Paul Otellini on Intel and the PC's Evolution

Since taking over as CEO in 2005, Otellini has focused on pushing Intel beyond the PC. He talks with Ashlee Vance about the high-stakes chip-making game and the company’s push into mobile devices.

How much does it cost to build a chip-manufacturing plant these days?
North of $5 billion. And in order to run those efficiently and pay for them, you need to have $8 billion to $10 billion of annual revenue out of that factory at a reasonable margin to pay for it. There are fewer of them being built, and fewer people can build them. You’re dealing with levels of purity of chemicals and air and precision and in temperature and in rinse and in everything that’s involved in the manufacturing process that have never been invented before. If you think about the output, the things that we’re building are the most complicated machines that human beings have ever built. You kind of get what you pay for. If you look at the last generation of technology that we just released, we reinvented the transistor, the first major reinvention in 60 years or something. That fundamental invention took us 10 years of R&D to do, and it’s not going to be reverse-engineered anytime soon. So it’s not just a matter of having a large bank account.