Microsoft Eager for Intel Core Chips for Vista

Published: March 8, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of the coming out party for its future Core Architecture chips at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday, Pat Gelsinger, who is in charge of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, brought out Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of its Server and Tools Business to talk about how the future Core chips and the future Windows Vista operating system were made for each other.

Gelsinger was demonstrating the "Conroe" dual-core chip, which will be available in the third quarter in a desktop platform dubbed "Averill." The dual-core Conroe is the desktop version of the "Merom" laptop and "Woodcrest" server chip that shares the Core Architecture that Intel unveiled this week. The Conroe chip burns at 65 watts, is expected to have about 40 percent more performance than the dual-core Pentium D 950 chip and use 40 percent less power, and will be the cornerstone of Intel's Professional Business platform, which is a fancy way of saying a stable PC platform with components that stay in the market for long enough for businesses to make big investments in them. Intel and its partners have shipped over 100 million such designated PC platforms to date, so this is a pretty big deal.

Muglia came out to say that both Windows Vista and Office 12 were ready to rock on the Conroe chip, and to prove that the new chip would be useful, he showed off the high-end graphics in the platform, which drive the 3D graphics that are one of the key features of Vista. He also showed some number crunching done in the Excel portion of the future Office 12 running on a Conroe box side-by-side with a Pentium D 950 box. While Intel is saying the performance difference between these chips should be about 40 percent, Muglia showed Conroe finishing a job in 11.4 seconds compared to 28.7 seconds on the Pentium D machine--both running software that has been tweaked to support multiple threads. That is nearly a factor of three performance boost.

Muglia and Gensinger also talked up the Advanced Management Technologies of the future Conroe chip/Averill platform, which will allow remote administrators to reach into the system BIOS and reconfigure the machine, even if Windows has completely crashed the system. (This would obviously be very useful to Windows desktop administrators.) Muglia also said that while Microsoft has already put support for the WS-Management specifications into Systems Management Server 2003 for the Windows operating system, Intel would be putting hardware support into the kicker to the Averill platform due in 2007. Gelsigner also previewed a technology called "current breaker," which will allow admins to set up machines to automatically isolate them in the event they are attacked by a virus or worm.