Intel to serve up chips with everything

Intel faces some difficulties in the higher end of the business IT market. It has been forced over the past year or so to play a fairly public game of catch-up with rival AMD over 64bit extensions and dual-core architectures, and it is seeing some business customers defect to AMD as a direct consequence.

Meanwhile, Intel still claims that its 64bit Itanium processor is on the road to success – a claim that leaves most pundits puzzled.

The firm’s answer to these problems is to try to alter the perception of its place in the enterprise market. The move started last year when Intel began to describe itself as a server platform company, a definition that caused confusion among people who considered that such an entity should include disk drives, power supplies, operating systems, management tools and the like.

But the terminology suggests Intel is moving away from being a razzamatazz technology provider and towards being what might be termed a “significant sub-systems” provider. It may also lead the firm into an area where it could integrate more platform capabilities. While it probably won’t go as far as producing solid state disk drives, there is likely to be more integration that builds on Moore’s Law.

Back in 1979, at a Solid State Circuits conference in Philadelphia, Intel’s Gordon Moore made an observation based on his own famous law. As device complexity increases, he said, the number and diversity of functions that can be integrated onto a chip also increases. The skill is in deciding what gets integrated.

Over the years Intel has integrated functionality that was separate within the PC – graphics controllers are a classic case. Now it is targeting server functionality, which will burnish its new image as a platform provider.

It already has on-chip power management firmware, on-chip virtualisation support, and is close to introducing Active Management Controller, which will provide a small part of the systems management capabilities found with the likes of Tivoli, OpenView etc. Other functions can be expected in future.

The next stage of Intel’s shift to being a platform provider will be the introduction of what Kirk Skaugen, vice-president of Intel’s Server Platforms Group, calls a Formal Usage Model. This will include support for blade servers, dynamic service provision and node configuration management. It will, no doubt, include a good deal more, though details have not yet been announced.

So this is a gamble for Intel. For its strategy to work, Intel has to make the right choices for what to integrate into the platform. If it chooses correctly, it will free IT managers from a lot of day-to-day admin, giving them more time to consider important decisions.