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Intel boss Paul Otellini has formally kicked of IDF Fall 2003. In his opening keynote, the president and COO of Intel acknowledged that there is more to life than gigahertz processor speeds - that Intel must provide users with benefits beyond simple processor speed.
Supporting evidence was the showcasing of two new technologies, codenamed Vanderpool and LaGrande.
Vanderpool involves virtualising hardware, to bring more robustness to the support of applications and the general use of PCs. By the use of partitions, a single PC should be better able to support separate tasks - one machine can effectively become two (or even four, with the use of Hyper-Threading).
In the demo of Vanderpool, a computer was being used to watch The Simpsons and play a computer game at the same time, driving separate screens. More importantly, one of the 'machines' could be rebooted without affecting the operation of the other. The Simpsons could continue unperturbed, as it were.
Using virtual machines within processors, independent software environments will be able to co-exist. There was no software emulation involved, he maintained.
La Grande addresses concerns about security rather than robustness. 'At a time when the "virus of the week" seems to plague us all, making our computing devices more secure through the addition of hardware-based security must become a top priority for the industry to ensure future growth,' said Otellini.
Not expected to be available for at least two or three years, La Grande is intended to be a hardware level solution to software-based attacks, but it wouldn't - Otellini stressed - require any 're-architecting' of software platforms. Note that it also involves some of the work carried out by Microsoft under the 'Palladium' umbrella....
Getting back to processors, an interesting announcement concerned the appliance of server science to the desktop space. Otellini said dual and multi-core processors would be developed from the server space into PCs and notebooks, that developers should expect 'dual core capabilities in our mainstream desktop products, and assume that the use of threading is pervasive'.
