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Thank you, Slashdot community, for allowing us (Intel) to join you in your forums and the Intel Opinion Center to discuss a wide range of topics over the last several months. We have enjoyed the opportunity to interact with you on a one to one basis and really dig deep into some of your questions and comments. We have appreciated your candor and your ability to ask us the hard questions about our products and our technology.

We would like to continue further conversations with you and have several areas where that is possible. Our Software group is very active within the Slashdot forums - please look for us there. In addition, we have several resources on intel.com where you can engage with us to ask technical questions and get straight answers. You can find us here:

• The Intel Software Network -- (http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/home/)
• Intel Software and Solutions resource -- (http://www.intel.com/go/software)
• Intel Software Developer Community -- (http://www.intel.com/software)
• Open Source @ Intel -- (http://www.intel.com/opensource)
• Intel's IT community Resources site -- (http://www.intel.com/business/community/)
• The IT@Intel Blog -- (http://blogs.intel.com/it/)
• The Technology@Intel Blog -- (http://blogs.intel.com/technology/)

If you are interested in projects that Intel open source team participates in, please visit:

• Linux Performance -- (http://kernel-perf.sourceforge.net)
• Xen -- (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xen)
• KVM -- (http://sourceforge.net/projects/kvm)
• UML -- (http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net)
• ACPI -- (http://acpi.sourceforge.net/)

Again - thank you for allowing us to visit your community and discuss topics such as Virtualization, Data Center Efficiency, Parallel Programming, and finally our Centrino Pro/vPro product launches this past week. We hope you found this valuable and look forward to more discussion opportunities in the future.

Best Regards,

Team Intel

Good Day Slashdot community... My name is Josh, I'd like to introduce Mike, Jeff & Chris. For the next 2 weeks we'll be online to discuss more about Intel's business clients - vPro, previously launched and Centrino Pro, which launches soon. As we're sure you've heard, one of our key features is Intel Active Management Technology which an IT shop can really apply to some of the seemingly intractable management and security problems that drive us nuts. Stuff like patching powered-down systems during off-hours, or remotely booting a hard-down PC. In our view, the key is hardware. As long as your management and security is a slave to the OS, you are stuck if the system is off or the OS is down. Hardware support opens up a bunch of possibilities.

One of the key items that we believe is important is how you integrate your vPro/CPro machines into your environment. We are experienced in our own Integration and we are interested in your questions on this topic. Over the last few months we have been working on integrating these platforms into our IT shop and the experience has been valuable to see all the integration points & how we can really leverage a vPro/CPro machine, whether in an Innovation centre, to a Training Room.

We wanted to take this opportunity to answer any questions you have around vPro or Centrino Pro. Or if not.. Here are a few questions that we would be interested in your response:

• Manageability, while this phrase is the latest buzz word for any IT professional, what do you think that means for your IT shop?
• Have the patch deployment and system inventory problems been largely solved?
• Integration, Have you integrated vPro systems on your infrastructure? How deep of an integration? How did it go?
• What would you like to see added to the manageabilty your clients? What could we do in hardware that you can't get in software?

We hope to hear from you, we will be responding daily during the 2 weeks.

Welcome to this week's topic - Mobility and Wireless! Allow us to introduce ourselves, I am Dave and joining us will be Omer, Danny and Tom. Omer and Danny work in Israel while Tom and I work in Northern California. This means that there is never a time when all of us are in the office at the same time so we must rely on technology for us to collaborate.

All of us work in the Intel IT department; Omer and Danny are the leads in the engineering team responsible for deploying wireless technologies inside of Intel. Tom is the lead in the engineering team supporting the client software for wireless, and I represent the Mobility and Wireless technology development group within Intel IT.

In order to keep this blog manageable, we will be using the term Mobility interchangeably with Mobility and Wireless.

What does Mobility mean to Intel as a large enterprise consumer? Mobility is more than a 'nice to have' at Intel. It has allowed us to use the word 'work' as a verb, not a noun - Work is now something we do, not somewhere we go.

Are we walking the walk? - Almost every Intel location has WLAN installed! Also, three quarters of Intel's employees are using Centrino notebooks instead of fixed desktop computers. And we have a campus where not only do we have WLAN installed, but we are changing the usage model by making wireless the primary network access method and using the wired connection as a backup method. - More on that in a subsequent post. Wireless is more than just WLAN, it encompasses all wireless technologies that are globally available - Wi-Fi, WiMAX and a variety of cellular technologies.

In order to mobilize Intel though, we have had to overcome a few challenges; one of them was the security around wireless. Another - usability - this includes the capabilities of the application software. Still another is the challenge of deploying a Wireless LAN to support a large number of consumers (100s to 1,000s) on a site.

So what does my 'mobility kit' look like - A Centrino Mobile Technology powered notebook and a 3G cell phone which receives my corporate email securely. - As a matter of fact, I am working on this post while mobile.

Please keep in mind that we represent the IT department, not the product group, so we can't give information on future capabilities. But we do think we are in a more unique position then most IT depts. - Our users are the people who actually developed the technology we support.

Two of us are located in on the West coast of the USA and two in Israel and we will be responding to your questions and comments on a daily basis.

We are looking forward to your questions.

If for some reason you have no questions for us, we'd be interested in your response to a couple of our own:

• Are you looking to move your internal employees to Wireless?
• Do you feel that Wireless security is robust enough to protect your production information?
• What challenges do you face in implementing Mobility?
• What changes would you like to see in Mobility?

CNet.co.uk tests a prototype Santa Rosa laptop, and likes it. (Santa Rosa is an Intel internal code name; production versions will be called Centrino Duo for consumers, Centrino Pro for business customers.) Even better: Intel is increasing support for white book (unbranded) laptop vendors, so it looks like Santa Rosa goodness will be available not just to those who can pay top-tier hardware prices, but to the rest of us as well.

Hi all, my name is Alan and I would like to introduce John and John (no relation). It is our turn in the barrel this week as we dovetail from the recent discussion around Core Microarchitecture and focus on enterprise laptops and desktops. We work in Intel's IT department and want to spend the week relating our experiences, direction and challenges in managing a large and diverse client environment.

We plan on covering relevant issues around business clients with topics ranging from purchasing considerations, refresh, feature selection all the way through manageability, security, virtualization and everything in between. We'll talk about the good, the bad and even the ugly when it comes to business clients.

Our plan is to put out some topics that we hope will have interest to the Slashdot community and provide insight into technology elements and business processes that drive decisions. All three of us are based in the United States and will be posting and responding as frequently as we can. Once the week ends we'll be passing the torch to some of our coworkers who will drive discussion on next week's topic, mobility and wireless.

For most of us, one of the most important bits of Intel news this week was not strictly technical. We could compress all the headlines we saw about this excitement into two words: Price Drop! Here's one of the many stories we spotted on this topic.

Most of this week's big stories about Intel are coming out of the Beijing Intel Development Forum. And there's a lot of them, too.

First, forget Dual Core. Or even Quad Core. Here's a PC Pro story headlined Intel finally demos 80-core pocessor. There has been talk about this ultra-mighy-processor in the past, but this is its first public unveiling. No, it won't run Windows (or any known desktop Linux distro), but still: 6 GHz, 2 teraflop performance. That'd be nice to have around the shop purely for bragging rights, wouldn't it? Surely we can come up with *some* kind of "practical" use for the thing that'll get our bosses to spring for one, right? Worth a try....

For the next 2 weeks Benson, Brett and Jeff will be on-line to discuss the Core microarchitecture. As you all know, our latest dual and quad core microprocessors are based on the Core microarchitecture and are a vast improvement over the previous generation of Netburst designs. Brett, Jeff and I have spent the previous 8+ years in Intel's Desktop Microprocessor division working with customers and Intel's design team to define processor features, specifications and board designs. We are looking forward to discussing a wide range of hardware features here; everything from low power states for Energy Star, maximum and typical power dissipation levels, cache designs, temperature measurement and thermal monitoring, dual and quad core performance, front side bus vs. integrated memory controller, and pipelines to name a few. You may have also read some of the recent articles about our upcoming processors built on the 45 nanometer process. We can answer questions on those products too. (If you happen to be in Beijing, China next week you can attend IDF and ask one of our Principal Engineers all about the 45nm Core 2 processors).

Please keep in mind that we are hardware experts, not software, so questions on virtualization, security and multi-threading optimizations are outside of our realm.

The three of us are located in Oregon, on the West coast of the USA, and will be responding to your questions and comments on a daily basis.

If for some reason you have no questions for us, I'd be interested in your response to a couple of my own:

• What is more important, a processor having particular architecture features or a processor that has the best performance?
• How do you use information displayed by some hardware monitoring programs such as processor temperatures or voltages?

Hello Slashdot community. Shobhan and Clay here to talk about parallel programming this week, a topic that is both interesting and familiar to us. Note: To continue a parallel program discussion with Clay, you can find him blogging and hosting forum discussions daily at www.Intel.com/software. As processors for server, desktop and mobile platforms move from dual to quad core and beyond, software must be parallelized to best benefit from the potential performance gains now possible. Software developers have successfully introduced parallelism to their software through multithreading using Intel resources such as software development tools and training. Let's get this discussion kicked off with some topics at the top of our minds.When thinking about parallel programming, there are three fundamental responsibilities that need to be addressed:

1) Identify the parallelism
2) Synchronize thread executions
3) Distribute data (global or local)

What should the tasks of the programmer be and what should be taken care of by the programming methodology? What do you think is the best approach for parallel programming: a new language, language extensions, or libraries?

We're also interested in what level of experience you have with parallel and threaded programming.

• How long have you been doing it, or, if you've never done it, what is making you consider it now?
• Are there specific challenges that you have faced as you embarked upon your past or current parallel programming efforts?
• Are you thinking about scalable parallel programming?

We're very interested in your feedback, though we appreciate your patience as we try to answer your questions while doing our day jobs. We'll likely be inviting additional members of our team as well to participate in this discussion topic and are looking forward to an interesting discussion this week.

Hi Slashdot community. Last week's conversation on data center efficiency was fast and furious with a lot of great comments coming in from you guys on the challenges you're seeing in your data centers. We've covered topics such as density driving the need for more acute attention to data center design, the need for adequate cooling and new cooling techniques such as fresh air cooling and "air-side economizers", AC/DC conversion and the emergence of DC powered data centers, and the drive for more efficient power supplies.

This week I'd like to start the conversation off by turning our focus to performance. We are all familiar with performance benchmarks such as TPC and SPEC. More recently, Intel and IBM proposed a virtualization benchmark called vConsolidate to measure consolidated workload performance more reflective of today's emerging deployments. But how should we truly measure performance efficiency - performance/watt, TCO/watt? The need for metrics definition is acute becuase until we can accurately measure the performance efficiency of the data center we can't accurately measure improvements based on changes in data center design and management. The Green Grid has pointed to metrics as one of their primary targets for development, and SPEC also has some work underway. But for our discussion purposes I'd like to hear from you on how your organization approaches the question of performance efficiency. Is this on your radar screen? What metrics are you looking for - and what would you really use within your organization?

I also noticed that Bill introduced the concepts of standards to the discussion last week, and I think this is an area that deserves a bit more dialog. The rise of the data center of the 21st century packed full of dense rack and blade servers is founded on the migration to an industry standard server model. Intel has been a leader in establishing standards from interconnects to system form factor design that influence the fundamental design of servers. One challenge as we move forward is deepening our attention on energy effiency in the further development of these standards. And as Bill pointed out, our IT experts at Intel have turned this standards approach to our data center design documenting standard best practices to bring to the construction and management of data centers. Are you seeking best practices in development of data center planning?

Finally, I'd like to re-introduce the question of big or small. We heard a comment of doing away with centralized data centers in favor of moving resources towards the server closet. Other data points highlight organizations, most famously companies such as Google and eBay, building massive data centers located close to inexpensive power sources as the best approach. Which direction is your company headed?

Let the discussion begin.