Intel Reaches for Stars Without Speed

Intel has put more flesh on the bones of its *T strategy with which it is hoping to distinguish its processors now that it has veered away from ever increasing clock speed.

The chip vendor has disclosed further details of its previously vague LeGrand security technology, and sketched out its plans for the Active Management Technology it hinted at during its most recent Developer Conference.

At the same time, it has hinted at further areas the *T strategy could expand into.

Intel this year has gone cold turkey on the addiction to speed that has historically dominated its CPU roadmap. The T technologies (* as in wildcard) have been pushed to the fore, together with the vendor's shift to dual and multicore technologies next year, as part of a "platformization" approach.

Existing *Ts include Hyper-Threading Technology and Extended Memory 64 Technology, and the vendor has made a lot of noise about its Vanderpool virtualization technology.

Yesterday, Ron Curry, director of marketing for Intel's Corporate Technology Group, confirmed that the vendor still planned to debut the LeGrande security technology in the "LongHorn timeframe", ie sometime in 2006. At the same time, he said, other operating systems would be able to take advantage of the technology around the same time.

In the case of EMT, the technology was already built into processors before Intel turned it on. Given the fluid nature of Longhorn's delivery date, it seems reasonable to expect LeGrande will be integrated into Intel's product line ahead of time. Curry would not comment on this, though he said developers would of course need LG-enable machines on which to develop their products.

LeGrande will initially be targeted at business desktops and notebooks, said Curry. "I think consumers will eventually find value (in LeGrande), but at the moment consumers haven't made the connection between the need for this."

He also said it would be immaterial whether users were running 32 bit or 64 bit software on the technology.

Curry also gave some more details on the Active Management Technology which Intel fleetingly referred to at IDF. AMT is part of the vendor's digital office initiative, which aims to offer "embedded IT". AMT will include hardware and software technologies which allow IT managers "out of band" system access and management, regardless of whether the system is turned on or not.

Curry did not give a timeframe for AMT's launch, saying it would be some time in the next one to three years.

Curry also hinted at other areas in which Intel could develop further *Ts. He said the vendor was looking at a range of possibilities including 3D and animated graphics, data mining, networking processing, and speech recognition and synthesis.

With the shift to "beyond" multicore computing, such applications could potentially be handled by dedicated cores within the system, he said, or spread across the whole system.