Intel advances multicore plan

Intel claims to have made good on a vow last year to rewrite its product road map to focus on dual-core and multicore processors.

At last week's Intel Developer Forum in the US, the chipmaker showed off half a dozen of the new chips. In September, the company was forced to rewrite its road map after a series of embarrassing product slips and cancellations and subpar third-quarter earnings.

The company demonstrated a series of new "concept" PCs aimed at pushing developers and OEMs to leverage Intel architecture for sleeker, lighter, more mobile systems.

Intel chief executive Craig Barrett, addressing 5000 developers at the San Francisco conference, said the new technology would be buttressed partly by its Channel Products Group created in January.

"The local use pattern is critical," Barrett said.

The Channel Products Group is charged with shoehorning Intel technology into solution provider-friendly products from servers to notebooks.

Jim Allchin, Microsoft's senior vice-president of platforms, backed another part of Intel's new road map -- its push to enable all its processors for 64-bit computing.

Allchin asked developers to create 64-bit solutions.

"We are locked on 64-bit," he said. "You should start [constructing] your applications to 64-bit in a native way."

Allchin said Microsoft would ship a workstation version of its 64-bit operating system next month.

Christian Paradis, a developer at CO Computer, a custom-system builder from Canada, said he was positive about the maturing of Intel's 64-bit-enabled processors.

"We've pretty much got to the point where frequencies are too high and there is too much heat," Paradis said.

Intel's dual-core and multicore planning, along with the supporting virtualisation technology for management, security and performance, were going to allow partners to offer more products.