HSBC pushes Intel to get more joined up

A PANEL of corporate IT types at an Intel bash in the Tate Modern yesterday evening produced some seasonal fireworks to light up the South Bank of the river Thames.

The event attended by around 150 guests, also saw the INQUIRER up in lights across the river, as Intel projected a continual light show praising their chips near Blackfriars. One slide had us apparently lauding the merits of Chipzilla's quad core chips.

Ray O'Brien, HSBC's head of IT at its corporate investment division, was asked by genial Intel host Nigel Woodward, what he'd like to see from the chip firm. O'Brian said he wanted to see Intel get more "joined up" with companies outside of Intel. That, he explained, meant better interconnectivity with IT vendors such as Cisco.

Other panellists said that energy efficient processors were important to their corporate strategies, but that multi-core processors were not as important as making sure legacy software applications worked well with the processors they're buying.

Intel's Woodward said: "We've had such a good year, now we're passing around the Bollinger." At that moment a bevy of beautiful young people dressed in sunflower adorned Intel t-shirts passed through the assembled IT suits bearing trays of flutes containing, an Intel insider claimed, not Bollinger but cava. A very pleasant cava, however.

Later, one of the panellists chatted informally to the INQ about the subject of processors. He said that CPUs had become commodity items and that performance, whether from AMD or Intel, was rarely important these days, although the pricing of such components is still a factor.

This chimes eerily with another comment made to the INQ by an IT vendor last week, who said that these days the difference between an AMD and an Intel chip used a similar type of marketing that was used to differentiate toothpaste. The number of stripes the goo contained when you squeezed the tube was the unique selling point.

The IT types went on to a complex session of tasting six different wines - we made our excuses and left. µ