Mr Maloney: Businesses today are using algorithms to accelerate competition.

Mr Sean Maloney, Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation, shared his views on the processor-based economy of the future at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s Distinguished Infocomm Speaker series recently. The following are some excerpts from his keynote:

The Singapore connection
Intel has always had a fascination with Singapore and a respect for the way Singapore is organised and focused on the use of knowledge for competitive advantage. The last time I was here during the dotcom bust, there was international skepticism that Singapore would recover from the downturn. That’s not what has happened. Now we see a thriving economy, a society that has always realised the importance of knowledge and the manipulation of knowledge in order to make an impact.

Algorithms and the transistor revolution
The primary use of the transistor is for the construction and deployment of the Internet. It is behind all the servers that power the Internet and the algorithms that power the economy. Businesses today are using algorithms to accelerate competition. They are abstracting real world processes and coming up with algorithmic renditions of those processes. We see this in the financial services sector, in oil and gas exploration. Today’s economic competition is now based around this. In advertising, for example, you have PageRank that tracks the number of webpage hits which enable advertisers to measure the reach and effectiveness of the online ad. Google’s US$150 billion algorithm is also leading a reconstruction of the advertising, print and publishing industry.

Revolutionising the financial services
In 1992, the financial services sector was still using techniques that would be familiar to Charles Dickens. But in the past 15 years, it has evolved rapidly with computerisation and the deployment of massive arrays of computers. The financial services sector is now delivering many services over the Internet. In 2003, about 20 per cent of trade on the New York Stock Exchange was on the Internet. In 2006, this was 80 per cent. We now have the ability to manipulate trade in very, very small amounts of time – nanoseconds can now make a difference.

Revolutionising oil and gas exploration
The biggest part of oil and gas exploration is the computation. All the easy oil and gas is gone. It is now buried in the depths and companies require computing power to locate these resources. We need more time to process data than to trawl for data.

Revolutionising entertainment
When it comes to entertainment, consumers want to have what they want, whenever they want it, on whatever device. For a weather gauge on how the entertainment industry is doing, look at iTunes. A year ago, it was mainly music and podcasts. Now it is also about TV and movies. The winner in entertainment will be the company that can deliver the different types of content to different devices. This calls for massive computing power in the distribution of the content.

Revolutionising healthcare
The goal in healthcare is to be able to come up with effective drugs. It’s not possible to do that with just people in white coats anymore. Now you need a state-of-the-art computer grid. Today, we are doing 1,000 combinatoric calculations per server per month. The goal is to do 1 million combinatoric calculations per server per month.

The personal Internet
Terabytes of data are being generated each month. The dotcom bust did not lead to a reduction in data, and I believe the growth will accelerate when high definition video takes off. We also have peer-to-peer applications that are doubling the amount of HTML traffic on the Internet. At the same time, people are expecting fast page loads and a rich online experience. Studies show that an acceptable user experience is about five seconds for a page load, and the industry will have to handle richer content and deliver it within this. For cell phones too, the requirement is 17-18 seconds, so we have to make devices that can handle data very quickly.

Impact of mobility
The Internet is getting so compelling that you want to take it with you. That’s the old network economics – the more people have devices, the more people will want to connect with each other, and more user content will be generated. Devices are inherently more useful if they are mobile. The move to consumer notebooks is just beginning. This year, in the United States, the number of consumer notebooks will overtake business notebooks. Notebooks will become a fashion device.

A WiMAX future
We see WiMAX about to reach maturity. Within two years, it will merge with Wi-Fi and become background technology. Wi-Fi used to come in 802.11b, a, d, g... Not any more. It will be the same with WiMAX. They will become background technology.