3/19 - 2005 was a good year for Intel. Nevertheless, their year ended on a whimper. Intel failed to hit its financial numbers for the fourth quarter, thanks largely to data that came in during the month of December. To make matters worse, Intel was forced to update its financial estimates for the first quarter of 2006 and revise its numbers downwards. Justin Rattner, Chief Technology Officer for Intel, in his opening keynote at Intel Developer Forum (IDF), mentioned that the company has been under enormous competitive pressure. That pressure comes from a nimble little company named AMD.

AMD, to the surprise of many in 2005, implemented its dual-core processor better than Intel. Today AMD's desktop chips tend to outperform their intel counterparts, not to mention the x86 server chips. Wall Street smells blood.

Possibly the most important thing said at the whole recent Spring IDF was when Justin Rattner mentioned that Intel intended to concentrate on implementing multicore efficiently, rather than just keep adding more cores. This means that Intel intends to compete with AMD head-to-head on the quality of its dual-core and multicore implementations, and not just race to put more cores on a die, or in a package. Last year, Intel was the first to ship a dual-core desktop processor, only to be outdone by AMD a short time later.

With this background in mind, let us turn out attention to the recent IDF.

Last year, Intel announced that it was moving to a new microarchitecture, something Intel does about once every five or six years. This year, Intel gave that microarchitecture a name, Intel Core. The Core microarchitecture builds upon the previous Pentium-M microarchitecture, which was orignally designed primarily for laptops. Intel, however, has always maintained that the new microarchitecture also has strong elements of the previous Pentium 4 as well, "such as wide data pathways and streaming instructions".

Intel underwent a transformation in 2005 from a company that primarily manufactures microprocessors to a company that produces platforms. Centrino is an example of a platform. So is Viiv. Another platform is Averill, Intel's Professional Business Platform. Platforms consist of a microprocessor, a chipset, and other software and hardware technologies, and Averill is no different. The Averill CPU will be Conroe and the chipset Broadwater. Technologies in the Averill platform include Virtualization Technology (VT), Active Management Technology (AMT), and LaGrande Technology (LT). "LT consists of hardware extensions to Intel silicon that enable the platform to protect against software–based attacks and protect the confidentiality and integrity of data".

Turning to servers, a new CPU is to ship this month for a new Xeon platform called Bensley. A quad-core CPU codenamed Clovertown was demonstrated at IDF that is due in 2007. IT managers ought to be able to upgrade their Bensley Xeons to the quad-core Clovertown CPU, since "Clovertown is socket–compatible with the Bensley platform".

Intel began shipping CPUs with Virtualization Technology (VT) late last year and is already hard at work on second generation VT. Both VMware and Microsoft have announced their support and collaboration on the new spec, called VT for Directed I/O (VT-d), which maps I/O devices to virtual machines. What's interesting is that the new VT-d dovetails into PCI Express technology. The VT-d spec "enables standardization efforts in the PCI special interest group to enable I/O virtualization capabilities in PCI Express I/O Devices".

Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) remotely manages client PCs and inventories and patches software running on those PCs. Second generation Active Management Technology (AMT) shall be a part of Intel's Averill Professional Business Platform. AMT and SMS can work together to provision a remote PC, even though the machine is turned off!

Intel also introduced a new storage platform. The Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology makes use of Intel's embedded processors and offers up to 2 terabytes of storage. The platform is primarily for small businesses, not consumers. But who knows? If Intel sells enough of these Entry Storage Systems, maybe the price will come down, and NAS may be as cheap as external hard drives.

Details about next generation Centrino and wireless technologies were unveiled at IDF. The Core microarchitecture CPU for notebooks, codename Merom, shall be the CPU. The wireless shall be the new MIMO (multiple in, multiple out) version of WiFi, which is to be 802.11n. Next generation Centrino is also to incorporate in some way, shape, or fashion non-volatile solid-state memory. There's been a lot of talk this past year about NAND flash replacing the hard drive. If this ever comes to pass, this is where it will start.

Next generation Centrino shall not ship until 2007. However, the CPU shall ship before then and owners of Core Duo CPUs can in theory upgrade to Merom since the initial version of Merom "will be socket or pin–compatible with the current version of Intel® Core™ Duo processors".

Intel is accustomed to announcing new things at IDF, but this year it actually did something new as well. It allowed people to benchmark its silicon that is currently under development. Conroe doesn't ship for another four to six months, so the benchmarks will have to be redone. Even so, preliminary results bode well for the future for Intel. Rave reviews. AMD has its work cut out for it.

One analyst wrote that "Intel greatly exceeded our expectations".

Another: "Intel is back in the game".