IDF Spring 2005 Day 1 - Gelsinger Speaks, nForce4 Intel and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on March 2, 2005 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
IAMT, VT, and why should I want Virtualization?
IAMT is Intel's new Active Management Technology. They didn't go into much (any) detail on how it works, but they talked about it as a separate entity on the hardware level that is able to monitor and correct problems on the rest of the system. This enables higher levels of reliability across the Intel platform. This will likely be more interesting to the server administrator than to the desktop customer. From other descriptions of IAMT, we can speculate that IAMT consists of a custom operating system stored in hardware (similar to the BIOS) that allows secure network access and is able to interact with the rest of the system. We know that IAMT will be able to operate regardless of software or hardware state. In other words, having a hard locked computer, dead hard drive, or even being powered down (as long as there is hard power to the system) won't get in the way of IAMT working.
One of the biggest advances Intel is trying to push now is virtualization (with Intel Virtualization Technology: VT). Other than simply adding another way to utilize the parallelism the dual core push will offer, hardware virtualization will allow quite a few new usage models for personal computers.
Hardware virtualization is the ability of the platform to partition hardware and allow software to run as if it had full control of the hardware. Companies like VMware have been building software level technology that attempts to virtualize systems for quite a while, but there are many more advantages to virutalizing at the hardware level.
A version of VMware running with Intel VT support
As we have pointed out in past IDF shows, virtualization could allow one single computer to run more than one OS, even mixing Windows and Linux. Multiple people could be using a single system as if it were more than one, provided the processing power were adequate.
Aside from this perspective, Intel also sees security as a major advantage of virtualization. In the past, they have talked about maintaining a dedicated management partition running a standardized installation. This would allow companies to easily fix problems on a PC from a sort of quarantined operating system (that even the computer's everyday user would not have access to).
In order to show the advantage of this, Pat demonstrated what would happen if a computer on a corporate network was infected with a virus. In this demo, the IAMT enabled server that the computers are connected to automatically detects the virus and disconnects the machine from the network. If this happens on a non-virtualized computer, the user must run a virus scanner locally. On the virtualized hardware, Intel is able to disconnect the infected partition and enable the management partition to scan and clean the system. After the management partition has cleaned the virus, the user's partition is able to reconnect to the network virus free. The demo showed all of this happening in the time it took Pat to explain what was going on.
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mickyb - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
Doesn't Intel's GOAT (Eh hmm IOAT) sound a lot like what nVidia was doing with their I/O chips? Intel should put "Not to scale" or "No real data was found" on every single one of those extrapolation graphs. I find it kind of funny how multi-core is the panacea to all performance problems. How is this any different than multi CPU SMP? It isn't, except for compressing them to a smaller space. SMP has its problems as well and the number of CPUs does not create an exponential graph like Intel is implying.I am interrested in this FBDIMM and will need to do some checking around on that one. It looks interesting. RAMBUS is still at it. We'll see how things shape up.
glennpratt - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
That changes his point very little. And, YOU probably won't be buying crap out of pocket...Questar - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
When will you guys realize how small the gaming market is?I'll buy more corporate systems this year than every gamer on this site will buy in the next five years.
Pete84 - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
^^ Not just games, but every app too . . .ZobarStyl - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
I love the graph on page 4, where multicore just jumps ahead by leaps and bounds, with the "Performance" being exponential growth. I'm sorry but the last time we saw something like this it was the NetBurst graph taking us into "10 GHz Space" and lo and behold, well you know the story. I'm so tired of Intel just putting a band-aid on a bad idea for a chip (not a bad chip mind you, just designed by marketing people, not engineers). Multicore without onboard memory controllers, tacking on an extra meg of slower cache to Prescott...why are we not seeing samples of a new chip that aims to correct the problems of NetBurst rather than just adding more and more to Prescott like it really is going to change the fact? Until games get really multi-core oriented, this last generation of single-core products is going to be the best thing out there until probably late 06.raskren - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
^^You^^Guess what, none of these are anywhere near store shelves so CTFD (calm the F down).
The Nforce4 board finally adds some appeal to the latest Pentium 4s. I'd say that i875/865 were the last two exciting chipsets. 9xx has fallen short on innovation.
Beenthere - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
The SpinMeisters from Intel are realing blow smoke up the azzes of journalist, as usual. Only the gullible would belive the nonsense these folks peddle when they can't even deliver a P4 without a fire extinguisher. No one with a clue would touch any of Intel's current or short term products. Maybe by '07 Intel will have something worth considering but that remains to be seen.xsilver - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
The idea of VT is a good one I think -- it may be possible to run a small office on only 1 multicore, multithread system? (spreadsheets and email aren't exactly taxing)and intel's idea of split dual cores may be future possibilities of selling cpu's scaled with cores rather than clock speeds?
eg. Extreme edition will have 8 cores, regular will have 4-7 cores ... celerons will have 1-3 cores... according to how the cpu's are binned?
bersl2 - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
--quote--Microsoft’s Jim Allchin came on stage and echoed Gelsinger’s statements with the simple line “it’s time.”
--quote--
Duuuuuuuu... no, really?
"And Wintel said, 'Let there be light!' But they were too slow to realize that the light had been on for quite some time."