing the verification: because it's boring as hell! Maybe if you doubled their pay, you'd get them to do it, but Intel isn't going to do that when they can just farm the work out to cheaper places.

Writing test plans, coming up with test vectors, endlessly debugging stuff, etc. is horribly boring work. That's why validation engineers are usually young and inexperienced: to get a foot in the door. After they've put in their time in validation, they do what I did: get the hell out and do something more interesting.

What's more, validation is thankless work, and it's not terribly interesting. Most of the time, you're just putting together cheesy tools to attempt to improve validation efficiency, and then simply running endless tests. Then you have to go through all the test results, and find out why 20% of the tests failed (it's usually not because of a bug, but because of a problem with the validation environment and software). When you finally do debug something that looks like a bug, you can only dig so deep, because then you need to contact the RTL designer who actually designed the thing, because they're the only one who knows enough to fix it. So basically, you're just someone who identifies bugs and enters them into a bug database, and spends time running around talking to people about the bugs instead of actually fixing them (lemme tell you, I didn't get into engineering so I could spend all my time talking to people; if I liked that, I would have gone into marketing).

Have you noticed yet that there's no one over 35 years old in validation? Much to my surprise, I found out only when I left validation that it isn't because engineers all leave the profession before 35. It's because they leave validation and go into other groups! No one ever bothered to tell me this before, so I had a really skewed perspective while I was in validation.

Re:Is it really for cost savings?

[gEvil (beta)]

Those came from the Israel development center, not India.

Re:CPU design goals

[misleb]

It would be great if the new cheap were designed with operating systems and end users in mind.
There is a number of things that would be much better if the CPU supported some special instruction. Every OS class student has been tought this.

Such as? Users get the virtualization instruction and SSE3. Do you have more special instructions in mind?

-matthew

Re:A question many Intel USA Engs will soon be ask

[jejones]

Consider this: If you lose 7.5% of these jobs a year in ten years, 75% of them are gone.

Ummm...actually, you lose (1 - .925**n) * 100 percent after n years, so with n = 10, that's a hair over 54 percent.

Re:Is it really for cost savings?

[joe_bruin]

There's a simple answer, and it's not about white and brown.

Israel has a high standard of living in the ballpark of European and North American nations. Opening up a development plant in Israel, or Germany, or Ireland is not thought of as "outsourcing" because there is not a (significant) cost savings versus American employees, it's simply a matter of going to where the talent is. Outsourcing to India or China, on the other hand, is seen as a pure cost move because of those nations' considerable cost difference. While there may be many qualified Indians, the perception is always that America jobs were transitioned to India because of cost. People don't have that impression from jobs in Israel, because the view is that the jobs there are being done there because of short supply of talent in the US.

Re:India = Death of Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Underinform American,

1. India has as much political freedom we have here in the US. They had a woman prime-minister within the first 30 years. They have a Muslim President, a Sikh prime-minister and a Christian leader of the party in majority. Imagine that variety in the U.S. where religious fanatics are in many positions of power today.

2. India has some of the best schools and universities of higher education. Many of the world's top scientist, IT professionals, enterpreneurs and other professionals are Indians and educated there.

3. There is very good law and order in India. Yes, disastors like Katrina happen there too, but overall a thriving democracy takes care that people are listened to.

4. India has been a free country for only about 55 years now, and there do exist a lot of social problems causing the issues you mention. But it is making big strides in tackling the poverty. Also remember that it is a country of peace loving people, and it hasn't attacked 30 odd countries in the last 50 years like US did.

I love U.S. too, but let's be realistic before hating the others.