SAN FRANCISCO — Patrick Gelsinger may not be the chief technology officer of Intel these days, but he sure sounded like it at his keynote on the second day of the Intel Developer Conference.
In addition to discussing further the company’s new quad core CPUs, Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of the digital enterprise group, also announced several new initiatives from Intel.
The first announcement was the next generation of Intel’s vPro technology, planned for next year. It will feature the third generation of Intel Active Management technology, adding support for the new Web Services Management (WS-MAN) APIs and system defense features that can slow or stop the spread of viruses and worms
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Patrick Gelsinger Source: Intel |
The next version of vPro will also include Intel Trusted Execution Technology, formerly codenamed LaGrande.
The technology includes hardware extensions for Intel processors and chipsets that protect applications by running them in their own space, isolated from other applications.
Gelsinger also announced 50 new instructions that will be added to the Penryn and Nehalem processors; the 45nm designs due next year. “SSE4 and more,” as he called it, would handle high-performance computing, searching and security systems.
Intel is also pumping up the internal bus of the PC, giving PCI Express a boost for the first time in years. The project, done in conjunction with IBM , is called “Geneseo.”
It would bring higher bandwidth and a lower latency interface to all peripheral cards. In a slide showing “Broad industry support” for Geneseo,” ATI was conspicuous by its absence from the list of vendors.
Gelsinger’s final announcement was one out of left field. Intel is partnering with BAPCo, developer of the 3Dmark benchmarking software, to create a power management and efficiency benchmark product called EECoMark.
According to BAPCo, EECoMark will measure power consumption across all components and while running different applications.
The show really reflects how much of a headache AMD has become for Intel, because Intel was hitting back at AMD. A lot.
Gelsinger ran a demo showing the Xeon 5300 against an Opteron (and clobbering it), and during a demo of vPro security, his “password” on a dummy bank account was “I hate amd.”
He also cited reduced time to market, higher yield and lower manufacturing costs of the Xeon over the Opteron, and that it was shipping. “We’ll have a million units before the competition ships one unit,” he said.
The day prior, Intel CTO Justin Rattner looked in a trashcan during his keynote demo and said “Wait, is that an Opteron I see in there?”
