Intel bets on open source future

Where Centrino emphasised power management and integrated Wi-Fi, PBP is designed to make desktops easier for enterprises to manage, and to wring more performance out of the silicon. Active Management, embedded in the chipset, allows administrators to remotely manage desktop machines over the corporate network, and quickly remove them from the network if they're infected by a virus, for example. VT allows a system to function effectively as two separate machines, running two separate operating systems, with little or no loss of performance.

Future plans for PBP include adding new features such as wireless chips, and a possible Centrino-like rebrand and marketing campaign in 2006. Intel is also planning further platforms aimed at business and home desktops.

The payoff for Intel: if businesses are spending less money on maintaining their systems, that frees up budget for capital expenditures like new desktop hardware. The new technology also gives companies a reason to invest in new hardware, in a saturated market where performance increases have started to seem less relevant.

Virtualisation
Much of Intel's work with open source is geared towards making this strategy work by ensuring the new technology is supported by Linux — indeed, features like VT are likely to see Linux support long before they show up in Windows.

That's where projects such as Xen come in. Xen started off as an obscure project at Cambridge University, designed to allow multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single computer, a field dominated in high-end servers by EMC's subsidiary VMWare. VMWare's software runs each operating system in a separate virtual machine, a complete hardware simulation; this allows the operating systems to run unmodified, but at the cost of some performance.

Xen uses a process called paravirtualisation that eliminates the virtual machine, allowing much better performance — typically around 2 percent compared with a typical 20 percent performance penalty with VMWare. However, paravirtualisation requires that the operating system be ported to run on Xen, something that isn't possible with proprietary operating systems like Windows. Application-level software doesn't need to be modified.

Intel's contributions to Xen mean that Xen running on VT-enabled Intel chips will be able to run operating systems without modifications; they won't run as fast as modified software, but should still be significantly faster than those running in VMWare. (Xen is also working on support for AMD's virtualisation scheme, code-named Pacifica, which is due next year.)

"Intel has worked extensively with our team to develop and integrate the VT extensions for Xen," says Xen's Crosby. "As such, Xen will be the industry's first supported code base for VT, when VT processors ship."

Intel's attitude towards open source has been "extremely positive", with contributions including support for EM64T — Intel's 64-bit extensions for x86 — and porting Xen to IA64. "Intel's work on VT in particular was a major contribution to the [open source] community, since VT itself has not even shipped, and the feature set is close to Intel's heart," says Crosby.

Without Xen, Intel might have to wait another three years for VT support to appear in Windows, says Gartner's Gammage. "VT technology is arriving imminently, and Pacifica is on the way early next year. Both Intel and AMD are keen to see their developments producing some return, and that's not going to happen without software support. We're unlikely to see it in Microsoft until 2008," he says.