THE INTEL Pro slate won’t really get into gear until Intel introduces its Conroe E6000 family, but it’s a game of three thirds, divided into the Professional, the Fundamental and the Transactional business parts of the market.
Professional
The topmost element includes E6000s, the Q965 Express chipset with ICH8DO, iAMT and iVirtuality.
Fundamental
The “fundamental” slate consists of its Pentium D 925 chip, and the Q963 Express chipset with ICH8.
Transactional
And the so-called “transactional” slab will use Conroe E6000 as well as E4000 microprocessors, the Pentium D 900, and the good old Pentium 4 6XX family.
Intel is taking aim at AMD’s “reference” platform for corporate desktops, which as we said last week will be adopted by Hewlett Packard in a range of its machines.
Pro Platform to be named VPro ?
Hours of careful sleuthing have turned up a link, that will lead to some head scratching. (1) The link is here.
If you follow it, and type in ‘vpro.net’ without the single quotes, you end up with a page that is registered to a one Ben Kirby, innocuous enough, right?
Well, the aforementioned person has that domain name, and he happened to park it on the Intel corporate DNS servers. Guess what that means, other than the owners of vpro.com just getting a windfall? The name for the new Intel Pro platform is VPro. Yay, got it.
[B]vPro is everything we said it would be
Good for users, bad for partners[/B]
INTEL started out the vPro presentation with a whimper, not a bang. As I am writing this, Paul Otellini is ranting about technologies and presentations using graphs and figures I can’t see. It seems that Intel security won’t let the presentation out on the web until 30 minutes after the CC starts. Yay.
Now, the airtight security was faultless, and it did indeed kill any buzz and momentum they could have built up for the launch. Brilliant planning, two thumbs up, own goal territory no doubt.
So what is vPro? Viiv that doesn’t suck? It is far less ambitious, we told you about the high points earlier, the official word is manageability (iAMT2), proactive security (ie push patches, and somehow VT is being spun as security), and energy efficiency (Not P4). Be still my beating heart.
The good thing is that I think vPro is a necessary step in the evolution of PC management, and the modest goals mean that it won’t suffer VIIV-itis. Modest goals, potentially large cost savings and things users want all point to a success. They also didn’t mention Skypelike we did, but trust us, it is there.
Now for the down side, everything in here is available elsewhere. iAMT, and soon iAMT2, VT and the Conroe cores are coming regardless of the logo. The hardware requirements, dual cores, iAMT aware chipsets, and the software is coming down the pike. The spiffy logo with an unwritten cost adder that is kicked back to vendors are no help to buyers. In all, no big deal, and you would get it anyway.
This is a blatant Intel power grab, they are shutting out companies that used to be partners, and trying to gain more walletshare. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, the best solution should win in the market. The problem is, the last few times Intel did this and crushed partners, they got bitten in the ass by it.
The current mobile chipset drought is a direct result of the Centrino program, and what is the dollar tally there up to? Intel could have done things fairly by certifying and taxing third party chipsets, but no, they got greedy. Then they ‘dun got bit’.
I see the same thing happening with vPro. Smiling faces on stage aside, you can bet that Symantec, Landesk and other management solution providers have got to be very nervous right now. If history is any guide, they will play along on the surface, but as soon as the eyes are off, they will try very hard to slip the knife in. Wagons are circled, but they are making the cowboys flee to AMD.
Overall, the whole thing is a mix off good technologies that did not need a banner to be a positive. Intel is great at enterprise tech, but lousy at marketing. Combining the two is not a ‘chocolate and peanut butter’ thing, more of a ‘mint and avacado with lime swirls’ flavoring. The lack of partners will hurt Intel in the end, and the branding will bring little if anything to the table.
The logo looks like this :
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/2153/vprologo2ja.jpg
[break=Intel Announces vPro Branding for Business PCs]
[B]Intel Announces vPro Branding for Business PCs
vPro joins Centrino and Viiv[/B]
Just when you thought that Intel was through with their product branding, the company adds another to its repertoire. First there was Centrino which took the notebook industry by storm. Then Intel launched its Viiv platform for entertainment PCs. Now Intel is stamping the vPro brand on next generation business PCs.
PCs with the vPro branding will feature a 64-bit Core processor, Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT). Intel’s AMT technology will be incorporated into the processor, wile VT will be integrated into the accompanying chipset. Intel hopes that the combined technologies will provide a stable and secure platform with unmatched manageability.
Offering businesses avenues to reduce PC support costs, Intel AMT helps manage, inventory, diagnose and repair PCs even when systems are turned off or have crashed operating systems or hard drives. The second generation of Intel AMT offers the ability to isolate infected PCs before they impact the network and alert IT when threats are removed.
Further strengthening PC security, Intel VT allows for separate independent hardware-based environments inside a single PC so IT managers can create a dedicated, tamper-resistant service environment – or partition – where particular tasks or activities can run independently, invisible to and isolated from PC users.
Intel already has backing from many of the top names in the industry including Adobe, Cisco, Computer Associates, Hitachi, Kaspersky Lab, Lenovo, Microsoft, Novell and Symantec. While Intel’s Centrino marketing campaign has been an overwhelming success in the notebook space, most of us are still waiting to see what the real benefits are of Intel’s Viiv platform…