Intel trumpets quad-core advantage

INTEL WAS FOCUSED on SMBs at the Channel Expo this week, wooing the hopefully soon-to-be-faithful in its bubble tent in Birmingham.

Director of Intel's SMB business, Ian Black, said the company had turned its appraisal of the sector on its head. If previously the chipmaker was taking a crow's eye view of the problems SMB's face it was now determined to come at them from the bottom up. Understanding their world would help the firm strengthen its relationships within the reseller community, he said.

Intel platformisation, was helping here, Black reckoned. If a customer buys into, say, the VPro idea, he's buying the platform proposition. This in turn enables Intel to move towards a managed service model rather than just shift tin. The move Black suggests helps SMBs focus on whatever it is they do best.

The managed platform approach tends to inspire more loyalty from a customer.

Naturally, servers require a different focus to desktop offerings. The question is, "How can servers help me as an SMB?" Black says. The customer then has to chose the appropriate server technology, the vendor, the design implementation and fit it to his business.

The flexibility of multi-cored offering helps here, according to Black, pointing out that Intel has been shipping quad-core technology for six months now. "No-one else has - yet," he grins, nodding in the direction of the Opteron box.

The flexibility of the quad-core processor allows the power requirement to drop but ups the headroom in terms of raw performance. Operating costs may also be cut through intelligent use of virtualisation, he reckons.

As to whether pushing multi-core offerings impacts on Intel's mantra to "sell more chips", as has been suggested, Black is confident the technology will grow the overall market. "There's still a need for raw performance," he says. "The multi-processor market is not going to go away. µ