Intel Secures the PC with vPro Dual-Core Design

Published: April 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

No matter what, you have to hand it to the top brass in the IT industry for one thing: always accentuating the positive. Here chip giant Intel stands in the middle of this storm: PC sales in decline, a new Core chip architecture on the way but not yet here, the future "Longhorn" Windows Vista desktop operating system delayed and Linux not yet a credible growth engine on the desktop, and rival AMD not just nipping at its heels, but firmly lock-jawed on its calf muscles like a pit bull.

And today, in the middle of all that high pressure, Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief executive officer, took use through a preview of what the future of the business desktop computer--what we used to call PCs and, if the company spent a lot of dough on it, a workstation--will look like if we can just wait a little longer.

Intel's new vision of the desktop for business, which it calls the vPro platform, has a few key elements that Intel has been banging the drum about for more than a year. But today, Otellini strung them together in a way that was meant to resonate with businesses, not consumers: The technologies embodied in the vPro designs would save them money and make their machines more secure, which also saves them money.

Otellini started off his vPro presentation by citing statistics from Gartner that indicate a whopping 89 percent of the IT budget goes toward what he called "maintenance"--by which he meant normal day-to-day system administration, operations, as well as traditional maintenance and technical support. Only the remaining 11 percent of the IT budget goes to what Gartner calls "innovation," which presumably means writing new applications to chase new opportunities and running them on shiny new hardware. He said that a few years ago, you could support a PC for about one quarter of the cost of the hardware, but now, with the lowering of PC prices and the increasing complexity of the software that runs on them, supporting a PC now costs twice as much in a year as the hardware itself costs. Intel and the other makers of hardware components don't want prices to come down that much more in the PC space, so Intel has wisely focused on lowering those support costs, and it is these features that are central to the vPro business design. And the target market? Those 85 million business PCs that are sold each year that will never be laptops.

The secret ingredient in the vPro platform is the new dual-core Core processors, both the "Conroe" desktop chip and the "Woodcrest" Xeon workstation chip, and the associated chipsets that go into these systems. These new chipsets have been equipped with Active Management Technology, which are extensions to the chips that allow better remote management of desktop PCs. According to statistics that Otellini cited from Zenith Infotech, remote management has a profound effect on the bottom line. While wake-on-LAN and other remote technologies that Intel and its PC partners have created to date have reduced the number of PC support incidents that require a tech to walk over to the PC or, worse yet, remove a PC from its cubicle and take it back to the shop for repairs, to a mere 13 percent of all PC support incidents, those 13 percent of incidents account for 46 percent of the total PC support costs at companies. Sneaker net costs a lot more than Ethernet. So the AMT features that are part of the vPro platform will allow techs to activate a PC remotely and install patches, or can even allow techs to log into a machine that is undergoing the Blue Screen of Death and remotely power cycle it. Servers have had service processors that do these same functions for years, and as Intel has said before, businesses want to have PCs enabled with similar technologies.

Services giant EDS was on hand at the Intel vPro event because it has been an early adopter of these technologies. Kim Stephenson, vice president of information technology outsourcing service delivery at EDS, explained that EDS has about 400 customers for which it manages their 3.5 million desktops, which of course needs a few hundred thousand servers as well. EDS is rubbing its hands in glee because it needs to lower the cost of supporting all of those PCs, and because its contracts include annual price reductions, this is not some theoretical need, but a contractual one. Stephenson said that for years, EDS has been trying to consolidate down to one PC platform, but because companies want what they want, not what you want, this has not been possible. But, if EDS can standardize on new vPro systems, made by dozens of vendors, this might be enough standardization. In early tests at EDS, using the vPro platform reduced deskside support calls by 50 to 75 percent and reduced the time to deploy new software by 90 percent.

Another key ingredient of the vPro platform is the hardware-assisted instruction set virtualization electronics that is in the Core chips, which Intel calls Virtualization Technology, and how this is used in concert with the second core in the chip to create a virtualized environment on one core and a virtual firewall to secure that environment on the second core. If you haven't figured it out yet, Intel has just convinced your boss and the IT department to commandeer that second core you want to run music while you work so it can be used as a personal firewall. As you might imagine, Symantec and other peddlers of antivirus and security software are all for this, and Otellini had John Thompson, chairman and CEO at Symantec, to come on stage and say what a wonderful idea this was. And, considering the nature of the threats that desktop users face--at least those who run Windows--maybe the two have a point.

Otellini said that in 2000, it took 209 days for a hacker to create the Ramen/Adore virus to exploit a security breach. In 2002, it took 185 days for someone to create the SQL Slammer virus, but by 2003, it took only 26 days for Blaster to hit, and in 2004, only 17 days for Sasser. By 2005, from security notice to Zotob attack took only three days, and now, you can get instant exploitation. "If things happen in a zero timeframe, how can you be proactive?" Otellini asked. Clearly, security has to be active, and this approach that Intel is advocating with the vPro design is part of that. In fact, the vPro chipsets have electronics that will not allow end users to disable antivirus software, which will cut down on virus, worms, and other malware outbreaks.

The last thing that makes vPro a new platform is a focus on performance per watt. Giving a sneak peak at the Conroe chip, Otellini did a demonstration that pitted a Business Pro platform using a Pentium 4 HT processors running at 3.8 GHz against a vPro platform using the dual-core Conroe chip running at 2.6 GHz. The benchmark that Intel created for the test was based on the new Office 2007 release, and had an Excel spreadsheet calculating a bunch of sales while running an Outlook email client and a PowerPoint presentation. On this test, half way through, the antivirus software was kicked on to do some scans. The Conroe box was able to run the test in about one-third the time. Compared to PCs in the 2003 vintage, Otellini said that the vPro machines would deliver at least twice the performance and about four times the performance per watt.

The savings in electricity can be significant for large companies. Otellini said that for a company with 50,000 PCs deployed over a four-year span, using the new Core processors could result in a $1.5 million in savings electricity costs.