Intel CEO Brian Krzanich met with top investors and stockholders this week, on the same day that Intel held its Technology and Manufacturing Day (which we reported on here). ExtremeTech has received a tape-recording of that meeting and the contents will shock you: According to Krzanich, there's an industry-wide conspiracy to slow CPU clock speeds and architectural advances to a crawl, while IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, ARM, Samsung, and a dozen other companies all rake in enormous profits.
"We actually got the idea from Craig Barrett," said Krzanich, referring to Intel's CEO from 1998 - 2005. "Back in the late 1990s, the Pentium 4 was controversial because it dramatically increased clock speeds without delivering a corresponding performance improvement. The technical press labeled it a 'marchitecture,' and complained that customers weren't actually getting the performance they thought they were entitled to."
"What we later realized," Krzanich continued, "Was that we didn't actually have to sell people any performance improvements at all. We could just tell them the chips were faster, make up some benchmark numbers, and kick the product out the door."
Krzanich then gave a rough timeline of events, including secret pacts between Intel and IBM, mutual agreements between itself and ARM that killed the early "smartbook" concept but led to Intel's withdrawal from the mobile market, and AMD's disastrous attempt to buck this shadowed conspiracy arrangement and go it alone. He chuckled, recounting how Intel funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in secret payments to GlobalFoundries and the Mubadala Development Company, ensuring that AMD's fab partner was actually responsible for sabotaging the entire Bulldozer product family. That move, by the way, was payback for AMD's counter-espionage that savaged Itanium and the IA-64 instruction set by paying Microsoft billions to promote the false notion that AMD64 was a superior architecture.
Everything you thought you knew is wrong. Power curves like this don't exist.
"It took us several years," Krzanich concluded, his voice hoarse and sounding vaguely like Emperor Palpatine, "But we finally got the mobile companies on board as well. Have you noticed how advances in mobile chips have slowed? It's not power consumption issues. It's certainly not a problem with our materials technology -- silicon could easily hit 10GHz, like Craig Barrett predicted nearly 20 years ago. We just realized we didn't need to bother doing it. The sheeple never knew what hit them."
A bombshell discovery
For years, ExtremeTech and dozens of other publications and websites have written about the decline of silicon scaling. We've discussed future transistor designs, the myths of Moore's law, the evolution of that law over time, process node technology, the failure of 450mm wafer development, and a dozen other topics. Now, that research stands in ruins; the work of hundreds of journalists, lithographers, and engineers, disproved by a single CEO's secret taped remarks.
But Krzanich's remarks just lead to further questions. How has this super-alliance of evil been flawlessly maintained for decades? How could thousands of people working for dozens of companies possibly have been convinced or coerced into keeping this mammoth conspiracy a secret? Is it the Illuminati? The Bilderberg Group? Is Cthulhu stirring in the dead city of R'lyeh?
We don't know. But we're going to find out.
