Intel Revamps vPro Platform

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting in on a teleconference with Intel, as they announced their revamped vPro platform. For those who don’t know, vPro is much like Centrino - a platform marketing initiative. In this case, it is targeted to businesses, and centers around security and virtualization.

Intel vPro processor technology packages a powerful new Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor, Intel® Q35 Express chipset and several technology innovations offering a host of security and management capabilities for desktop PCs.

New in this product is Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT, formerly codenamed LaGrande). In addition, Intel enhanced its Intel vPro processor technology with improved System Defense Filters. These filters can identify greater numbers and varieties of threats in the network traffic flow.

The latest version of Intel vPro processor technology also offers an embedded trust agent, the first certified by Cisco, providing the industry’s only 802.1x compatible manageability solution not dependent on OS-availability.

Further boosting PC manageability is the newest generation of Intel Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT). Intel® AMT allows for inventory and repair PCs “out of band” – meaning even if the OS has crashed or the PC is turned off.

The new Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor and Intel® Q35 Express chipset together will deliver improvements in energy-efficiency through a combination of performance increases and reductions in power consumption, thereby helping businesses support their own “Green IT” objectives and Energy Star* requirements. For the highest-volume processor, the 2007 Intel vPro processor technology delivers 30 percent greater performance than the previous-generation product, while significantly reducing power consumption. Source: Intel Press Release

We Say: As presented, the vPro platform is for businesses - and you can bet your IT department will be happy with many of these updates, as well as PCs built with them. They’re not really all that interesting for consumers, but in the future, many of these initiatives will likely work their way into consumer products.