Some business machines boasting the new platform will begin shipping today, said Mike Ferron-Jones, Intel director of marketing for its digital office platforms division. The world’s largest computer makers, including Dell, HP, Gateway and Lenovo, are among vPro customers, he said.
We’re not targeting vPro to be almost a workstation product, Ferron-Jones said. We want to be able to make it available in higher-volume, mid-level mainstream.
The chipmaker first announced its vPro brand and intentions in April, as part of chief executive Paul Otellini’s platformization vision for the company. The strategy is to sell more bundles of Intel product rather than individual components. Otellini touts platforms as a way of linking together interconnected Intel technologies. Of course, it also means the company sells more products.
Still, there seems to be a couple of advantages of buying a machine with the vPro package.
The bundle includes Intel’s newest dual-core microprocessor, Core 2 Duo, which is based on its latest low-power microarchitecture, that promises 40% more performance than its single-core Pentium 4 predecessor.
Also, the Pentium 4 has a thermal design power, which means maximum power, of 84 watts versus 65 watts with the Core 2 Duo, which means cheaper energy bills.
Core 2 Duo was officially launched in late July and notebooks with the chip have been shipping since then. There are five versions each of the Core 2 Duo for notebooks and desktops, based on processing muscle. But enterprise users will only notice a performance difference with Core 2 Duo-powered machines when they are multi-tasking among several applications at once.
Enterprises also should bear in mind that as Core 2 Duo machines roll out, their Pentium-driven counterparts will become cheaper as Intel continues to lower Pentium prices.
vPro also boasts Intel’s latest corporate chipset, the Q965 Express, which replaces last year’s 945G chipset. Notably, the new chipset includes an integrated graphics card designed to support Microsoft Corp’s forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.
vPro also debuts the second iteration of Intel’s AMTm, or Active Management Technology, which first launched in 2005. So, it’s had a year to kind of ripen, Ferron-Jones said.
That ripening includes Intel garnering significantly broader support from OEMs, which now includes all the usual suspects, as well as software makers, such as Adobe, Cisco, HP OpenView, Microsoft and Symantec, among others.
The new AMT has a couple of notable added system defense features. It now has an agent presence monitor, which ensures a management or security agent on the desktop isn’t disabled by the user or malicious software. The agent monitor continually checks in with the hardware and if it fails to do so, the hardware then sends an alert to IT management. The agent can then be either reinstalled or the machine isolated from the network, for example, Ferron-Jones said.
vPro’s AMT also has a network isolation feature, which is a microcontroller built into the chipset that works within the network. If it reads patterns within the network flow that might be malicious, such as a system trying to send packages using an IP address not authorized to that system, it can isolate the desktop and notify IT, he said.
Also new to the platform is what Ferron-Jones called a virtualization appliance. This is like a virtual firewall box inside the system, which includes a lightweight virtual machine monitor, an embedded OS and an application manager to provide services to the main user OS.
This is a little different than the AMT. Instead of being a piece of hardware inside the chipset that inspects just the heads of the packet, the virtualization appliance inspects all layers of a network packet, which is useful for packets that appear normal on their heads but are indeed corrupt further down the packet, Ferron-Jones said.
The virtualization appliance also can monitor the set group of applications and security policies for each desktop machine within the network, to insure the user OS remains compliant with IT policy.
The vPro bundle also includes the Intel 82566DM Gigabit Network Connection. Ferron-Jones noted that if enterprises chose desktops with Intel’s new microprocessor, but networking silicon from another supplier, such as Broadcom, for example, the machine would carry the Core 2 Duo badge but would not have AMT.
While the platform comes with standard components, enterprises can still choose to customize certain features. For example, they can add a separate graphics card for higher-end machine configurations, he said.
VPro is Intel’s third so-called platform, following Centrino, the earlier mobile bundle, and Viiv, Intel’s new consumer set launched earlier this year.
Ferron-Jones said Intel expects substantial ramp of vPro during the following six months, with high volume deployments certainly within a year.
The vPro is part of Intel’s so-called Stable Image program, which promises one predictable new enterprise desktop product each year, to help enterprises budget for IT. That means the next version of vPro is expected at around the same time in 2007.
Every year we’re going to be refreshing the capabilities of the platform to be able to extend its features and capabilities, Ferron-Jones said.
