| | The L2 cache accesses are double tick accesses for Pentium II
| as compared to single tick accesses Pentium Pro. So, for
| a given clock speed, Pentium II has half the L2 cache bandwidth
| of the Pentium Pro.
A couple of points. Yes, the L2 cache runs at half speed.
But the L1 I and L1 D cache is double the size, to 16KB I and
16KB D. The fastest Pentium PRO shipped ran at 200MHz, with
the L2 cache running at the same speed. The Pentium II at
300MHz would have a 150MHz L2 cache. (1.2GB/sec bandwidth.)
| Does the Pentium II L2 cache use the same SRAM as the Pentium Pro?
| Or is it commodity SRAM in a custom package? If proprietary, what is the
| process technology roll out for the SRAM?
The cache in the Pentium Pro was a single chip packaged side by side
with the CPU chip. The Pentium II does not go this route, instead
a number of different cache designs can be implemented.
Anyhow, for details, here's Andy Grove's keynote from the Compaq
hosted conference. May is just around the corner.
( http://www.intel.com/intel/people/asg/asg_innov.htm )
-mr. bill
Innovate �97 Keynote Address
Dr. Andrew S. Grove
April 8, 1997
in Houston, Texas
Good morning.
My subjects are about these three points; I would like to tell you,
very, very briefly, about Intel and what we do to bring that little
Intel Inside� sticker on Compaq computers and, following on the
same theme, I would like to tell you a little about what is coming
in the future in terms of our processor road map and end on talking
about some of the larger issues that face computing in the years to
come.
In its most basic essentials, Intel�s strategy can be summed up in
one visual presentation that you see there; it�s kind of Intel on a
post-it note. We work to advance the art of microprocessors in two
directions; on the horizontal directions you see the increasing
density that comes about by the finer and finer line width on
silicon processing. In the vertical direction you see improvements
in microprocessor architecture that, for any given technology,
bring higher performance.
So, the flow of chips from the upper left to the lower right is
brought about by the combination of ever-increasing processor
technology, ever-refined processor technology and ever-refined
microprocessor architecture.
On this particular chart we started with the i386� and ended with
the Pentium� Pro processor. The story actually started 25 years ago
with products long before the 386 that I didn�t show this on this
chart, and in a like fashion, the story doesn�t end with this
chart. Picking up from the Pentium Pro processor, the future has
the same kind of advancement ahead of us. Ever refining processor
silicon line width going substantially below the 1 micron geometry,
to .25 micron, to .18 micron of fineness and ever refined future
architectural generations that bring better performance for each of
those silicon performances.
That�s what we do for a living. That�s what we wake up in the
morning worrying about and that�s what we go to sleep dreaming
about. But in between waking up and going to sleep we spend a lot
of money on this, both in terms of developmental spending -- where
I had the opportunity to visit with a local research center
yesterday here and somebody pointed out to me that the entire
federal government health research budget is less that what we
spend on R&D per year. And I don�t know which of us is wrong here,
but something doesn�t fit with that picture. And that is the lesser
of what we do because then what we produce with that R&D program,
given the size of the industry, requires a very massive capital
outlay years in advance of the need for utilization of the product.
So this has been a chart that has grown from the multihundred
million dollars, from the beginning of this decade, to something in
the vicinity of $4.5 billion capital outlay budgeted for l997. And
this is a very abstract number, even, I have to admit, even to me,
and I cannot figure it out.
Just flip through a few of the projects; we are under construction
around the globe and I can�t show you everything but this is a
major extension of our Leixlip, Ireland, wafer fabrication plant.
We have outgrown our principal location in Penang, Malaysia, so we
are building a new site about thirty miles away in a place called
Kulim. We are building assembly and test facilities in China, a
Flash memory facility in Israel; we are also expanding assembly and
test facilities outside of Manila in the Philippines; and we have
started a new design, engineering and manufacturing facility near
Seattle; and having run out of all other states we even come to
Texas. This is going to be a very major wafer fabrication plant in
that little square or rectangle that you see there.
So, that�s what we do. Now, where does all of this investment take
us and what are the basic directions that we pursue in the next
several years to come; and I would like to paint for you the
processor road map that we are working on and that you will
probably see before the next time that we have a opportunity to
review progress on this.
Basically, as suggested in an earlier slide, we are doubling our
developmental path by doing a two-pronged development, continuing
to expand the 32-bit microprocessor line, where you see the Pentium
Pro processor and the Pentium II processor -- which is a product
that we will introduce in the next few weeks -- that is where we
are today. And the products that are labeled future 32-bit
processors, those are all real products, with real people, with
teams of multiple hundreds of engineers working on them as we
speak.
Simultaneously with those we have started a new branch which is the
64-bit architecture of the Intel Architecture extension
intellectual product line that is going to run 64-bit software and
it will run all of the 32-bit software, as well. This represents a
whole different computer architecture and the two will probably
occupy different portions of the computing space; we intend to
carry those two in parallel as far as we can think of.
Now, all of this is necessitated by a variety of changes in
computing, and two-thirds of the computing market is driven by the
needs of business. So I think it is worthwhile for us to kind of
step back and take a bird�s eye view of developments in business
computing, specifically, and, for the interest of focusing on one
area, I�m going to particularly focus on business desktop
computers.
The major events of the last several years have been a transition
of the traditional business desktop that was represented by
products like the i486� ; and products like the PCI bus structure,
to a new generation of business computers that are represented
today, typically built around the Pentium processor, built with the
PCI bus structure and typically endowed with Fast Ethernet and
audio cards and very heavily doing communications applications
represented by electronic mail.
We are about to make a transition to the new business desktop, in
the years ahead of us, that I will call "the Visual Connected PC."
This computer, typically, will be represented by a product like the
Pentium II processor, the PCI bus structure will be superseded by a
new bus architecture that we will call Dual Independent Bus
architecture, and you�ll hear more about that in a few minutes.
Computers like that will have Internet access built in. They will
be video conferencing enabled, typically they will be connected to
a much higher bandwidth 100Mb Ethernet, and they will come with
built in manageability.
Now the details are going to, of course, vary and the details will
unfold a little differently on that but the basic characteristics
that I want to call attention to is that the step between the
current business desktop, the Pentium, PCI business desktop, to the
new Visual Computing Connected Visual Computer, based on the
Pentium II processor and the Dual Independent Bus structure, is as
large a step in its combination as the step from 486 and
ISA(phonetic) to Pentium and PCI was. There�s a very major
discontinuity and this step and this evolution brings about a
redefinition, a necessary redefinition, of how we look at processor
performance.
Processor performance used to be looked at as a one-dimensional
phenomenon; it is now necessary to use three different vectors to
describe performance; integer performance, floating point
performance and multimedia performance, because all of these are
encompassed in the Visual Connected Computer. These require
different technical attributes to achieve.
In the case of integer performance, the architectural goodies that
we put into the P6 architecture -- whose first instantiation was
the Pentium Pro processor, the second one is the Pentium II
processor -- that we call dynamic execution, predominantly gives
you highest integer performance, highest CPU core performance.
The cache bus that, again, you will hear in a moment, I�ll just
forward reference it, that is a key part of the Dual Independent
Bus architecture will allow the extension of floating point
performance by allowing floating point, data that requires floating
point calculation, to bypass the ordinary bus structure and
communicate with the floating point unit and those parts of the
subsystem that requires independently, and, lastly, MMX� ;
technology that we introduced earlier this year, leads to faster
communication and multimedia applications.
I would like to demonstrate what these things look like and what
these things will look like in the future, so let me first ask
Spencer Clark from Intel to show us a demonstration of ...
Spencer Clark: This is a dual Pentium II processor system running
at 300MHz and what I�m going to show you today is an application by
a company by the name of SolidWorks and what I have here is ...
Dr. Grove: SolidWorks is a CAD application, right?
S. Clark: That�s correct, that�s a CAD application, this particular
object here is a very complex object; it�s a SCUBA regulator and
I�m going to go ahead and rotate the object. What we�re looking at
is an object that has a lot of lighting, a lot of shading
characteristics to it, very many polygons required to render this
as I move the object.
Dr. Grove: So, every time that object moves, every point and every
bit of, every piece of data that is representing that point and the
lighting on that point, gets recalculated over and over again in
real time.
S. Clark: That�s correct, it�s very compute intensive. What I am
going to do now is I�m going to show you a subpart of this
particular model, which is the mouthpiece, bring that up, and
you�ll notice that I can take this particular subpart and move it
very smoothly. It actually flows very nicely.
Dr. Grove: Presumably you can move it through there because there
is less, fewer data elements involved in it, so therefore the
computer, at the same data rate, is capable of recalculating it
more often per each second.
S. Clark: That�s correct, it�s a less complex module than what we
had up there before. OK, what I would like to also do is show how
we can do, very quickly, on-the-fly manipulations to this
particular object.
What I am going to do is, let me get in a little better position
here, we�re going to apply afillet to this particular part of the
object. If you look at it at a very sharp right angle here, we want
to smooth that out, I�m going to do my best to see if we can just
grab that, one second here, this is the tricky part getting that
one part that we want, and that�s it right there.
Dr. Grove: Well, don�t let these guys make you nervous.
S. Clark: OK, easy for you to say, I guess. We�re going to, I�m
going to go ahead and apply a fillet here of 15mm and that will
make the transition at that particular part of the object a little
bit smoother. And you can see, we did that on-the-fly, and it no
longer has that real sharp angle there.
Dr. Grove: So the mechanical calculation immediately translates to
its visual representation with a click of a button.
S. Clark: That�s correct. Now we have this and are just showing
this in an engineering sense but we can also bring up this
particular application within an office product, Microsoft* Word*,
for example.
Dr. Grove: Which is a key point because unlike many workstations,
this, when all is said and done, is a personal computer and it runs
PC applications like Office* or like Word.
S. Clark: Exactly, and we�re actually using (unclear) here. What
I�m going to do is I�m just going to type something in this to show
that it�s just a standard Word document. Well, as you can see,
we�re just adding text to it but what�s nice about this, typically,
with office products we started out with just the ability to have
text and then later we transitioned into having text and graphics;
well, now, we actually have an interactive 3D object within the
office.
Dr. Grove: So, for instance, an engineering memo will come with the
text, with the explanation, with the mechanical part, built in as
an object in that demo; subject to the reader�s whim, he can rotate
it, he can look at it and this could be an engineering document, it
could be a medical document, it could be anything that involved a
3D object, all will be part of the document of the future.
S. Clark: That�s correct. I just double-clicked on this object and
we now have the toolbars here on top, I can now go in and do what
we did before when we were in the SolidWorks application and I can
rotate this object.
Dr. Grove: But you�re inside Word now.
S. Clark: That�s correct.
Dr. Grove: Very good. Thank you.
Progress does not stop with a dual 300MHz Pentium II processor and
we�re going to push the envelope a little bit and pushing the
envelope is Steve Hunt from Intel who will demonstrate
Steve Hunt: Hi, Andy. We�ll be demonstrating a technology
demonstration of the Pentium II microprocessor and what I want to
do is, kind of, give you a little, quick tour.
You can see the actual Pentium II microprocessor, here, the silicon
and the package around it. You referred to the cache bus, and this
is a very important element of the Pentium II processor shown here
on this part of the I/O and this interfaces to a variety of
different types of L2 caches. Here, we have a separate system bus
that goes off and talks to the DRAM and the I/O.
Dr. Grove: More about all of that in a few minutes.
Steve Hunt: This is, kind of, the die and you can see we�ve
actually doubled the on-chip primary cache. Up here, we see the
floating point unit. Now this is a very powerful floating point
unit and what we�re going to do is run an application where we�ll
actually try to stress that floating point and show how the
floating point execution bandwidth scales along with the processor
clock frequencies. Now we�re running, right now, at 450MHz, I guess
I�ve got a rounding error here, 449, but ...
Dr. Grove: Don�t exaggerate.
Steve Hunt: OK, 449, and what we�ll do, let me go on ahead and fire
up the, an application from Caligari called trueSpace, it�s a 3D
rendering package, what we�ve done here is downloaded a model off
of the Internet, this is a standard benchmark that is supplied by
the company and we�ll actually go ahead and kick it off.
This particular model renders on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro processor
with 512k cache in 24 seconds, we�re rendering this in about 12-13
seconds, roughly at 2x speedup. So this is a lot of complex
lighting calculations and texture maps being applied here.
Dr. Grove: And that speed is a testimonial to the higher speed
floating point unit but also to the improved bus structure that
allows that floating point unit to do its thing at a system level.
Steve Hunt: Exactly. We�ve got to feed that raw floating point
engine with the op RAMs and instructions associated with this
program.
Dr. Grove: Do you have any livelier demo than that one?
Steve Hunt: Sure, let�s see what we can find here, I�ve got one
that will fire up, it�s a, kind of a more interactive, 3D
environment. Everything is completely done in real time. Now this
is a classic division of responsibility between the processor and a
3D graphics card; we have the 3Dfx coupling with the Pentium II
processor. In this case we have the Pentium II processor doing all
of the geometry calculations and the pixel seal, in other words,
sealing all the polygons that are created by the Pentium II is
accomplished by the 3Dfx card.
Dr. Grove: It�s sort of like a coloring notebook, where the Pentium
II processor does the geometry and the 3Dfx card does the coloring.
Steve Hunt: Exactly. So it does the rendering. OK, so we�re running
now, I�m going to send it on kind of an automatic fly-through for a
moment. A couple of things I�d like to point out: You can see
there�s quite a few objects, we�re flying through a predefined path
at the moment, we have spatial audio so objects in the scene that
have sound associated with them become louder or softer as you
become closer to them, the function of your position in the scene.
We�re going to fly by this barn and I�m going to put it into kind
of an interactive mode because I run the farm now. I want to point
out a really neat feature here in this application which is
reflection mapping. So, you can see the reflection of ...
Dr. Grove: You can see the clouds in that pond.
Steve Hunt: That�s a lot of, you know, complex ray tracing types of
algorithms, so we�ll take it on around here. I�m actually flying it
interactively now.
Dr. Grove: What is that video-looking thing there?
Steve Hunt: Well, let�s go and take a closer look. I think I hear a
familiar theme here ...(music)
Dr. Grove: Not again ...
Steve Hunt: I think it�s the Bunnysuit, let�s see, we saw that
during some famous event. See, I�m kind of on the front end of the
blimp and the sound goes away a little bit; let me take it in a
little closer, I don�t want to hit that helicopter ...
Dr. Grove: I think we�ve had enough of that one.
Steve Hunt: Oh, OK, you want me to, I can go on ahead and ...
(crashing sound)
Dr. Grover: Thank you, Steve.
The point I�m trying to make and the point that we try to bring to
you through these demonstrations is that it is no longer enough to
deliver faster CPUs; we must deal with and cross the bandwidth
valleys of death where, on the one side, we can crank up CPU power
but unless we cross that valley of death we don�t come out on the
other end with that same performance.
And I use the term in plural because there are two elements to
that: There is the bandwidth that we have to deal with between
processor and memory, and the bandwidth that we have to deal with
between processor and graphics subsystems.
We were very, very proud, five years or so ago, when, in the first
major revamping of PC architecture, our industry delivered the
current architecture, bus architecture. I described this as the big
step from ISOP 486 to Pentium and PCI bus and it was a very major
improvement at the time. But, as it turns out, with today�s
processor speeds, this five-year-old bus structure is becoming an
increasing limitation.
Limitation comes in two places. One is increasingly relying on L2
cache, as Steve pointed out to you in the floating point
calculations, being a perfect example of it, and the access to this
L2 cache is limited, and the current technology, is limited to
66MHz -- way lower than the clock frequency of the microprocessor.
Similarly, the access to the graphics subsystem has to go through
the, system bus has to go through the PCI bus and is limited there.
And with the increasing demands on the system coming from 3D
graphics, coming from 100Mb Ethernet, coming from external
bandwidth delivered through technologies like 1394; this limitation
will increasingly limit us. These bus limitations will increasingly
limit system performance.
Simply put, the three vectors of performance demand a different bus
architecture, and the bus architecture that we are ushering in this
year is what we call the Dual Independent Bus architecture.
In its simplest form, in this bus architecture, we break the bus,
the memory bus, into two parts. One addressing the L2 cache and one
addressing the system. The most important of those, again, as Steve
was trying to steal my thunder a minute ago, is the bus that goes
to the L2 bus that, for simplicity, we�ll call the cache bus. This
has the largest amount of data traffic, in many instances 95
percent of application performance is traversing this particular
bus.
The beauty of the microprocessor architecture that is implicit in
the Pentium Pro processor and the Pentium II processor is that it
contains a technique called out-of-order execution that can manage
the data stream in advance and split them up between these two
buses and use them very judiciously.
So let me talk a little bit about these two buses. The first of
those, again, is the cache bus, this is the traffic between the
core of the central processing unit and the L2 cache, as I
mentioned, 95 percent of application bandwidth is taken up by this
and, specifically, in the case of floating point applications, as
you saw in Steve�s earlier demo, it is very heavily dependent on
this cache bus.
The point here is now that with this bus architecture we are no
longer limited by the 66MHz system bus for this traffic, but the
power of the bandwidth of this connection scheme will scale with
the processor, so, as the processor speeds up, the bus will be able
to keep up with it and not provide a limitation.
The second bus, the system bus, likewise, first of all, no longer
carries that traffic and, second, it is scaleable itself. Year by
year, we will be able to speed this thing up, keeping up with the
generations of microprocessors and the portion of the traffic that
is directed to the system bus and the key here is to deliver this
to the mass market, to the mass desktop market, in a cost effective
fashion. And we will do that in a fashion that we call the "Slot 1"
implementation which, again, will come up in a few minutes.
Backing away from the details of this, what we are doing with the
Dual Independent Bus architecture is addressing the total processor
bandwidth by adding up the bandwidths coming from the cache bus to
the bandwidths coming from the system bus. The total system
bandwidth is the sum of these two and to give you an illustration
of 300MHz Pentium II processor that you saw before, the cache bus
will be operating at half the processor, in this case, half the
processor frequency of 150MHz, corresponding to 1.2Gbytes/sec of
bandwidth; we add to that the system bus bandwidth of 66MHz at
5.28Mbytes/sec. When we total these up, the total processor
bandwidth is going to be 1.7Gbytes/sec capability. Over threefold
of the bandwidth of today�s Pentium processor with PCI
implementation, a very major increase in total bandwidth and, in
addition to that, scaleable with processor performance, so with
headroom for the future.
This bus architecture was basically first pioneered with the
Pentium Pro processor and was hidden in a complex package that was
fairly expensive and not designed with the idea that this bus
structure will spread through the entire range of PC performance.
What I mentioned earlier with the phrase of Slot 1 is an
implementation of the same thing with an eye toward mass
production, with the ability to use industry standard DRAMs and,
due to the connection scheme, a processor bandwidth, a system
bandwidth, that will further scale with increasing frequencies.
This Slot 1 implementation of the Pentium II processor looks like
this, it is a little cartridge that has an H-connector that plugs
into the system and it is designed from the ground up with mass
production and low cost, cost effectiveness, in mind. And, in fact,
as we are ramping this into production, we are finding just one
thing that is really giving us headaches; it has a little
holographic version of the Pentium II processor chip on it and
attaching that to the cartridge is turning out to be quite a
difficult production task, but we will overcome that one too.
Let me move on to the second bandwidth, second valley of death,
bandwidth valley of death, which is the connection between
processor and graphics subsystems. What we are talking about here
is, on your left of the system wherein the Dual Independent Bus
architecture is using what we call the Accelerated Graphics Port or
AGP, we can shunt off the data stream to the graphics subsystem
independently of the cache traffic and the memory traffic and
therefore deliver high and scaleable bandwidth to the graphics
subsystem.
This capability is again related to the capability of the Pentium
II processor which has inherent parallelism built into it that is
capable of managing the data stream in this type of fashion.
Scaleability of this bus is just as important as the scaleability
of the cache and the memory bus because graphics subsystems will
become faster along with microprocessors and we need to make sure
that we are not building in a future bottleneck.
And, in fact, the Accelerated Graphics Port bandwidth will scale,
its �97 implementation is at 133Mbytes/sec, when you look at it our
plans, and these are supported by solid technical work, imply a
doubling of AGP bus bandwidth every year all the way through the
end of the decade, which, actually, interestingly enough, is a
little faster than Moore�s Law predicts transistor and chip
performance which doubles only every 18 months.
So, I think we are getting ahead of microprocessors with the
graphics bus system for the first time in the history of personal
computing. The point here is the way we are getting across these
bandwidth valleys of death, we engineer our way through. The memory
bandwidth will be delivered with the Dual Independent Bus
architecture, the graphic bandwidth will be delivered through the
Accelerated Graphics Port working in conjunction with the Dual
Independent Bus architecture. All of this has the benefit, very,
very simple benefit, all of this pretty complex technology, will
enable the computer to scale with processor performance and deliver
that performance in a software visible, a user-visible fashion, all
the way to the use.
So, that�s kind of our story on processor and platform roadmap and
with that I would like to move on to my last subject which is some
of the trends which face us, computer users and computer
manufacturers, all of us in the computer industry in the years to
come.
I would like to start by submitting to you a basic premise for the
future: All computing is going to be network computing. This is
almost a given in business computing, but actually it is going to
be a given in consumer computing and one of the things as kind of a
subtext that I would like to leave you with is there�s going to be
an increasing blurring between consumer and business applications
in the very near future, but more about that in a minute.
The first megatrend that we are dealing with in this network
computing area is the mandate to reduce the total cost of ownership
of network computers; and the way to achieve this is like the way
we engineer ourselves through any other problem, is to build this
into every machine, right as it is manufactured, and we can do that
and we must do that. We can and we must instrument every personal
computer that we ship out of the factory.
Once we instrument and manage a PC, this management will allow for
a network administrator in a central location to obtain system
information in a standard fashion, enable remote diagnostics and
repair and we will be able to do so without giving up the
flexibility and adaptability of personal computers that has been so
successful and so powerful in making personal computers successful
in the last 10 years. The answer to this management problem and the
answer to the total cost of ownership problem is a spectrum of
managed PCs.
What do I mean by a spectrum? The spectrum comes first in the
dimension of various degrees of flexibility, ranging, on your
right, the fully flexible, adaptable PC as we know it, full range
of applications with flexible configurations, user upgradeability
and remote management built-in, as I said before.
On the left side we can see a version of the personal computer and
remove some of the flexibility, orient it to applications and users
with more narrow range of applications, limit the configurations,
limit, or eliminate, user upgradeability altogether, and yet
deliver the same type of remote management capability across the
entire spectrum of flexibility in this horizontal fashion.
The second axis of the spectrum that we are talking about is both
flexible and Net PC capabilities and constructs can be delivered in
a range of performances dependent on the present and anticipated
user needs just as it has been the case with personal computers.
Let me proceed to a demonstration and welcome Jeff Lo here, who is
a new employee of the Data Integrity group. Welcome aboard, Jeff.
Jeff Lo: Thank you, Andy.
Dr. Grove: And what you have here is the first ever public showing
of, will I get electrocuted if I touch this? This is a Net PC,
hopefully alive and well and fully managed, and a new employee gets
a brand new Net PC on his desk on his first day of work and he
checks in, proceed.
Jeff Lo: Well, I have been playing around with this Net PC a little
bit and checking it out but I think I need to go check out the
company orientation, so I�ll go and click on the
"Welcome" button and we�ll see our person here welcoming us and I
think she�s supposed to be telling us something but I�m not hearing
her say anything.
There seems to be some sort of a problem here, oh, the LANDesk�
Client Manager has detected a problem, it says I can click on the
"Solve" button. Well, I�ll let it try and fix this itself, so I�ll
click on "Solve" and it has already figured out it is missing some
software and has already gone ahead and installed it ...
Dr. Grove: Now, you didn�t do this.
Jeff Lo: I didn�t do this, the Client Manager just ...
Dr. Grove: System in the clouds did it for you.
Jeff Lo: Yes, uh, huh.
Dr. Grove: That�s the kind of computer I�d like, too.
Jeff Lo: There�s still another problem but it doesn�t know how to
fix this one so I can click here to contact support. Let me go
ahead and do that and it has already entered my name, my e-mail
address and what it thinks the problem is and let me go ahead and
click on "Submit" here and see what happens.
Matt Arnet: OK, the ticket has been submitted with the unknown
audio problem. This took hours at my old company, somebody always
had to come out and do this, see what happens here, OK, in the
not-so-distant past the network administrator would have to receive
a phone call or e-mail and physically get himself up and go over to
the client and fix the problem and obviously that would increase
your total cost of ownership. Now these network administrators are,
typically, called Help Desk technicians and they would be
monitoring a screen such as what I have here on my LAN Desk Client
Manager. Here you see that throughout my busy day I have closed
quite a few tickets here of previous problems or occurrences that
have transpired on the network.
Now, if I just refresh, I�ll see that a Mr. Jeff Lo has had an
unknown audio problem, L2 critical, and this is open, OK, well
that�s a new ticket so, what I�m going to do is I�m going to look
into this a little more deeply.
So, I�m going to double click on Jeff Lo�s ticket, bringing up some
more detailed information, again, you see that the employee, Jeff
Lo, unknown audio problem, and this was all discerned on his
computer via the LANDesk Client Manager. And it was shipped over to
our inventory database.
Device data, Creative Labs Sound Blaster*, OK, so that tells me he
does have this equipment in his Net PC, so that�s probably not the
source of his audio problem. Time stamp is that it occurred today
and less that five minutes ago.
The next LANDesk Client Manager recommends that I take remote
control of his PC and see if I can rectify the problem over our
corporate Internet. OK, I�m going to take control over TCPIP,
manage his PC and take control of it just as if I was sitting
there. So, I�m going to give Jeff a call here ... (ringing)
Jeff Lo: Hello, this is Jeff.
Matt Arnet: Yes, this is Matt Arnet over at the Help Desk.
Jeff Lo: Oh, great, that was quick.
Matt Arnet: Well, yes, I recognized that you had submitted a ticket
here and I wanted to see if I could help you by taking over
remotely and see what the source of the problem may be.
Jeff Lo: Great, if you can fix it, that would be great.
Matt Arnet: OK, let�s see, right now, I should be accessing through
our pipe, there we go ...
Jeff Lo: Wow, my mouse is moving all by itself ...
Matt Arnet: Well, yeah, yeah, don�t do anything there because I�m
in control of your PC at this point, now, you haven�t been playing
with your computer at all because I know you�re a new hire and you
did go through the new employee orientation, did you not?
Jeff Lo: Yeah, but it was this new Net PC, I wanted to check it
out, see what it could do.
Matt Arnet: Now, didn�t they tell you that before you start playing
with your PC you had to have additional training before you changed
any of the configuration parameters?
Jeff Lo: I know, I know, but I thought ...
Matt Arnet: OK, well, you know, I�m going to go ahead and fix it
for you this time but I�m going to make a special note that we do
not accept any more tickets until you have been authorized to
submit, so what I do see down here in the lower right hand corner
is that his microphone, or his speaker, has been nulled. What I�m
going to do while I�m in control of his computer, and this is
happening on his computer, is I�m going to bring that up, because I
have a feeling that that�s the source of his problem.
Now, over here, low and behold, he has been muted, so I�m going to
uncheck his mute, close that master output window and I�m going to
go back and tell Jeff that I�m going to refresh this, thus taking
him back to the initial screen and Jeff, I�m going to go ahead and
close out because I have a feeling that I fixed your problem for
you so why don�t you go ahead and launch your application that you
tried before.
Jeff Lo: OK, I�ll try it again here.
(Woman�s Voice) Hello, I�m Allison ...
Jeff Lo: Oh, great, great, that was no sweat at all and it�s
working, thanks a lot, Matt.
Matt Arnet: OK, thank you, Jeff, and don�t call us, OK, we�ll call
you.
Dr. Grove: Thank you.
What you have seen courtesy of Jeff Lo and Matt Arnet is two new
things, working together; one of them is the Net PC, that I pointed
out, the second one is the management task, the remote management
task that was executed was done on the basis of an Internet-based
management scheme called Web Based Management which is an
initiative that we are working with Compaq and Microsoft to bring
to the market to use the pervasive deployment of Internet based
networks to be the foundation for all management software, remote
management software. We have at least gotten it to the point where
we can demonstrate it.
So, that�s about the spectrum of managed PCs; both managed and the
Net PC being a key element of what we are talking about.
The second megatrend is the emergence of the Java* programming
language as a tool for unlocking legacy data, a large portion of
which continues to reside in legacy computers, in legacy databases
and is very important for us to capture those and integrate them
with today�s network computing environment. Java is a very
important tool in this one and Intel�s role with respect to Java is
to make it run the best, meaning the fastest, on Intel Architecture
machines.
So, I would like to give you a bit of a status demonstration of how
we are doing on this one and what I want to do here is demonstrate
it by a bake-off, basically, what we have is the same Net PC that
you have seen before, that is on your right screen, the data
pertaining to the Net PC is on your right screen.
Here, we have Sun JavaStation operating with a microSPARC and the
data pertaining to that is on the left screen. So it is a little
confusing this way but keep in mind Net PC, JavaStation. And what
we have in the JavaStation is 100MHz microSPARC memory, no hard
drive, hard Java browser and all the rest of it is the same in both
instances. In the case of the Net PC, as we saw earlier, we have a
233MHz Pentium II processor, same amount of memory and, of course,
it has a hard drive, Windows NT* workstation and Internet
Explorer*. So, let us see this demo, Spencer and Jeff will do for
us and the first part of this demo, Jeff, walk us through this,
please.
Jeff Lo: Well, the first thing that we�re going to do, is we�re
going to load the caffeine mark, benchmark and this is a benchmark
of Java code, bring it up into the window here and then we�ll go
ahead and start it and I�ll tell you what is going on, ready, go.
The way this works is that it runs a bunch of Java code in a loop
and it counts the number of times it goes through a loop in a
specific amount of time and displays that number. So, bigger
numbers are better, we�ve gone through it faster, more times
through the loop, takes about a minute for the whole thing. This
first test you see the score. I�ve got 257 over here on the Net PC,
and Spencer, on the Java, is 113. The next one, the loop score, is
207.
Spencer: I�ve got l24.
Jeff Lo: Outrunning it quite a bit. Here, we�re starting to look at
some of the graphics benchmarks that come up, watch the speed of
the repaints. And just some other typical things, drawing of
dialogue boxes that you would see on your screen, and we�re done
here, our caffeine mark score for the Net PC is 356, compared with
...
Spencer: 126, on the JavaStation.
Dr. Grove: An almost 3 to 1 difference and it is not a fair
comparison because this is a faster processor, but if I take my
slide rule out, and scale down the performance that Jeff got here,
the 356, to the equivalent that we would get, assuming linear
scaling, at 100MHz to match the microSPARC that�s run here, we
would still get 150, for the scaled down Pentium II processor, as
compared to 120-something for the JavaStation, so, we are still
beating, even on this basic caffeine mark, the Java performance.
But that�s probably not all.
Jeff Lo: Yeah, we can look at some actual applications, not just
benchmarks. We�ll go back here to our start page and have the
Corell Office for Java* they�re working on and we�ll go ahead and
start this up now. Go ahead on three: one, two, three. And it will
take about eight seconds or so on the Net PC to bring up this
shell, it�s already here, and it�s about 20 or so on the
JavaStation, and there, now we�re up.
Dr. Grove: About the same kind of scaling that we had at caffeine
mark.
Jeff Lo: Yeah, but we actually see even more on some of these
applications; if we look at the calendaring software they have
here, Infotools, we�ll start that up: ready, go, here, it takes
only about nine seconds, it sits here for a few seconds then it
just suddenly it will pop up. And, there we go, we�re ready, it�s
about 35 seconds there.
Dr. Grove: We�re not going to wait for that.
Jeff Lo: No, I wanted to show you something else we can do here
that you can�t do there. A big advantage of the Net PC is, it is a
regular PC and I can go ahead and bring up Microsoft Office and
launch Excel* or any other PC application that I�ve got on this and
we can�t do it there.
Dr. Grove: And that, of course, is operating at full speed because
it is a native application running on a Net PC which, after all, is
Intel Architecture-based PC, runs all the Intel Architecture-based
applications.
Jeff Lo: Yup.
Dr. Grove: Good, thank you very much.
If I summed these up in the raw fashion unadjusted for frequency
you saw the caffeine marks almost 3 to 1 difference; you saw the
difference in Corell Office; launching in the personal information
manager application and, of course, the fact that the Net PC runs
PC applications much the same way as that workstation, the 300MHz
workstation ran Microsoft Word also.
The point here is the Net PC delivers performance on Java
absolutely as good or better than the equivalent and runs all of
the PC applications which help us make the PC and the Net PC, the
Intel Architecture altogether, as the no-risk, no-compromise choice
for Java applications. No need for either of those because we can
match the performance and you don�t have to compromise because we
carry all the PC applications, as well as acquire all the
Java-based applications.
Lastly, the third megatrend is the emergence of the Internet in
business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications.
Excuse me for just a minute.
The key element here is this intersection between business and
business and business and consumer is enhanced by the prevalence
and easy accessibility of visual computing. In an article a couple
of months ago, John Reed was holding forth on the subject of, John
Reed, CEO of Citibank, was holding forth on the subject of
electronic banking and he said, "The limiting element in the
availability, or the widespread use of electronic banking, is
establishing trust between the bank customer and the bank."
Nothing helps establishing that trust as much as the visual element
that modern computing can bring to that. And, again, I think, the
best way to demonstrate how this could work is to conjure up a
scenario where customer to database and customer to other
individual interfaces can be seen and enhanced by visual computing.
And here�s Jeff again, what happened, the last time I saw you in
Data Integrity?
Jeff Lo: Got a new job, well, I think my true calling was sales, so
I joined a company to do real estate sales and I understand you�re
trying to sell your house.
Dr. Grove: Absolutely, and, of course, nothing would please me more
that to deal with a real estate agent that got fired for playing
with his computer.
Jeff Lo: Yeah, now I�ve got a new computer, too, I�ve got this nice
laptop notebook computer, so I can go out to the customer and sell
their houses. So what I�ve done is, before I got out to your house,
I entered the information on your house into our database, but I
wanted to get a picture, so before I came in I took a picture of
the house. But, I thought, to show the prospective buyers of your
house and the people you�re going to be trying to buy your house
from, I�d get a picture of you that we�ll add to our database, as
well, with my new digital camera.
Now, what I need to do to put this on our network here is to dial
in over the phone line in your house back to our corporate server
which is actually sitting right here. We�re dialing up over this
regular phone line; and connecting up, while that�s connecting I�ve
got the picture I just took of you plus the one of the house on
this flashcard which I can take out of the camera and insert right
into the notebook, so that we can access it online.
And I�ll go ahead and pull up our page here, this is our page where
I can log in, give it our password and I�ll click "Submit" and it�s
going to give me a bunch of options that I can go through here and
what I�m going to look for is the option to edit the listing so I
can add the photo of your house in. OK, here it is, "Edit
Listings," and now it�s going to do a query on the database; all
these pages are actually coming out of an Informix database and it
is doing a query for listings that are mine, that are listed by me.
Dr. Grove: Pause for a moment, all of these pictures of the
different houses come out of the server database that resides on
the server in your head office and you�re downloading them and
displaying them on this computer.
Jeff Lo: Yes. And I�ve been busy, I�ve already got six listings and
here�s yours without the photo there. Let me go ahead and click on
that so we can edit it and put the photo of the house in and get it
up to our server.
What I�m going to do is I�m going to run our FTP application. But
let�s take a quick look at these photos that I�ve just put in here.
To figure out which one it is I�ll open the drive that is our
flashcard and there�s the house and here�s that picture of you up
here on stage. Looks pretty good, I think people will sell you
their house. But this is really the one we want, this number 56,
so, go ahead and close this down and I�ll connect into our server.
Give it the password for our special upload area and we�re
connected up and I�ll go ahead and send the file now. I just don�t
have any luck with computers, everywhere I go something happens, it
says access is denied but ...
Dr. Grove: Old Matt is probably standing by someplace to fix it up
if you somehow can get to it.
Jeff Lo: Probably, so let me do this, we�ve got our Help Desk page
here, and I can submit another ticket here, but since it�s kind of
urgent, I�m sitting here with you and I want to get this listing
uploaded, I want to give him a call but ...
Dr. Grove: You only have one line in this house.
Jeff Lo: Right. And I�m using that to dial in to our server. So,
what I can do is click on here and it will make an Internet phone
call into our Help Desk ...
Dr. Grove: On the same line?
Jeff Lo: On the very same line.
Dr. Grove: Wow.
Jeff Lo: All running over Internet protocols. And it�s placing the
call.
Matt Arnet: Oh, oh. Jeffrey, where do I know that name from? Hello,
this is Matt at the Help Desk.
Jeff Lo: Oh, look, it�s Matt, you�ve gone to the real estate world,
as well.
Matt Arnet: Yes, Jeff Lo, you�re not in the building, are you? Can
I help you, do you have any problems, today, or what can I do for
you?
Jeff Lo: Yeah, I�ve been trying to upload this image, I�m trying to
sell Andy�s house and put his photo on line but it said access was
denied, can you help me with this?
Matt Arnet: OK, well this time it sounds like it�s not your fault
so let me take a look at our server. I�m going to take remote
control of our server from the same web page that I did before.
It�s just the server management instead of a client management. Now
I�m in control of our server over the Internet and I�m going to
take a look at, since he�s dialed in via RAS, the Internet service.
Now, Jeff, where were you putting those files?
Jeff Lo: It�s in the new directory for the photos.
Matt Arnet: OK, well, let�s take a look at that and make sure that
that�s all set up for you properly, so, again, taking control of
everything, I do see here that on the server right is not checked
for Jeff. So I�m going to go ahead and check right, select OK,
select OK here and, Jeff, why don�t you give that a try again
because you should be taken care of.
Jeff Lo: OK, I�ve got the file selected and I�m telling it to
upload and. ...Wow, great, it�s copying it up, 60 percent 70
percent, all set, thanks a lot, man.
Matt Arnet: My pleasure and give us a call soon.
Jeff Lo: I�ll try not to. Let me get back to here, so, we�ve got
the path name of the new file up there and we�ll go ahead and tell
it update along with all the information on the house and it�s
going to now insert this record into the database with this new
image. So, it�s been updated and I�ll tell it to go ahead and
display your house. And it�s downloading the picture we just put
up. Now, I understand that you really like the house that you�re
in.
Dr. Grove: I particularly like the roofline.
Jeff Arnet: Well, what we can do is we can tell this database to
....
Dr. Grove: But it�s too small.
Jeff Lo: Too small? Too small but you like the look, so , we�ll
tell it to find a similar house. We�ll bring up our search page and
we�ll need what, three bedrooms or so?
Dr. Grove: Uh, huh.
Jeff Lo: So, three bedrooms, two baths and we�ll also tell it here
to match the appearance so it will actually use the Informix
DataBlade on the database to do a search on the images of all the
houses in the database.
Dr. Grove: It is a visual database, so it is capable of comparing
like images by searching the database by visual criteria.
Jeff Lo: Correct. So we�ll go ahead and click on "Search,"
submitting that sequel request and it�s comparing the images, the
price, the number of rooms and it�s pulling up what it thinks the
four best choices are here. Give it a second here to download.
Well, we can see these all have this little peak in the roof like
your house does. It�s grabbing these last two.
Again, a number of the same visual elements; this one also has the
same kind of railing in front of the porch as does this one. You
know, I went out and looked at this house the other day; it looks
really nice, I think this is your next dream house ...
Dr. Grove: Well, it is particularly my dream house because it�s
only one block away from Intel so I never have to take my car and
look for a parking space again.
Jeff Lo: Yup, and it�s my dream house, too, because it�s the most
expensive.
Dr. Grove: Well, you have to keep a job for that, Jeff.
Thank you. What we have seen here is several technologies working
together. First of all, you have seen a consumer application where
with the ordinary telephone line we have still used the techniques
of Web Based Management for a service person, support person, to
remotely fix a problem that Jeff is prone to be creating.
Secondly, you have seen networked computing at work where a very
data-intensive database application involving visual databases was
used on a powerful server and yet the very data-rich image was
displayed and manipulated on the client that�s connected to the
computer.
In the future I believe that commerce will be conducted
increasingly screen to screen. In this case the screen-to-screen
transaction took place between Jeff and Matt, the support person,
but if it was a real real estate situation the next transaction
could very easily have been to a mortgage broker, again, screen to
screen, with a single phone line using the capabilities of the
Internet to display video images telephonically in addition to
data.
After all, the video images and the sounds are just so many more
bits traversing, intermixed with the numerical data that are
involved in this transaction. Or, conversely, or beyond that, it
could have been very easily a transaction could have transacted,
could have taken place between seller, us, and a buyer on another
line, again, screen to screen, using the capabilities of connected
computing.
Increasingly, whether it is, we are not going to jump to this
complex situation in one move but, screen-to-screen commerce is
coming our way very, very rapidly.
So, if I sum up the megatrends that are facing us, all computing is
heading, if it isn�t already, toward network computing;
increasingly it will be visual in nature. Network computing and
visual computing require performance. Performance, in turn, will be
determined as much by the internal bandwidths of the computer as by
the processing power, and what I tried to illustrate to you is how
we are working to deliver both the processing power and the
internal bandwidth for the future of network computing.
Now, we are one company in a network of companies in a different
sense of the word, that working are making network computing a
reality and we are very, very pleased to have the partnership of an
outstanding company like Compaq to help us, guide us, collaborate
with us, deploy our technology and move us along when we stray.
And, in commemorating all of that and perhaps one of the key
elements, key successful elements, of our joint work, may I have
Eckhard Pfeiffer join me for a moment, please.
Recently, Compaq reached a very important milestone and Intel was
very, very proud of them. Compaq, through their outstanding
engineering and marketing effort, has managed to bring Intel
Architecture-based servers into places where, until a few years
ago, we never dreamed it would be possible; and are turning their
work with, hopefully, a little contribution from us, are turning
high-performance servers into a volume business.
In commemorating the one millionth server, here is a framed ad of
ours that we ran to congratulate you with that.
Mr. Pfeiffer: Thank you, Andy. I�m deeply touched. Frankly, I
didn�t expect it. You are the one to be thanked and receive a
little gift, but before handing it over to you, let me thank you
for this outstanding presentation, for this fabulous demo.
I think you have not only captured the imagination and the
excitement of the entire audience and, obviously, we are booked
out, we are sold out, every seat is filled. So, a fabulous
presentation, fabulous demos, showing the excitement of this
industry, showing the outlook into the future and how Intel is
leading the way in microprocessor process technology as well as
product technology and I think everybody will be going away from
this presentation with a much better understanding of the power of
this entire industry.
With that, thank you again and let me hand you a memento to this
important meeting, Innovate 97. It�s not as big as your picture,
but it�s very nice.
Legal Stuff � 1997 Intel Corporation
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