This significant statement by Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, kicked off his keynote speech at the March, 2005 IDF (Intel Developer Forum) .

Intel has vowed to bring it's higher end platform features such as greater management capabilities through it's "embedded IT architecture" and virtualization (formerly known as Vanderpool for desktop and Silvervale for server, into it's full line of processors, from their top of the line XEON and Itanium processors, down to their budget desktop chips. On November 14th, Intel continued to work towards that goal with the introduction of virtualization technology into their desktop PC processor line.

Virtualization Technology... What is it?

Virtualization Technology, in it's simplest form allows a computer to be partitioned so that it can run several types of software, applications, or even entire operating systems simultaneously in their own virtual space or "container". While Virtualization has been popular at the software level in the server market for several years now, (VMware first introduced their x86 virtualization product in February of 1999), the reality of bringing it to the hardware level and the desktop of everyday home users is an entirely new proposition. Microsoft has already incorporated the ability to use this technology into it's Enterprise edition of it's next Windows O/S, Vista, which will hopefully be saving us all many headaches down the road.

By using this model, each set of applications are protected from the next. In the event of a crash or other conflict the remaining processes continue running, oblivious to the catastrophe that could have been if the applications been running intertwined in the same space.

Virtualization will allow users to accomplish tasks such as browsing the web in a completely safe environment. By using a totally isolated browser window in which to net-surf, the act of closing the window would eliminate any trace of spyware, ad-ware, or malicious scripting which was picked up during the session. Virtual sessions could also allow IT departments to run PC backup, recovery, and update security software in the background while a user continues to perform his daily tasks uninterrupted.

Intel actually has different plans for users of VT based on the platform that you will be using. For server users, Intel Virtualization Technology makes system software called virtual machine monitor more robust and resilient. For desktop and laptop users, Intel Virtualization Technology enables a new deployment model, called appliances, to be run in isolated virtual machines.

Intel Virtualization Technology is part of a larger collection of premier Intel designed and manufactured silicon technologies that deliver improved computing benefits to home and business users, and IT Managers. These technologies called T's (or *T) are already being implemented into your daily computing experience. The idea behind these technologies is that the computing experience can be enhanced significantly by introducing technology to help organize and protect your computing environment. Intel's efforts to focus their development in this direction, instead of simply trying to chase Moore's Law, are much wiser and will work out much better in the long run than simply trying to increase the speed of their processor platform.

Other T's Technologies include:

• Hyper-Threading Technology
• Vanderpool Technologies (Intel's codename for VT)
• Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology
• Intel® Active Management Technology
• LaGrande Technology (Intel codename)

Intel Virtualization Technology Enabled Processors

Even though the Pentium 4 processor 662 @ 3.6GHz. and the Pentium 4 processor 672 @ 3.8GHz.have been introduced, and are readily available, it will require more time for them to filter down through the distribution channel. System builders can expect to be shipping systems containing the new technology early in 2006. Intel is looking at a timeframe of around 2007 or 2008 before the technology is considered "mainstream". This time frame gives Microsoft, and any other developer, plenty of time to tweak their software to take full advantage of the technology and benefits of virtualization technology if they so desire

One of the speculations as to why Intel chose to release this new technology for the desktop in it's single core processors first was that some of their larger corporate and government clients are standardized on the single core processors and they wanted to give them the opportunity to work with Virtualization Technology without having to change their system configurations. Dual-core Pentium D processors based on the Presler core should be rolling out in Q1, 2005 and will probably be the main processors that early-adopters will be using while bringing VT to the desktop.

Intel has also already introduced VT into their XEON "Paxville" chips and plans to update Itanium server chips and their Pentium M notebooks within the 2006 calendar year. About the only Intel chips that don't look to be getting the VT benefit (at least at this time), are the XScale chip family members. Originally slated to coincide with the launch of Microsoft's "Vista" O/S, the entire process of bringing VT to the desktop has been accelerated from within Intel due to a wealth of positive feedback in it's initial testing phases

Components of Virtualization Technology

In order to use the Intel Virtualization Technology enabled processors, you will require a few key components.

A VT Enabled Processor
Choose one of the many upcoming and already released models from Intel
A VT Enabled Chipset
Desktop chipsets such as the 945 and 955
A BIOS which supports VT
Recent BIOS updates have a VT Enable/Disable option
VT Enabled Software
VMware, Xen, Microsoft Vista, Virtual Server, Virtual PC

A computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, a VT enabled motherboard BIOS, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and for some uses, certain platform software enabled for it. Functionality, performance, or other benefits will vary depending on hardware and software configurations. Intel Virtualization Technology-enabled BIOS and VMM applications are currently in development.

Benefits of Virtualization Technology

In addition to the basic security enhancements provided by using Virtualization Technology, there are benefits, both in the desktop and server platforms, that will assure the success of this feature.

Desktop Advantages:

• Legacy Software Support (consolidation)
• Training / QA (consolidation)
• Activity Partitioning (isolation)
• Manageability (isolation, migration, embedding)

Server Advantages:

• Server Consolidation (consolidation)
• Failover Infrastructure (migration)
• Flexible Datacenter (migration)
• Manageability (isolation, migration, embedding)

Who's Invested in Virtualization Technology?

Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource are three companies closely watching the development of the mainstream VT market. Along with many others, these companies have long been working to bring secure computing to the mass market through their powerful Virtual Machine software. Prior to the introduction of the new VT chips from Intel and the upcoming "Pacifica" chips from AMD, the software had to perform the majority of the instruction set virtualization that is now handled at a hardware level.

Microsoft saw the benefits of virtualization technology and recognized that it would become a very important factor in the future of computing. This caused them to acquire Connectix Corporation who had originally written Virtual PC and Virtual Server for both the x86 platform and the Macintosh platform. Along with continuing new revisions of this software, the incorporation of the technology into their Vista Operating System shows the confidence that Microsoft has in it's future.

Final Thought on Virtualization Technology

To say that Virtualization Technology is going to be a big change in the way our computers work in our daily lives is probably a pretty big understatement. This technology has the ability to reduce or eliminate downtime due to malicious code, protect our valuable data, allow better usage of available computing resources, and reduce the amount of computers needed in any given location to do any number of specific tasks. Servers can be consolidated down from several machines running several operating systems, down to 1 machine running them all. Home PC's can be reduced down so you don't need a desktop machine, and a gaming machine, and a "Media Center" machine, since all tasks can be handled simultaneously within their own isolated environments.

"We are on record as saying that VT is the most significant change to PC architecture this decade" - Martin Reynolds, Gartner Senior Analyst

Virtualization Technology Links

• Intel Server Virtualization Website
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
• VMware, Inc.
• Xen Source

  The new Radeon® X1000 video chipsets are X1300, X1600 and X1800 series graphics cards deliver unique quality-enhancing features offered exclusively by ATI. This new series has basically three families, each one for a distinct market segment: Radeon X1300 for the entry-level market, Radeon X1600 for the mid-range market and Radeon X1800 for the high-end market. In each series there are several models being launched. The RADEON X1000 is a completely new architecture that has little in common with ATI’s previous generations of GPUs. By the way, the senior model of the RADEON families, RADEON X1800 (R520) chip, is more complex with 320 million transistors. Note that the RADEON X1600 (RV530) targeted for the mainstream market segments consists of 157 million transistors, while RADEON X1300 (RV515) is the first value chip that is built of about 100 million transistors.

  The Radeon X1000 series is different, It utilizes a full FP32 precision all of the time, meaning that partial precision hints in the game engine's code are simply ignored by ATI's new architecture in the same way that they were with all GPU's residing from R300. Essentially, this means that all shader instructions will be processed and completed using a full 128-bit floating point precision, through all of the Radeon X1000 series. Adding hardware assist for video playback has become more important for graphics cards. Current video cards already accelerate basic MPEG-2 and WMV9 video playback to reduce CPU utilization, but ATI's new Radeon X1000 series cards will support the new H.264 and VC-1 HD compression formats in advance of Blu-ray and HD DVD. The new cards also have advanced video de-interlacing and scaling support to improve image quality.

  Radeon X1300 video cards are already available in the channel, but Radeon X1600 is still not available to hit the channel shelves until December. ATI focused on efficiency and scalability with their new GPU architecture. Their goals were to reduce idle time and latency, while decoupling processing units from their previous rigidly defined pipelines. ATI also wanted to expand their feature set, and they've done so by finally introducing full Shader Model 3.0 support in the entire X1000 graphics family, from top to bottom. The entire line supports ATI CrossFire multi-GPU rendering, they have dual-link DVI outputs and are equipped with ATI's recently announced Avivo video engine.

The ATI Radeon X1000 Graphics Image Quality Features (click here for more details)

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• 105 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
• Dual-link DVI
• Four pixel shader processors
• Two vertex shader processors
• 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
• 32-bit/1-channel, 64-bit/2-channel, and 128-bit/4-channel configurations
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• AGP 8x configurations also supported with external bridge chip\
• Dynamic Voltage Control

High Performance Memory Controller

• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

• 321 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
• Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching
• Sixteen pixel shader processors
• Eight vertex shader processors
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• Dynamic Voltage Control

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
• 3Dc+ texture compression High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Render to vertex buffer support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline, Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes, Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns sampling New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance
• Quality modes, Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode, Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes, Up to 128-tap texture filtering, Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Engine

• High performance programmable video processor Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & trans coding DXVA support De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
  Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing 3:2 pull down (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support, Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters, DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready
  Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
  Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
  Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with under scan support for all outputs Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays Fast, glitch-free mode switching VGA mode support on all outputs
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 55