Enterprise security and systems management were a major
focus on the second day of the Intel developer Forum in San Jose as
the company previewed PC technology for 2003/4.
During his keynote, Louis Burns, general manager at Intel's
desktop platforms group, discussed how Intel would offer simpler IT
management for users this year and 2004.
First, he said, by using Intel's hyper-threading technology
within the next forthcoming "Prescott" Pentium processor ,
"multi-tasking can run very effectively". Hyper-threading would
allow an IT administrator to run system maintenance on end-user PCs
in the background, without affecting the performance of the
applications the end users were running.
Intel also introduced its Granite Peak initiative, aimed at
simplifying systems management, by freezing PC configurations for
18 months.
"Granite Peak is targeting one of the biggest issues IT faces
today," Burns said, adding that IT departments had asked the
industry to reduce the number of PC configurations they needed to
manage.
"On Intel-based systems with Intel-based chipsets, Granite Peak
will guarantee no changes [to device drivers] for six
quarters."
Burns said Intel would also provide a single set of device
drivers for notebook and desktop PCs, again to the reduce
complexity of managing IT installations.
Intel showed its concept PC designs for 2003 and 2004. Both
featured Intel's trusted computing platform, based on a
crypto-processor which uses RSA's 2048 encryption key to secure the
PC. The idea behind the trusted computing platform is to ensure the
PC starts up in a secure and stable state.
In Intel's design, a device known as the trusted platform module
(TPM) could be configured to encrypt information on the PC's
configuration as soon as the PC is powered up. This information
could be checked using system administration tools over a network
to verify that the PCs configuration had not been corrupted in any
way.
For the checks to work effectively, Intel is counting on
operating system support, such as the Palladium initiative from
Microsoft. With such support from the operating system, Intel said
a system administrator would be able to check if an end-user was
connecting unauthorised devices to their PCs, such as a portable
hard disk, to prevent confidential data from being copied.