San Francisco — The emergence of dual-core processors will bring the parallel computing power necessary to virtualize enterprise IT environments and ease manageability issues for CIOs, executives told the Intel Developer Forum.
Speaking to a crowd of approximately 5,500 software firms and industry
partners, Intel president Paul Otellini promised dual-core additions to its product line that
would span its high-end Itanium chips to the Xeon server products and Pentium desktop products.
Dual-core chips are designed to significantly increase performance without increasing power consumption, a key concern among original equipment manufacturers and developers. By 2006, Otellini said he expected more than 40 per cent of Intel desktop chips to contain two cores and 85 per cent of its server chips.
These products will also include hyperthreading, a technology that takes some of the unused circuitry (called “”registers””) on the chip and, in a sense, fools the system into thinking it is running on a dual processor. Hyperthreaded or multi-threaded CPUs could either run two or more applications at once (by using both the floating point integer and the graphics unit), or simply make a single application run faster.
Otellini said dual-core processors and hyperthreading would usher in an era of “”parallel personal computing”” whereby computers will first recognize a piece of data, mine for more context in an archive and then synthesize it into meaningful information. For example, a financial services company could create an application that would lean to spot a hedge fund, search for a hedge fund investment opportunity and then factor in what would happen when interest rates change. Desktop applications of this nature would require 50 G-flops of processing speed, as opposed to the five to seven available on PCs today.
“”Instead of thinking about how many chips are on the computer, you’re going to start thinking about how many computers are on a chip,”” Otellini said.
Intel is planning to facilitate parallelism in future processors and chip sets, Otellini said.
These include Vanderpool, a technology that will allow developers to build systems that virtualize end-user systems into four partitions. One of these might be devoted to corporate applications, another to personal computing applications such as games, a Linux workstation and a manageability area that would look for the latest bug patches and virus protection.
Vanderpool is expected to be available when Microsoft launches the next version of Windows, code-named Long-horn, in 2006, but Intel co-CIO Stacy Smith demonstrated its capabilities with a desktop chassis painted with four- colour bars, like a rainbow, to represent each partition. Smith said Vanderpool would eliminate thousands of calls to IT help desks and would remove the second system from many developers’ desks.
Perry Longinotti, a project manager with payroll and HRIS developer Aspen Avanti Inc. in Calgary, said dual-core processing wouldn’t necessarily have a huge impact for his customers because its software is not computationally based. “”We use a SQL database, so our product will scream just as fast on a 700 MHz system as a dual-core 300 MHz system,”” said Longinotti, who is not attending IDF this year but spoke by telephone. “”Our customers will get more from the development of faster buses, faster drives and the ability to address more memory.””
Vandepool, however, offers major potential, given that Aspen Avanti’s product would likely reside in the corporate applications partition. “”That’s pretty interesting, and it means a lot of companies could farm out some of the manageability stuff that take up a lot of their time now,”” Loginotti said.
Intel is not the only company working on a dual-core product. IBM unveiled a dual-core version of its Power chip earlier this year, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has already started demonstrating a server-based version of a dual-core Opteron. Intel’s demonstration was on a dual-core Itanium, which sells in lower volumes. However, Otellini told CDN he isn’t afraid of falling behind.
“”This isn’t a race. This is a sea change in computing. I’m happy to see our prime competitor is embracing this move because it shows we’re moving in the right direction.””
