When Intel announced that it plans to setup base in Bangalore, India in 2000 with about 100 employees, the expectation was the company would ramp up its operations in India. True to its word, today Intel has about 3000+ employees today at it Research & Development hub at Bangalore, Karnataka. The total investment that the multinational company has poured into the country amounts to 1.7 billion USD till date.
The company sure has been justified in pursuing its Indian dreams. The Sydney Morning Herald reports the breakthrough of a tera flop chip, the major portion of which, was researched and developed in the Indian Intel center. The chip, which packs 100 million transistors, burns less power than a typical home appliance and performs more than a trillion calculations per second -- a "teraflop." The first "teraflop" performance was achieved in 1996 on a supercomputer built by Intel that took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium processors and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.
Though not out for commercial production yet, the chip marks an important milestone not only to Intel India, but also stands testimony to the skilled human resource available in India to lead high end research projects. This usually has been a point of endless debate with a certain section of people arguing that Indian engineers are mere products of a mass assembly line educational system and another section arguing that though we might be producing engineers in large numbers, they are not lacking in skills and talent. Well, this should be an indicator of the positive outlook one attaches with the Indian talent pool.
More on the topic: Financial Express
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