Intel To Help CIOs 'Chill Out'

"Agility refers to an IT manager's ability to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements - something that happens every minute of every day," said Gelsinger, addressing a keynote audience at Intel Developer Forum today. "Intel platforms and technologies will enable enterprises to proactively prevent problems from occurring in their networks and to react more quickly when they do occur."

IT managers are faced with a balancing act between increasing computing performance with growing power consumption, real-estate and manageability concerns. In datacenters, power and cooling costs have become a large part of the total cost of ownership. Increasingly, companies are measuring a platform's capabilities in terms of the amount of performance achieved per watt consumed.

"Intel's new enterprise platforms are designed to deliver superior performance and power efficiency in order to increase compute density while reducing the total cost of ownership," said Gelsinger. "Yet, we will provide noticeable increases in performance as we continue to shift our server and office PC and notebooks to multicore designs."

Using low or idle utilization technology inside Intel's server platforms can deliver up to 24 percent power savings which could mean $100,000 in savings annually for even moderately sized enterprises with 500 servers. A new processor, codenamed "Sossaman," is evidence of Intel's continuing commitment to increasing performance and power efficiency. Sossaman, due in the first half of 2006, will be targeted for server rack and blade designs where space is constrained and is just one of many new products on Intel's power efficient roadmap.

Sossaman is also a key component of the telecommunications roadmap where power efficiency is crucial. Gelsinger commented that Intel's communications business continues to do well. "Just today Motorola announced they are using Intel building blocks for their new communication equipment. They have also increased their participation in Intel's Communications Alliance program by becoming premier members."

Another key theme Gelsinger addressed was the company's Embedded IT vision, in which Intel is building IT capabilities directly into platforms to reduce maintenance and installation costs. Current capabilities include out-of-band diagnostics. This technology, known as Intel® Active Management Technology, can automatically detect platform health issues and allows an IT manager to remotely diagnose and perform fixes. Intel® Active Management Technology is available on PCs being delivered this year. Many IT outsourcing companies, including Atos Origin*, CapGemini*, EDS* and Siemens*, are looking to benefit by the new Embedded IT capabilities to efficiently administer the millions of PCs under their management.

Intel is also driving platform innovations to enable corporations to work more efficiently and to collaborate more easily, working in partnership with software developers and OEMs to make this vision a reality. Some of the cooperative programs include models that build on Voice over IP (VoIP) including business class audio that is twice as rich as today's normal phone lines. Intel today announced that Intel and Skype* are collaborating to deliver compelling VoIP applications on Intel Platforms.

Multi-core platforms are key to delivering these new ways of using technology and providing the horsepower for embedded IT capabilities. At IDF today, a number of platforms were shown and demonstrated, including ones based on forthcoming and highly scalable dual-core Intel® Xeon™ processors, based on Intel's new micro-architecture.

The micro-architecture represents an evolution in design combining the best of Intel's current Intel NetBurst® and Pentium® M architectures along with many new innovations. The new micro-architecture will also enable unique combinations of higher performing, ultra-quiet, sleek and low-power laptop, desktop and server models.

Gelsinger also emphasized the growing momentum behind Intel® Itanium®-based server platforms in the high-end server market segment and the advancements coming with the next- generation Itanium processor, codenamed "Montecito."

"We see broad OEM and developer support for the Itanium family with seven major OEMs shipping platforms today and with more than 4,500 computing applications and tools available," said Gelsinger. "Shipments of the Itanium 2 processor grew 170 percent from the first quarter of 2004 to the first quarter of 2005.

"Looking into the future of our multi-core roadmap, in addition to planned dual core processors we have more than ten designs with four or more cores in various stages of development. The future is bright for Intel's continued leadership in dual and multi-core designs," said Gelsinger.