A radical proposal for how Intel can escape its dysfunctional relationship with software companies by building app frameworks directly on silicon semantics.

1. Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. • The Swan Factory, Inc.
Apps on Silicon
How Intel Could Disrupt
Software and Take Back
Control of its Destiny

2. Intel’s Conundrum
❖ Hardware Rocks
❖ Fast • Reliable • Exponential
❖ Software Sucks
❖ Slow • Buggy • ~Linear
❖ Software Rules
❖ Cheap • Malleable • Experienced

3. Let’s Fix This

4. The Challenge
Apps
Frameworks
Operating System
Compiler
Instructions
Circuits
Silicon
Users
Intel
Intermediaries

5. – Robert Noyce
(on inventing the integrated circuit)
“Why not cut out the middle ground…”

6. The Solution
Apps
Signal Abstraction Layer
Circuits
Silicon
Users
Intel

7. Signal Abstraction Layer
❖ Signal-based systems are already everywhere
❖ Circuits, HTTP, Node.js, Actors, etc.
❖ Just remove idiosyncratic syntax and semantics
❖ Abstract out common elements
❖ Layer directly on top of silicon
❖ Massively streamline app creation

8. Sound crazy?

9. We’ve already done it!

10. http://hourofnode.org

11. The Hour of NODE
❖ The first new way to learn programming in 20 years
❖ Based on four years of research into computation
❖ Build by a global team from scratch in 70 days
❖ Next-generation virtual hardware/software stack
❖ Multi-core shared memory with interrupt handling
❖ Programmable by 10-year-olds on an iPhone

12. The Secret Sauce
❖ Get rid of instructions
❖ Invented by von Neumann to simplify math
❖ Sacrificed parallelism, composition, state
management, and physicality
❖ Instead, use signal abstraction for everything
❖ Hardware • Firmware • Software • Protocols
❖ Compiler • Operating System • Frameworks

13. The Reality
❖ The Odds
❖ 99% chance this will never work
❖ 1% chance this will change everything
❖ The Bet
❖ I left behind my dream job at Apple to bring this theory
into the world
❖ Can Intel leave behind enough of the past for
your silicon to rule the world?

14. Our Plan
❖ Develop a complete system over two years
❖ Estimated cost of $600K
❖ Faster if we work with you
❖ Slower if we don’t get funding
❖ Somebody is eventually going to disrupt software
❖ Why not you?

15. Thank You
info@theswanfactory.com
THE
SWAN FACTORY