Intel Issues CPU Road Map

As it tries to maintain its lead in the semiconductor market over a revitalized AMD, Intel is moving forward with a new vision of multicore processors running virtualized applications while consuming power more efficiently.

These ambitions were on display at August's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. The chipmaker hosted more third-party vendors than ever before at the event, where it showcased upcoming technologies for health care, mobility, digital homes and other verticals.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini kicked off the show with a keynote address outlining the company's upcoming plans. Much of Intel's recent growth has come in the mobility space, with the Centrino notebook processor comprising roughly 36 percent of the units shipped in 2005. Moreover, in the second quarter of this year, notebooks outsold desktop PCs for the first time ever.

One of the problems mobility presents is how to get increasing amounts of computing power into ever-smaller devices. To address that, Intel has been redesigning its processors to maximize their performance per watt.

"We're moving beyond our historical focus on gigahertz, to core competencies that intersect a broader set of human needs," Otellini noted. "Left unchecked, power and heat consumption would limit the kind of technologies we need to produce today."

Otellini gave the audience a sneak preview of a new power-optimized micro-architecture. Expected to ship in the second half of 2006, the CPU micro-architecture combines Intel's NetBurst and Pentium M micro-architectures. It adds new features into a multicore design that will enable a wide range of sophisticated functions for digital home and office PCs and help IT managers increase responsiveness and productivity while reducing real-estate and electricity costs. The new technology comes not a moment too soon for Intel. In the last quarter, AMD upped its x86-based server-processor market share from about 7 percent to 11 percent.

Intel also demonstrated machines running the Merom (notebook), Conroe (desktop) and Woodcrest (server) processors. Devices with the new processors will be available by the second half of 2006, and the company also is developing processors with four or more cores.

Intel anticipates multicore processors will lead to a new type of computer currently referred to as "handtop PCs." These energy-efficient devices, about the size of a typical paperback book, will provide a converged communication and PC-like experience, however, they require less than 1 watt of processing power and weigh less than 1 pound. They should hit the market within a year.

One of Intel's other primary goals for the upcoming year will be to push its virtualization vision. At an IDF panel session, several industry experts discussed the technology. Virtualization has been used primarily in enterprise servers as a way to lower IT management costs and distribute workloads without sacrificing performance, often by consolidating servers.

"Virtualization is a better way of deploying management systems, and it's a matter of when, not if, most or all platforms are running some form of virtualization," said Karthik Rau, director of product management for VMWare. "We currently have about 10,000 customers running VMWare servers, and about 10 percent of them are running virtual applications, with the number expected to grow quickly."

Virtualization's advantage is that it shortens crisis-response time and saves money when problems arise. It also enables emerging technologies, such as grid computing and parallelism.

"It enables us to create more robust platforms that keep systems up and running and recover quicker when there is a problem," said Lee Highsmith, program manager for Lenovo's ThinkVantage Technologies division.

Despite the focus so far on enterprise servers, observers generally agree that virtualization will be deployed by all users eventually, including consumers, though they may not realize it.

"There's a better case right now for virtualization in the server space, but we do expect it to eventually have a much broader role across the whole ecosystem," said Mike Neil, product unit manager for Windows virtualization at Microsoft.

He said Microsoft's virtualization technology, known as HyperVisor, does not yet have a release date, but that it should roughly coincide with the rollout of the Longhorn operating system (officially named Windows Vista).

Among the hurdles virtualization will have to clear before it disseminates broadly: alleviating any security concerns, but even that could become one of its strongest selling points.

"The average cost of a deskside IT visit is about $180, so you don't have to have very many of those to save a lot of money," Highsmith said. "Every time a user can recover automatically, it yields significant benefits to an IT staff."

A BUSY YEAR AHEAD: PRODUCT TIME LINE

• CPU micro-architecture: Second half of 2006

• Merom, Conroe, Woodcrest processors: Second half of 2006

• Viiv home-entertainment platform: Q1 of 2006

• Handtop PCs: mid-2006

• 8-hour battery: 2008 (estimated)