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Intel to Take Online Suggestions for New Chips
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Sep 07, 2007 08:15 PM
from the horses-mouth dept.
from the horses-mouth dept.
hhavensteincw writes "Intel has quietly launched a new online community that it plans to use to take feedback and suggestions from OEMs and end users for new features in its vPro chips and management software. Intel envisions that the community will grow to allow users to get answers from other community members faster than Intel's support group can answer questions."
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Intel Updates vPro Platform and Features 77 comments
MojoKid writes "Intel's has certified the Core 2 Duo E6550, E6750, and E6850 processors for vPro, and is releasing the new low-power Q35 Express chipset with a companion ICH9-DO Southbridge, and 82566DM Gigabit Network controller. With these new chispets and technologies, the vPro platform offers next-generation Intel Active Management Technology, enhanced Intel Virtualization Technology, and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (aka Intel TXT). vPro also supports next-generation management standards like WS-MAN and DASH (draft 1.0 spec) and v1.2 of the Trusted Platform Module. Intel has plans to provide continual updates to the vPro platform and will likely enhance vPro further after the launch of their 'Montevina' platform in the first half on 2008."
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Faster support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
mmmmm cake... they have it, they want to eat it too.
The most important part: (Score:5, Insightful)
New chips (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New chips (Score:5, Funny)
Let me say "wow", what an insightful advice ! None of our top-notch engineers had
thought about that before. Would you consider joining one of our engineering teams ?
We feel you could be a precious asset to the company.
Thanks,
Intel.
PS: Please don't tell AMD about this extraordinary good idea.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sort of off-topic... (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD/Intel should stand as a primary example of why honest competition is great for a market.
- Scott
Re: (Score:2)
Reminds me of the old adage: "A fair trade is a trade in which neither party walks away satisfied." Competition is great for customers. Not so much for the corporations in competition.
Not that I'm complaining. I'm just saying.
--Rob
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, a company in a monopoly position will charge whatever they want. And in an immediate sense, this definitely means higher profits.
But in the long term, I think competition can be good for the companies involved, too. (Not in all cases, of course, but in some sectors of the economy.) I think semiconductors is a pretty good example. Imagine if for the last 10 years we had only a single vendor of chips (Intel, AMD, IBM
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sort of off-topic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
If I were to have a hand in development. (Score:5, Funny)
Then, when I boot up Chippy, I'd hear "How may I serve you master?" I'd then boot Windows, open Word and begin typing. I suppose Chippy may interrupt and say "Do you really need me to handle this? It's rather simple." I'd then open seventy five applications and begin decoding the genome.
Chippy would interject "This is a lot for me to handle master. Can you not have me work so hard? It's getting hot in here!"
I'd then open up the interface and change it's name to "Pinky". Sure, Pinky may protest, but unless he kept quiet, I'd open 30 pages of Flash.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
x = 1;
while (x == 1) {
echo "I will work harder";
}
Chippy: No Master! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!
altivec (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like a chip... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
TPM (Score:3, Insightful)
Even though Intel is not going to do this in the foreseable future, at least not in a non-EU release (there's a chance our legislators may wisen up... oh well, whom am I kidding?), yelling loud enough and often enough may at least give Intel a hint that they're doing something wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Repeat after me. TPM isn't DRM! TPM isn't DRM! Got it? Good!
TPM which is controlled by anyone else than the machine's owner is quite related to DRM -- except, instead of restricting what you can do with a piece of software it restricts hardware instead. One of key uses for restricting hardware at the moment is making sure DRM is not being circumvented.
TPM does have a lot of potential beneficial uses, but they all require the owner to have control over the key.
On-die interpreter (Score:4, Funny)
Important suggestion - be truly open (Score:5, Interesting)
It is quite sad that despite their chips being 100s of times faster than a few years ago, so-called 'partners' and OEMs like Microsoft have given the x86 series a bad name - resulting in little or no incremental performance gains for the user community.
Like HP made winprinters and some vendors made winmodems to the customer's ire... and the perennial problems faced by video and audio device mfrs. including big names like Creative... it is clear that the biggest OEM, namely Microsoft determines what customers get to see of "Intel Inside".
The recent thrust towards Open Source drivers for wireless cards from Intel is a very small and incomplete step. Recently at my firm, we talked to Intel for sourcing a 1000 laptops for students joining our colleges. Intel said they would share roadmaps and plans under NDA!!
This is a far cry from 20 years ago when Intel gave out the complete instruction sets and architecture layouts for their 8080; I sort-of remember the Zilog Z-80 did a better job of implementing them. Unless Intel come clean in favour of the truly Open source model, they risk small time players making it big in niche segments - including the biggest niche of them all - the PC market. If not Negroponte, someone else will come out with a non-Intel platform for under $100 and Intel will go down pulling others like Microsoft behind them.
Re:Important suggestion - be truly open (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like here [intel.com] or here [intel.com]???
They have such a big brand name - it doesn't really matter if their designs became public.
Now there you're wrong: Hasn't the competition between AMD and Intel convinced you that, at various times, one of them knew something about processor design that the other hadn't yet implemented?
A tech company giving up its core IP means giving up any edge, which translates to lower profits as competitors overtake the company.
Parent
Faster Please (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read that the reason Intel / AMD are going parallel rather than increasing clock rate is due to the problem of heat dissipation. Multi-core is great for some apps (web-server farms, simulation), but is not going to speed up most (single-threaded) apps. Dual core is nice. About the time the industry is going from 16 to 32 cores, I doubt most users will care - or bother to upgrade. And if the heat problem is not solvable - that may be a serious marketing problem for chip makers and computer manufacturers.
Re:Faster Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen to that. On the bright side though, if chip growth stagnates for too long, software developers will have to start optimizing and writing streamlined code. That's never a bad thing.
I think we're long overdue for an architecture change, by the way. Can't we just start transitioning out of x86? It's well past its limits -- a Core 2 Duo generates a TON of heat, compared to an equivalent POWER chip. I mean, sure, it's way better than a Pentium 4, but it's still a kW hungry beast. Its FP performance is great -- compared to other x86 chips. Compared to other architectures though, it needs work.
POWER's not that alien either -- it's got a lot of the "improvements" that Intel/AMD have been trying to bolt onto the x86 architecture. Difference is, these improvements already exist, are well tested, and well-performing. Want multi-core? SPARC and POWER have got it. Want high-speed multithreading? Look to the Niagra II. Want virtualization? Look to POWER.
Geek fantasy: IBM open-sources the POWER architecture, Intel licenses it and starts producing a high-end chip, AMD competes. Intel and AMD start to use the improvements on their x86 chips, and, in an effort to one-up one another, start producing high-end desktop POWER-based chips. This trickles down, and soon, the x86 and POWER architectures are in competition. POWER, being a better, more modern design, eventually overtakes x86 (starting with high-end desktop usage, and trickling down to the lower-end.) Multi-core POWER chips (or SPARC, depending on the fantasy) often run with one or two cores dedicated to x86 emulation for backwards compatibility. Microsoft, having just released Blackcomb, finds their target chip slowly relegated to emulation, concurrent with the development of their next OS. Unable to use the existing codebase (which is, by this time, highly x86-centric), Microsoft is forced to roll out a new OS, built from scratch. Using some of the lessons learned from Microsoft Research, a new OS is built, embracing the core values of security, modularity, and portability. While the OS is good, the lost development time provides the boost that *nix needed. Linux takes marketshare, as does Mac OS X. During Microsoft's transition period, Apple seizes the opportunity, and releases Mac OS X for all x86 boxes. The driver situation is a little rocky at first, but open source helps ease the pain. By wholeheartedly supporting open source development, Apple leverages their work, soon gaining support across the board. Already having years of experience with the POWER chips, their dual-platform OS development allows them to provide compatible OS's for POWER and x86 computers -- and translation software (already written) helps unify the two.
Well... that's my dream anyways.
Parent
Hey Intel... the CPU is a commodity! (Score:2, Funny)
ROFL!!!
More registers please. (Score:2)
Screw silicon and metal (Score:2)
Add a FPGA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
That'll be productive... (Score:2)
There's the rants from the green party I suppose - and the "stop acting like a monopolist" crowd.
Real innovation... (Score:3, Funny)
I have a few (Score:3, Interesting)
Open up the xeon cpu to chipset links so you have more choice in chipsets like AMD systems do.
Dump FB-DIMMS from xeon systems or make the same chipset with FB-DIMMS or DDR 2/3 ECC. The new xeno chipset with 2 pci-e 2.0 x16 slots should be FB-DIMM or DDR ECC.
Make the new chipsets with all pci-e 2.0 slots not some 2.0 and the rest 1.1 yes the new xeon chip with pci-e 2.0 will only have 2 slots with pci-e 2.0.
Go to true quad-core not 2 dual's linked by FSB.
Dump the FSB and go to the HT bus.
The summary fails. (Score:2)
Intel has quietly launched a new online community that it plans to use to take feedback and suggestions from OEMs and end users for new features in its vPro chips and management software.
The article does not mention anything about this. In fact:
Intel envisions that the community will grow to allow users to get answers from other community members faster than Intel's support group can answer questions.
is more like it. It's an attempt to connect people who know about Intel processors with people who want to know about them. Lets face it, if Intel wanted feedback or information about how best to proceed with chip design, there are plenty of places they could go and listen. No, Intel are NOT interested in listening to your ideas on optimising their chips, though I understand how such a skew might generate public interest.
I want a Six Million Dollar CPU ... (Score:2)
Oh, and use less power too.
Bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be quiet about this too if I were Intel. This is a stupid idea. Half your end users (including me) couldn't care less about what chip they have in their computer as long at works. The other half of your end users want the chips in pink or with an integrated LED. Either way a forum like this will just piss people off, because even the good suggestions aren't going to mesh with their five-year development schedule.
All I ask for is a chip (Score:3, Funny)
Programmable TPM (Score:5, Interesting)
They're taking advantage of a new trend (Score:3, Insightful)
Then some corporate drones looked at what was happening and though "how can we take advantage?" So they got the "each contribute a small amount" part but overlooked the "everyone takes advantage" part. The corporate version is more like "everyone contributes a small amount and the corporation takes advantage". Many corporations have tried this plan and they've been left wondering "what went wrong?"
So here comes Intel - they're asking the people to contribute ideas and then they'll take advantage of them. We've seen this play out before and the result is always the same. Hey, Intel - if you really want people to do your work for you, you need to include some way to compensate them in your plan. You didn't really expect them to do this for you for free, did you?
I suspect they did - and when this plan fails miserably they'll pick some unfortunate person in their corporation to take the blame for the failure. They'll never for a moment think that their plan was flawed and doomed to failure from the start...
I have a suggestion... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't mean the current minor onboard garbage they're putting out now. I mean real, high end chips to combat the GeForce 8800 series or the Radeon x2900 series. With their own GPU development department, and their open drivers, they could really blow open the market.
Why not?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And do you really want a single company controlling not only the CPU market but also the GPU, wireless, and what else markets? Doesn't this sound like giving too much power to a single manufacturer?
I think AMD-ATI will soon satisfy GNU/Linux and BSD users. But even if they don't you can always support projects that seek to produce open graphics hardware.
"quietly lauched"? (Score:3, Funny)
one suggestion I would make is bring down the cost of mainstream CPUs to a more affordable price, like $10 or so. That would be nice. Thanks Intel.
Computing Appliance (Score:4, Interesting)
I want a small, fanless computing appliance that is going to last 20 years or more with zero maintenance other than software. No dust, no noise, no ticking time bomb spinning parts and electrolytic capacitors. Something that will not require me buying a huge solar panel if I want to go that route. If I have data storage needs, USB, firewire or eSATA external hard drive enclosures will suffice.
Captain Marvell and the Super-Duper-Threading (Score:4, Interesting)
*(Cores are process-shrinked versions of the Intel 8088)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anecdotally, the company is like 70% asian according to a friend of mine who works there.
Re: (Score:2)
I have a keyboard you might find interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, but you will get a free Intel coffee mug with a picture of your billion-dollar CPU on it.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that's the approach Buffalo is taking on their new design.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)