UK

Point, Shoot, Listen

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:38:19 GMT

It is difficult for me to imagine the daily challenges faced by people with visual impairments or dyslexia in a world predominantly designed for those without these difficulties. Today in the UK, Intel’s Digital Health Group has announced the launch of the Intel® Reader, a device designed to help transform the printed word into speech.

This mobile and handheld device is about the size of a paperback book and is designed to increase independence for people who have trouble reading standard print. In the UK alone, there are an estimated six million people with dyslexia and two million people with visual impairments such as partial sightedness or blindness, for whom reading printed words is difficult or impossible.

The Intel® Reader works by pointing it at a page of text, for example a book or a news paper, and taking a picture of it. The image is then converted into digital text and is read back aloud to the user. On its own, this is pretty cool but the device is a lot more flexible than that. It can also work in social settings – reading restaurant menus, grocery prices or the sports results, bringing independence and confidence to the user. If you had a lot of text to capture, a portable capture station is also available.

For the techies out there, some of the latest Intel technology is under the hood including an Intel® Atom™ processor, an Intel® Solid-State Drive and software developed on the Moblin Linux platform.

Both the British Dyslexia Association and the Royal National Institute of Blind People have announced their support of the Intel® Reader as an important advance in assistive technology.

More information on the Intel® and information on where to buy it are available at www.intel.co.uk/reader

BREAKING NEWS - 'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

craig.p.wallace@intel.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:37:45 GMT

Please enjoy this rather humorous video made by a YouTuber call 'ServerWhistleblower'. We don't know who you are but keep them coming!

'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

Your IT Galaxy Team.

US Healthcare Reform Challenges

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:09:49 GMT

Over the next two days, I’ll be blogging from the 2009 Connected Health Symposium, run by Partners Healthcare Center for Connected Health, in Boston.

The opening keynote at this year’s symposium was delivered by Stuart Altman, Professor of National Health Policy at Brandeis University, who spoke on the topic of healthcare reform and some of the challenges it brings.

In 1971, US spending on healthcare delivery was $75 billion, or 7.5% of GDP but today this has reached $2.5 trillion or approximately 17% of GDP. Many people have tried to address this for years but 3 clear issues have emerged that need to be addressed:

1) Create a universal healthcare financing system

2) Develop programmes to reduce the rate of growth in healthcare spending

3) Improve the quality of care delivered

The current political discussions in the US try to address these issues and will likely reduce the overall federal spend but spend from other sectors may increase. These would include increased spending by states and increased payments for insurance by younger people.

Professor Altman then introduced what he called Altman’s Law: almost every powerful constituent group favours health reform but, if it is not their plan, they prefer the status quo. In the case of the current reform, the industry to see most negative impact will be the Insurance Companies – all other stakeholder groups will either get additional funding or stay the same, making it easier for the reform to succeed.

In conclusion he stated the need to change the payment and delivery system, through an appropriate but effective comparative effectiveness system that includes clinical and cost effectiveness components.

Care Plans in the Cloud

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:27:06 GMT

Last week Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Google Health and previously involved in many other successful ventures, launched his new company – keas. This is quite an interesting development as the goal of keas is to help you understand what your health data means and how you can use it to be as healthy as possible.

Keas works by getting you to complete a basic health questionnaire and to answer some questions about your family history and your wellness goals. It then assigns certain care plans to you, which, in theory, enable you to either manage your condition better or assist you in achieving your wellness goals. These care plans are designed by experts but do not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

What makes this proposition interesting is that you can upload your medical data to the system from other services, such as Google Health, or enter details of clinical tests that you may have undergone. Keas will then attempt to provide an interpretation for you and assist you in dealing with possible next steps. This is one of the first sites to pull all of these different elements together to offer you comprehensive advice and guidance.

It sounds simple but in fact this can be a challenging area from a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Many clinicians are reluctant for data to be stored outside their country (and sometimes even outside their offices!) despite the fact that many countries have implemented stringent data privacy regulations. Additionally, providing care plans that are useful, while not crossing the line of delivering medical advice could be quite a challenge.

Keas is backed by a strong management and advisory team, and it will be interesting to see how it delivers over the coming months.

Virtualisation as the foundation of the Cloud

alan.priestley@intel.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:35:50 GMT

VM 09 @ Earls Court this week brings together many of the key elements driving Cloud Computing with the software and hardwrae vendors discussing their offerings to enable IT to deploy and utilise Cloud based infrastructure.

One of the major tenets of Cloud architectures is the ability to seamlessly deploy workload anywhere within the cloud and to scale available compute resources based on workload demand. Virtualisation is the key element that enables cloud providers to deliver these capabilities to their customers and it is the availability of server hardware with in-built virtualisation support that is the underpinning of these developments.

One of the key considerations when developing virtualisation software ( the hypervisor ) is how to ensure that the guest ( i.e. virtualised ) workloads do not see that they have been virtualised, to do this it is essential that the impact of the hypervisor is minimised.

For some years now Intel has been working with the hypervisor vendors to implement hardware support for virtualisation within their processors. This support is aimed at making it easier for the hypervisor vendors to implement their code and to ensure that they are able to transparently virtualize the guest or hosted workloads.

Intel’s virtualisation technology has focused on 3 key areas – the processor, the I/O subsystem and the network interfaces.

· Processor enhancements – new instructions and protection model that enables the hypervisor to co-exist with unmodified guest operating systems and to host multiple operating systems on the same hardware. With successive generations of Intel processors new features have been added to the processor to help the hypervisor operate and to reduce its overhead.

· I/O subsystem – one of the limiters in early virtualisation implementations was the ability to ensure adequate I/O throughput and isolation between various workloads sharing the same physical I/O devices. Many new Intel Xeon processor based servers now have virtualisation support built into the chipsets.

· Network interfaces – another challenge with running multiple guest environments on the same server has been the need for them to share the same physical network interfaces and for the hypervisor to manage the separation and distribution of network traffic between the various guest virtual machines. This has been addressed with the latest network interface chips that provide hardware support to manage movement of network data directly between the LAN and virtual machines

It’s also worth noting that raw CPU performance plays a significant part in determining the number of workloads a virtualised server can host. For example if the hypervisor consumes ~10% of the available compute resource, reducing the hypervisor overhead by 10% would result in ~1% more CPU resource being available to the guest workloads, whereas increasing the CPU performance by 10% provides 10% more compute resource to the guest environments – which could equate to 1 or more addition virtual machines being hosted.

When all this is hardware support is put together with the software developments that the hypervisor vendors have been making in terms of tools to dynamically provision and move workload between various physical servers we can start to see how the underpinnings of cloud computing are being put in place.

For further reading there’s lots of good stuff in the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation tracks at the recent IDF, all the materials are here.

The UK's Largest Virtual Event - VM 09

craig.p.wallace@intel.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:04:33 GMT

And IT Galaxy will be there...

07-09 October, 10.30am | Earls Court, London | Stand 716, IBM Theatre

VM 09 returns for it's 2nd year to exhibit the most up-to-date virtualisation technologies, and with one emphasis that we are delighted about - Server Virtualisation.

According to IP Expo "The event will include keynote presentations, a seminar programme running over both days and hands-on demonstrations, which will help visitors to address the issues currently dominating this fast-growing market." (Source: http://www.ipexpo.co.uk/IP-Expo/Virtualisation/)

Our very own Business Solutions Director, Steve Shakespeare, will be hosting a seminar in association with IBM titled 'More performance, less power: The server nirvana'.

Where?

Server Virtualisation Theatre - IBM

Synopsis: Breakthroughs in processor performance are transforming the way IT organizations utilise and improve data centre productivity and energy efficiency. Intel® Xeon® processors based on Intel® Core™ microarchitecture integrate hardware for virtualization into all key server components including Intel® Virtualization Technology helping IT organizations consolidate more applications and heavier workloads on each server to improve flexibility, reliability, and total cost of ownership (TCO). As the basis of Intel's most advanced –Intelligent- server technology, Intel Core microarchitecture improves virtualization performance across every part of the server platform

Malcolm Hay will also be hosting a seminar, in association with DELL - titled 'Next Generation Client Computing Models'.

Where?

Data centre Management Theatre - DELL

Synopsis: Learn how the new developments in client side virtualization will enable new levels of client manageability and security without compromise to the end user mobility and performance experience.

Our virtualisation guru, Alan Priestly, has written several blogs on cloud computing. Check one out!
Alan will also be blogging LIVE from the clouds on the day of VM 09.

If you required any further information, please visit IP Expo. We look forward to seeing you there.

Your IT Galaxy Team

A v-Prositively Huge Success

craig.p.wallace@intel.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:26:46 GMT

post-vPro Live Chat.

Hello Members,

The vPro Live Chat held on 30th September and was a huge success. Altogether, we had 4 countries participating, over 10 experts sharing their plentiful knowledge, and vast amounts of queries being posed.

The experts....

Throughout the 2 hour session the vPro experts were asked many a question, for example; how to measure the financial benefits of vPro without implementing (TCO tool), what the usages of vPro are for SMBs and very small fleets of employees, and what they thought the future of vPro looked like.

For a full transcript of the Live Chat - click here.

We would like to thank all of you that participated and hope that your questions were answered. If not, please post a discussion and await a response.

A sneak peak of what's to come...

Xeon Live Chat in November. Further details to be published soon.

Your IT Galaxy Team

Ageing Gracefully at Home

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:51:16 GMT

The current issue of Business Week contains a feature (link) that looks at the Intel® Health Guide, a comprehensive personal health system that combines an in-home patient device with an online interface that allows clinicians to monitor patients and manage their care remotely.

The article gives a valuable insight into the life of a patient suffering with congestive heart failure, who used the solution to take daily blood-pressure and weight readings, as well as having regular video consultations with his nurse. His nurse in-turn was able to review the daily measurements from this and other patients, making any necessary interventions by getting them to see a doctor quickly.

A similar pilot was recently run in the UK at NHS Lothian (link), focusing on patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition that affects more than 3 million people and is the second largest cause of emergency hospital admissions in the UK.

In Great Britain, the Department of Health estimates that 17.5 million people are living with chronic disease (source) and the burden of chronic illness falls principally on the elderly, so as the population ages the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases will increase. Recent research states that conditions such as these can be challenging for patients because they often have to make significant changes in their social and family relationships while dealing with physical pain, prolonged medical treatment, psychological distress and growing restrictions on their daily activities, and as a result, their quality of life is significantly reduced. (Stanton et al. Health psychology: psychological adjustment to chronic disease)

There is a growing impetus to make better use of information and communications technology to meet the very considerable challenges that are facing the health system, and in helping to improve the lives of patients.

What are the challenges that you see?

Coming soon! Live chat with Intel® vPro™ Technology experts.

craig.p.wallace@intel.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:02:40 GMT

Coming soon! Live chat with Intel® vPro™ Technology experts.

~ September 30, 11:00 - 13:00 BST ~

Join us on September 30th for an interactive live chat with Intel® experts on Intel® vPro™ technology. During the event, you’ll have the chance to ask our experts your questions in real time.

Click here to find out more about vPro™ technology and receive a ‘save the date’ calendar invitation.

As members of IT Galaxy, you have the opportunity to get your vPro™ technology questions first in the queue. Ensure they get answered by simply commenting on this blog.

MEET THE EXPERTS...

David Hollway - Technical Marketing Engineer
Bio: David is a TME in the Platform Technology Enabling Group in Swindon. Having spent 14 years with Intel, he is currently responsible for supporting and promoting Intel vPro and related business computing technologies.

Steve Cutler - Technical Marketing Manager
Bio: Steve has been with Intel 23 years and worked in multiple roles covering business clients, servers, infrastructure, embedded, communications and HPC. His current role is ensuring that the IT ecosystem in Europe is able to effectively build new value add services around new technologies Intel is building into Business Clients. Main focus here over the last two years has been with the vPro platform and in particular with Active Management Technology.

Steve Davis - Technical Marketing Engineer
Bio: Steve is based in Swindon UK and is a member of the EMEA Solution Support Team. He joined Intel in 1988 and has worked in various technical and managerial roles. He is currently responsible for enabling and supporting deployments of Intel® vPro™ Platforms into Enterprise customers

Stuart Dommett - Business Development Manager
Bio: With 20 plus years of IT technical and management experience, Stuart’s recent roles in Intel have included European Product Manager for Intel’s vPro Technology. He is now driving technology adoption and business development for the UK System Integrator market sector.

Martin Lloyd - Enterprise Architect
Bio: Martin works within Intel's Worldwide Architect organisation and has over 25 years of experience within the Computing industry. Martin has worked for Intel for 9 years across several business lines including software development and consultancy. For the past three years he has worked alongside Intel’s global IT Outsourcing partners to integrate and enable Intel vPro platform technologies into new and existing enterprise client solutions and managed desktop service offerings.

Mark your calendar, post your questions, and join us!

Your IT Galaxy Team

Trying to Calculate Server Refresh ROI? Here’s How to Do It

edward.g.groden@intel.com — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:41:16 GMT

When the Xeon 5500 platforms launched earlier in the year, we also introduced a server refresh ROI estimator tool to help IT managers make sense of the significant OpEx savings they can achieve by making targeted investments in new server hardware.

We know that server deployment and refresh plans vary widely from customer to customer, so we needed a robust and interactive to help you model your savings opportunity, regardless of your situation. This tool delivers just that by taking the knowledge of Intel IT and industry leading ROI and TCO consultant Alinean and putting it into an easy-to-use tool!

We identified and were able to model eleven cost and savings categories (both pluses and minuses) in the Server Refresh ROI calculation and make these cost category assumptions able to be included, excluded or modified by you. You can model and view scenario output real time and print/email reports to share with others.

To share some numbers from the United States, in the first 3 months, there has been nearly 4,000 users of the ROI estimator, and of those users, almost 800 users have printed reports to share with others in their organizations. Here’s some of the encouraging feedback they’ve been hearing from their customers:

· CIO for major US hospital: “This would help my IT staff justify the financial value of the technology investment they are proposing. This has been a barrier to freeing up capital internally”

· IT Manager for major US bank: “I used to have regular funding for technology refresh projects. It was a given for my budget. However, with the increased constraints on capital, I now have to justify this type of spending”

· Technology Sales Consultant: “This tool helped me work better with my customer to gain a deeper understanding of their server environment and allowed us to jointly identify high ROI investments to improve their infrastructure”

Good news is the tool has continued to evolve based on feedback from the multiple customer engagements to date, and as a result, we have just released an updated version. Check them out:

Tool Training – How to Use: We heard that the benefits of using the Savings Refresh Estimator spanned many functional roles, making us realize that the use models for this type of tool and what users were looking for would vary dramatically from person to person. We have a pdf training guide today that can help you get started now.

PowerPoint Output: What would we do without PowerPoint? J We received feedback on the desire to make the output of this tool more sharable inside IT organizations and with business partners in a PowerPoint format as a way to communicate the opportunity and benefits for server refresh investment. So, we now have a PowerPoint output option in the reports section that breaks down the benefits of server refresh for a variety of audiences from executive staff to facilities to finance. Everyone inside your business can benefit from server refresh and now you can show them how.

Secure Analysis: We received feedback that many users wanted access off-line either as a way to use in meetings when connectivity was challenged or to protect internal data from exposure online. We now have the ability for you to run the tool on your laptop to support these use models.

More … More … More Functionality. We heard lots of requests and ideas to expand the level of functionality and analysis capabilities. We have to balance scope, complexity Keep these requests coming. The following changes are incorporated into today’s estimator.

· Virtualization to Virtualization Refresh Scenario – now included

· Virtualization Loading: Can edit and change VM/server new and old

· Custom Performance Data – enter you own performance data to better model what you expect to see in your biz

· Depreciation Cycle – no longer fixed at 4yrs .. can adjust

· Memory Sizing: information added to allow user analysis

· Processor Description: allows user to cross reference data to other more familiar terminology.

I encourage you to check out the tool and let us know how it helps you get a better handle on the benefits of server refresh. Feel free to respond with comments and feedback here.

1 Terabyte of RAM in a 4 socket server anyone?

ian.lloyd@intel.com — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:32:15 GMT

I was at a customer meeting recently and got asked the question whether it was possible to populate a server with 1 Terabyte of Memory. The customer is a HPC customer and they perform calculations on very large data sets. The requirement was to be able to have a very large dataset loaded into memory at any one time. Another requirement was that it was on an x86, 4-processor system.

One of the criteria for sizing overall memory capacity is the availability of large capacity DIMMS. The forthcoming Nehalem EX systems will be populated with DDR3 DIMMS and if the memory vendors make 16Gb Quad Rank DIMMS available, then the 1Tbyte of RAM is certainly a possibility.

Numbers of memory sots will vary from OEM vendor to vendor. Early samples of the Nehalem EX systems that I have seen are configured with 8 Memory boards each having 8 DIMM slots. Thus theoretically (and if your wallet can stand it!!) if the servers are populated with 16Gb DIMMS, then 16x8x8 = 1024 Gbyte of Memory.

Check out the press release on Nehalem EX here:-

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090526comp.htm

While I am on the subject of large memory capacities in a server....Another interesting development on 2 socket servers are the compute blades which form part of the Cisco UCS solution. The Cisco UCS B-250 M1 Extended Memory Blade Server uses some additional Cisco technology to increase the possible memory up to 384Gb per blade. This is a stunning development in terms of virtualisation capabilities in a 2 socket machine.

More information on the Cisco UCS Blade server can be found here:-

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10300/index.html

Intel goes from black sheep to white hope of technology

laura.conger@intel.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:51:52 GMT

The green shoots of recovery were encouraged by Intel's results despite the shadow of a EU fine hanging over the US chipmaker.

Read more here on what Graeme Wearden, of The Guardian, has to say on the EU ruling for Intel, a possible recovery of the market and roumours that Apple is finally ready to launch a tablet-like device ....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/15/intel-is-white-hope-of-technology

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series: The Right Product at the Right Time

anna.drury@intel.com — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:56:34 GMT

Intel’s Gordon Graylish (VP EMEA) shares his views on why now is the right time for investment, innovation and risk-taking and how the new Xeon 5500 processor series is the intelligent choice.

http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/090407_faster_graylish/index.htm

Demonstrating IT Value

alistair.kemp@intel.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:13:19 GMT

We all know IT is a complex business, and is only getting more complex. In this is sort of climate how do you establish best practices to ensure the IT is run optimally and is demonstrating value to the business. IT CMF could be the answer, and to tell us more about it, we caught up with one of its proponents. In the first of a series of regular interviews IT Galaxy talks to Martin Curley, Intel’s Global Director of IT innovation and research, to tell us more. Below are the highlights, and we’ll try and make the full audio available soon.

Can you explain what the IT CMF is and what problem it addresses?
Sure. IT CMF stands for Capability Maturity Framework. It has a very simple focus, although it’s focused on solving a very complex problem. We are trying to create a single, CIO-level tool or playbook that can help the CIO navigate all the many challenges the CIO faces while at the same time improving IT capability and ultimately the value contribution from IT to the business. There’s been a systemic problem around the creation of actually demonstrating the value of what IT investments deliver while also there is a significant history of failures of IT investment. What we want to do by introducing this is help CIOs improve their capability and ultimately improve the predictability, the probability, and the profitability of their IT investments.

What does the framework actually look like, and how is it structured?
In version 1.0 of the IT CMF there are what we call 4 “macro processes”, and underneath those 4 macro processes there are 36 critical processes. You could say that through these 36 critical processes, we’re trying to create a periodic table of the atomic level of the business processes that the CIO needs to manage. At the highest level , the macro processes are: managing IT like a business, managing the IT budget, managing the IT capability, and managing IT for business value. These are essentially arranged in a control loop where budget is your input, managing the IT capability is the IT factory or engine, value is the output, and where we talk about managing IT like a business, here’s where all the strategy, and leadership and governance and a lot of other activities occur. So: 4 macro processes underpinned by 36 critical processes and for each of these processes we’re identifying 5 levels of maturity. Level 1 is “state-of-the-Ark” and level 5 is “state-of-the-art”. The whole hypotheses is that CIOs can improve the maturity of their processes and as they do they’re able to create more value. We have some empirical evidence and some validation of this in practice.

You mentioned partners; who actually created the framework with you?
The framework was initially developed at Intel by myself and a small team, and we used it to drive a transformation of Intel’s IT organisation. Now we have almost 40 partners. We have 6 different communities involved: the technology ecosystem; enterprise end-users; public sector end-users; the analyst community; CIO associations, and of course academics. Some of the more well-known players that are working with us would be Ernst and Young, SAP, Microsoft BP, and , AXA Insurance. Everybody has recognised that even though technology is moving ahead very fast, the management practices that we use to manage the new technology products have lagged, and that this problem was bigger than any one company, or any one university could solve.

And what do you think is going to be the near-term future of IT CMF, where do you think the next developments are going to be, and who’s going to take it up?
We expect by middle of next year that the full IT CMF version 1 will be released, but we’re also working on a sustainable computing capability maturity framework and we have an internal release process , and the sustainable IT CMF has already achieved a level 2 (and we hope to be at level 3 in September. That means that we actually have a full suite of tools that we can then go pilot with some of the member organisations.

Find out more about IT CMF here, and in the news here.

Quad Cause: on Aristotle and Multi-core Processors

alistair.kemp@intel.com — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:34:40 GMT

At Intel we’re very fond of starting sentences with the word ‘so’, particularly when we’re talking to each other, and even more so if we happen to be in conversation with people external to Intel. I think we use it to buy ourselves a precious second or two of thinking time before opening our mouths and going on the record.

So… I admit it is pretty pretentious to even consider the correlation between a cornerstone of one of mankind’s greatest thinkers and something so apparently mundane as a CPU, but there are times when an idea occurs that just latches on like a - insert your own simile here – and just will not leave you alone.

I’m not going to give you a mini bio of Aristotle the man; if you’re reading this you know how to use Wikipedia or Google. He was undeniably a very influential thinker, and in some respects, way ahead of his time, particularly when you consider he was writing/teaching in the mid 300s BC and that many of his world views were held to be universal until the enlightenment in the late 18^th Century. Aristotle is also widely considered to be the father of logic, defining the need for, and the methodology of, deductive reasoning. He was the first person to really set down ways of structuring the process of thinking, of reasoning and it is not stretching the point too far that his work was the root of the subsequent developments on which computing logic is based, no matter how far removed it may appear now.

Among the most famous principles of reasoning is the set of rules he laid out in order to determine the inherent nature of an object. To fully understand it we must ask four questions, we must determine its four “causes”. The word ‘cause’ is one that seems to have resulted from translation from ancient greek, and clearly something has been lost in translation, as the word cause does not carry the same meaning as it does today, so much so that it defies succinct translation even today. Rather it is better to put it in the form of 4 questions which, if responded to help you to understand an object in a holistic fashion. Aristotle is said to have used the example of a statue, but these questions were designed to help us understand all objects. Of course, things were much simpler back in Aristotle’s day, but what sort of understanding do we get of an object that is more complex: an Intel quad-core processor for example.

The first question is: from what is it made (what is its material cause)? The main portion of the answer to this question is of course silicon. But we ought not to stop there. Take a modern day processor, it has silver, tin, hafnium (lovely hafnium!). For simplicity’s sake, let’s leave it as silicon. Next, the formal cause, or more simply put: what is it? Well… um… it’s a processor, a quad-core processor. Yes, we could argue it’s a microchip, a semiconductor or even - and I have a feeling Aristotle would like this - a logic device, but to me it is a processor pure and simple. What brought the object into being is the third question, i.e what is its efficient cause. As an Intel employee this is where you start to feel good about the company you work for. It was born out of one of the cleanest, one of the most advanced manufacturing environments in the world, an environment built to hugely exacting requirements that in some ways they are as remarkable as the devices that they are used to produce. I speak of course of a wafer fab, an Intel wafer fab. I’ve never been inside one of these buildings, so they still hold an extra mystique for me. So far, so good, if unremarkable: it’s a processor, made from silicon (and hafnium), in a fab. We probably all knew that.

So what of the fourth cause, or, as Aristotle called it its final cause? Well the answer to this is, like the device itself, infinitely complex. If we left our imagination at home, the answer to the question ‘what is it for’ could simply be left at ‘computing’, or ‘processing’. But that would be to not answer the question properly or fully. The real answer is, if you want to keep it short and sweet, “whatever you want it to be for”. It can help you do whatever you want with your PC, notebook, or server.

This is the crux of the matter. The choices are endless, or at least as endless as the variety of applications and usages that are out there. What is more, the world and its economy are more reliant on these devices than ever before. We are using them every time we search the web, every time we make an online purchase, and many do not have a so much as an inkling that we are using one. In March this year, Intel launched its latest quad-core processor, in the Intel® Xeon® processor family – the 5500 series for servers and workstations. It seems a shame that it is being introduced to a world that is not as ebullient as once it was. But in another way, these circumstances provide Nehalem EP with an opportunity. It is in times of strife that innovation comes to the fore, receiving more focus as we all count on it to deliver us from stagnation.

This is where such a processor, in tandem with a variety of applications can shine. It provides the means for obsolete hardware to be replaced at a cost which is recouped in less than a year, it provides the means for digital artists to express their ideas better and more immediately than ever before, it enables movies to be animated in 3D, it helps find new reserves of oil, and provides the horsepower to design machines that are more energy-efficient and sustainable than before. There are a wealth of documents on this site that will explain the compelling ROI in replacing old, single-core servers with new machines based on the Xeon 5500 series CPU. And what is exciting is that there are people out there who will take advantage of this supremely quick computing power combined with its intelligent performance and put it to new uses, providing a firm with a new competitive advantage. Then other firms will follow suit, and this pattern, as it snowballs, begins to haul us out of the mire. Don’t misunderstand me, not even Xeon 5500 is going to fix this economic situation singlehandedly or speedily, but history teaches us that technology comes to the fore when times are tough, and the better the technology, the more it stands out, and that those who make best use of it, establish themselves as leaders.

So to bring it back to that curious 4^th cause: what is it for? Well, with so many possible answers, we can only stick our hand in to all of those notions above and pick one at random or just pick a favourite. Others will pick something that has not occurred to anyone else and will use that to build a business opportunity. My inclination is to say that it is for innovation, for IT to show its value to the business, as contributor to the bottom line. A little trite maybe, but it is true. It is also an answer derived from a certain amount of logic. Surely Aristotle would not want to argue with that.

UK

Point, Shoot, Listen

*BREAKING NEWS* - 'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

US Healthcare Reform Challenges

Care Plans in the Cloud

Virtualisation as the foundation of the Cloud

The UK's Largest Virtual Event - VM 09

A v-Prositively Huge Success

Ageing Gracefully at Home

Coming soon! Live chat with Intel® vPro™ Technology experts.

Trying to Calculate Server Refresh ROI? Here’s How to Do It

1 Terabyte of RAM in a 4 socket server anyone?

Intel goes from black sheep to white hope of technology

The green shoots of recovery were encouraged by Intel's results despite the shadow of a EU fine hanging over the US chipmaker.

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series: The Right Product at the Right Time

Demonstrating IT Value

Quad Cause: on Aristotle and Multi-core Processors

BREAKING NEWS - 'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers