Photo: Intel
If the American psychologist Maslow were alive today, he would surely explain to us that the three most basic human needs are water, food and Wi-Fi, and without them we would not survive.
This week we are celebrating 20 years of the chip, which for the first time allowed us to connect to WiFi using the laptop, and along the way also changed the definition of laptops as we know it. But what not everyone knows, is that this chip – Santino – was also a turning point in the relationship between Intel and Israel; And we see the fruits of his success to this day in every poster of the company. We met for a conversation with two of the Israeli Intel executives who told us about the development process, the difficulty of the modest Israeli center in front of the global management and also what caused Intel to rush to install hotspots at its own expense.
When the Israeli team faces the American team
Time was the seam line between the 90s and the early 2000s. Most people worked on desktop computers, when even if you were blessed with a laptop, it was the thickness of an encyclopedia, the weight of the yellow pages (remember?), the battery life of a drone, and to connect to the Internet, you had to connect a LAN cable like peasants. In short – a “mobile” experience, which was not really mobile.
But then came Dedi Perlmutter, who was in charge of Intel’s young laptop division, and Molly Aden, who was in charge of Intel’s development center in Haifa and later was the iconic CEO of the Israeli center and one of the top executives at Intel worldwide. Together with the Israeli team, they decided to promote a concept for a new platform, which was developed under the code name “Banias”, and went against everything that Intel knew until then.
In those years, the personal computer market was dominated by the aging Pentium architecture, and with each new generation of Pentium, Intel engineers boosted performance by increasing the frequency. Intel’s Israeli team came to the conclusion that it can increase performance, precisely while reducing the frequency. “If the frequency goes down, the power consumption goes down. A small power consumption makes it possible to use smaller cooling systems, which makes it possible to build thinner computers. The power consumption at the low frequencies has another component of much greater battery life. When you’re not working in a high performance mode, and the energy consumption is low , you can get better battery life,” Itzik Saylis, corporate vice president and director of the client computer integration department at Intel, explains to us today. At the time, Seilis was the manager of the validation department, and manager of the Santino platform.
Image: Intel.
“There was a concept, mainly from the team of Pentium architects from Oregon, and it resulted from the fact that Intel wanted to continue its direction with the architecture. We understood that this was something that could not happen. Processors went in the direction of 150 watts, and we understood that this was the wrong direction. It was a war of who to believe, And the company did not believe that we would be able to bring a processor, which would have much better performance than a Pentium, with such low power consumption. Sometimes arguments are not only about data but also about ego and perception. The data was in our favor, but it was not easy to convince Intel that there was a research center here And a small development that didn’t build any processor, but has a revolutionary idea that is going to conquer the world,” Saylis says. According to him, the Israeli team devoted a lot of time, resources, tenacity and also perseverance to convince the global Intel management that the right direction is the direction of the Israeli Banias, and not the direction of the American Pentium.
Gigtime’s new app
In the end, Intel management agreed to go along with the crazy vision of the Israeli team, and the result was Centrino, a processor platform that made the laptop truly portable: with battery times of only one hour, Centrino computers (which contained a main processor called Pentium M) boasted battery times of approx. 5 hours of battery life (“It was a revolution,” recalls Saylis), a “light” weight of 2-3 kg, and in the process, against everything Intel knew until then, the performance increased. Ilan Bresler, then A young software engineer, and currently vice president and CEO of the wireless communications division at Intel, tells me that the integration of Santino led to a reduction of almost half the weight and thickness of the laptops, and allowed the OEMs with whom Intel worked to build more practical and portable laptops. According to him, Santino computers were “visible like a spaceship” compared to the existing computers at that time. But the Santino series had one more special feature, a card called PRO/Wireless 2100, which was also developed in Haifa. This feature, which nowadays we take for granted, was support for wireless communication, or as we all called it back then “hotspot”.
Dedi Perlmutter at an event in Israel. Photo: Intel
Yes, remember the good old days when you would travel abroad and ask every restaurant and cafe if they had a hotspot? Back in the early 2000s, there were hardly any such access points. Vasilis explains that as part of the preparation for the launch of Project Santino, which is supposed to bring the news of Wi-Fi, Intel made a parallel move to build infrastructure. After all, you didn’t have wireless internet at home yet, and laptops were the property of business people who are not in the office, and need the ability to work wherever they are.”In 2000, even if you had WiFi, you had nowhere to connect,” explains Bressler. So Intel opened its wallet, and began investing in the installation of hotspots around the world so that users would also have somewhere to connect. In the first phase, the installations were focused on airports (Sailis tells how on the day of the installation of the first hotspot at the airport in San Francisco, he struggled with the field manager over the location of the point), and later a deal was also signed with Starbucks, which thanks to this development has become the place you go to to connect to Wi-Fi Free during the trip. “Most of the computers in the world were stationary. WiFi was not that important. The whole idea of WiFi was that the world would go in the direction of mobility, and the number of computers would increase. Therefore, there was a belief that it was necessary to invest in the infrastructure of hotspots to enable the connections of these computers. Today, most computers are laptops. So it was a strategic view,” Saylis says. The speed of the connection at those times, if you were wondering, was 11 megabits per second.
The next jump is already around the corner
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After the successful launch of Santino, the Israeli site, and Haifa in particular, became one of Intel’s most important research and development centers in the world, and the Israeli team became an integral part of the development of each and every processor. “Since then, the processor core has only been developed in Israel, even 20 years later. It doesn’t matter if it’s mobile, stationary or server processors. The core is developed here in Israel.” Today, Intel is working on the next leap, from 11 megabits per second in 2003 to 46 gigabits per second in the Wi-Fi 7 standard.
There was no point in building WiFi without the ability to build a real laptop
On the edge of the fork, Bresler explains that the significant difference between standard 6E and 7 is not only in the rate of the given Hebrew “but Even with the stability in which the data can be transferred. This transition will be much more efficient with much better control over how the data moves. The second part of the standard talks about guaranteed reliability. If a certain bandwidth or latency is needed, there is a way in the standard to make sure it happens. It’s definitely being talked about as a complementary technology to 5G,” he says. Let’s recall that the 6E standard was defined as the biggest change to WiFi since its invention, mainly in light of the fact that it opened up a new frequency spectrum that will allow much less interference than before.
Bressler and Celis refuse to specify when Wi-Fi 7 will appear in Intel laptops, but indicate that in their estimation, in the second half of 2024 we will see the start of adoption of the standard, and after about a year and a half, the deployment will already be much more significant.
So the next time you open your laptop, and take for granted the fact that you don’t need a cable to connect with a network cable to the wall to read Gigtime, try to remember the young Israeli group that fought the management and the teams close to it to enable a real laptop and real wireless internet. Or as Bresler describes it: “One is not possible without the other. There was no point in building WiFi without the ability to build a real laptop. The revolution is based on that.”