Comment Articles

Intel's platform games

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Mar 2005 18:05 GMT

You can see this policy in everything Intel says and does at Spring IDF 2005. The Digital Enterprise Group has ruthlessly divided its world into client, server, storage and communications infrastructure platforms -- each of which could, perhaps even will, adopt a public brand that parallels the mobile division's Centrino. Although new technologies will still span platforms, they won’t in general be considered as individual entities. You want to talk about multicore? For now, you can -- but Intel would rather focus on what it means for Napa, Lyndon and Bensley, the codewords for portable, desktop and enterprise DP servers.

This approach has its problems. Intel may have launched Sonoma -- its next-generation Centrino system -- but in the absence of simultaneously refreshing the main brand itself customers, retailers and even industry watchers seem only vaguely aware that anything's happened. Platforms and brands are more complicated to maintain than pure products: long term, Intel has a lot to learn.

But this simultaneous change in marketing and engineering focus is no coincidence. Both reflect the way that technologies have stopped being interesting for their own sake and are now judged ruthlessly on what they deliver and how good they are at delivering it. This makes the job of Intel watching harder: as the things that Intel sell become more abstract, measuring their success or lack thereof becomes harder and more subjective. Some things won’t change: in the maxed-out, muscle-bound world of high-end servers, raw statistics translate directly to measures of goodness. But how to measure Intel's Active Management Technology against its competitors? If that troubles you, think what it must look like to AMD.

Whether the intelligence in the systems is adequate to efficiently manage huge numbers of independent execution units, and whether software designers will find good ways to exploit these resources in applications, are questions that only time will answer. Likewise, it'll take a while to find out whether Intel's platform approach will bring it into conflict with its OEMs, who have been used to making those platform pitches for themselves. One thing is undeniable, though: after a couple of shaky years, Intel has found the discipline to buy itself that time.