At a roundtable this past weekend, Intel CTO Justin Rattner emphasized one overriding message to the journalists who made the trek out to the chipmaker's Berkeley labs: Intel is still spending on research and development.

Rattner's opening slide featured the following quote from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid." Rattner reiterated this point in his own words, insisting, "we have historically viewed downturns as an opportunity to invest and improve our competitive position. These times are really opportunities."

Intel is not alone in keeping up its R&D spending during these lean times. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation pulled together the R&D numbers for a host of technology companies and found that most of them, with two important exceptions, made relatively few cuts to their fourth quarter 2008 R&D budgets in year-over-year terms.

The two primary exceptions were AMD and Freescale, both of which took out the axe and cut their R&D spending significantly in the final quarter of last year. It's no coincidence that both companies made Moody's recent "Most Likely to Default" list, and have been aggressively reducing costs since the downturn began.

AMD, for its part, has even more cuts ahead. At this point, though, I have to ask: if AMD has cut loose its fabs, making it a design-focused company, and is now cutting its R&D—where is the company really headed? (Of course, a similar directionality question could also be asked of Sun, a company with an R&D budget that remained flat year-over-year.)

Ultimately, for a tech company to cut its R&D budget in a downturn is a desperate survival move—you're essentially eating your seed corn and, unless you really hit the jackpot with whatever research you keep funding, you're going to exit the downturn with no future.

But AMD and Freescale aren't the only ones gambling with their future. Intel, as it turns out, is also taking on a bit more risk, even if it doesn't show in dollar terms.

More wood behind fewer arrows == fewer shots

At the roundtable, Rattner described Intel's R&D approach in this downturn as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows," with the money specifically targeting Larrabee, Moorestown, and energy efficiency. In other words, Intel is keeping its overall R&D budget mostly intact, but it is clustering those funds around a more selective slate of initiatives that it thinks have a higher probability of success.

The problem, of course, is that one or more of those shots may miss, as these shots inevitably do. To abruptly switch analogies, this is the peril of both the AMD approach, which cuts down on the number of eggs and the number of baskets, and the Intel approach, which puts the same number of eggs into fewer baskets: either way, you wind up with all your eggs in fewer baskets.

The other issue is the time horizon of the research that gets funded by most companies—in a downturn, research that isn't likely to be monetizable soon is more likely to get the axe, as companies consolidate their resources into efforts with nearer-term profit potential. I suspect that this represents a problem that is at least partly behind Rattner's emphasis, which he has repeated in other venues, on the academy and government partnering with industry on R&D. The academy and government are the two entities that, in theory, should have the longest research horizons.