Your laptop may have just survived 2020 – but is it ready for 2023?
(2020/11/30)
- Reference: 1606746607
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/30/vpro_continually_learns_from_experience/
- Source link:
SPONSORED Nothing is predictable in enterprise IT. Just consider how most corporate workers - and their laptops - have shifted from their offices to their homes and gardens over the course of this year.
Face to face meetings have been replaced by video calls, pushing audio, graphics and connectivity harder than ever. Many users will be running more demanding workloads than they originally envisaged. And workers have become semi-detached from corporate networks, raising issues around security and connectivity, and their impact on overall system performance.
Smart IT buyers will always want to build in headroom to deal with the unexpected, which is why Intel is now looking ahead to 2023 with its vPro platform.
Intel’s vPro platform has been around since the mid noughties, designating laptops and PCs built with enterprise users in mind. As Intel’s Client Compute Group UK director Jeff Kilford puts it, the vPro platform is built on four pillars: performance; stability; security and manageability. It’s a philosophy as well as a specific set of technologies, which has expanded to cater both for enterprise users and the IT teams that support and manage their machines.
So, for example, Intel® Active Management Technology allows admins back at base to manage mobile workers’ hardware remotely. Likewise, Intel® Hardware Shield includes security technologies such as Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and Intel® Threat Detection Technology (TDT, which offer protection “below the operating system”. And the Intel® Stable IT Platform Programme smooths transitions by stabilising key systems components for 15 months and validating multiple versions of Windows 10 for any given version of the platform.
The performance part of the equation has become even more important, Kilford says, because the PC has become a tool in attracting and retaining the best talent coming into the workforce. This is particularly important as companies face up to a workforce that is now over 50 per cent comprised of millennials.
So, while the current vPro platform continues to give the IT professional what they need to “protect the individual, their data and the IP of the company”, a vPro laptop also needs to be powerful and stylish, so users “can form a positive emotional connection with that device and then through the device with the company”.
And if you don’t believe that a laptop can produce an emotional response, just consider what happens when your security software starts a scan while you’re in the middle of a video call.
The workloads of 2023
The Intel vPro platform is currently built around Intel’s 10th gen Intel® Core™ processor, which features up to 10 processor cores and promises a 40 per cent improvement over a three-year-old laptop. When it comes to defining performance in the future, Intel’s starting point is that today’s machines should be able to run the workloads of 2023 - even if it’s difficult to predict exactly what those workloads will be.
So it’s worth taking a look over what else the Intel vPro platform encompasses, look forward to where it’s heading, and ask how we can actually measure the benefit of all this.
The Intel vPro platform spec for the vendor’s 10th generation core processors includes integrated support for Intel® Optane™ Memory SSDs, which delivers an 81 per cent performance improvement over standard SSDs.
The spec also includes support for Wi-Fi 6, which promises better performance for video conferencing, complementing the processor’s built-in UHD. As well as providing a significant speed boost and increased security, Wi-Fi 6 allows users to be further away from the access point - which may be as beneficial when working from home as when roaming. Wi-Fi 6 is integrated into the processor package, reducing the need to incorporate discrete components spread around the motherboard.
Peripheral connectivity comes via Thunderbolt 3, which offers transfer speeds up to 40Gbps, and support for USB, PCI Express and DisplayPort, all through a single cable.
On the security side, Intel TDT includes Accelerated Memory Scanning, which offloads scanning memory for nasties to the processor’s integrated GPU. The GPU might normally be under-utilised while users are running many day to day tasks - spreadsheets, word processing, etc. This isn’t just a benefit from the CPU utilisation point of view. As Kilford points out, this is a lower power option, compared to loading the CPU, therefore reducing the drain on battery when using the laptop unplugged.
AI technology
And if offloading complicated tasks to the graphics processor reminds you of what is happening in servers built for AI, you’d be right. The increasing use of AI and machine learning technology is a theme that runs through the vPro platform.
For example, the 10th generation-based products introduced Intel® Dynamic Tuning, which uses AI to intelligently manage CPU frequency. This makes power management more nuanced than in the past (where a machine might kick into Turboboost mode without really needing to, before throttling back as the fan starts screaming. In the meantime your knees have warmed up).
As Kilford says, “That's great for a number of reasons. It keeps the skin temperature cool. The fan might come on for very heavy workloads, but typically it keeps the fan off, and I get the performance I need in a more consistent way over a longer period of time. And it's much better for the battery.”
These are all ways in which workloads are “federated” across the platform, rather than loading everything onto the CPU, which as Kilford explains, adds up to a much better overall laptop experience.
Intel’s 11th generation Tiger Lake architecture features a neural network accelerator that does noise reduction, while the GPU is running AI workloads, together with Intel’s Deep Learning Boost technology on the CPU.
“When they aggregate together, they make for an amazing video conferencing experience, because they do a lot of video clean-up and noise filtering,” says Kilford. “On these modern workloads, everyone expects HD minimum screens and they really expect the device to be running a ton of applications at once.”
vPro platform systems based on Tiger Lake are coming in the new year, says Kilford. “We have to do a huge amount of engineering, co-engineering with the whole ecosystem, and certification of the platform to ensure that we know it's going to run workloads on 2023.”
Consistency, every time
All this might mean that you have to re-evaluate how you evaluate performance, as your traditional approach to benchmarking systems may not be capturing the whole picture.
For one thing, with other parts of the CPU package taking up so much of the grunt work, simply measuring CPU performance doesn’t give a complete picture of the work the system is doing.
At the same time, it’s worth considering the vPro platform is focused on delivering consistent performance whether or not the device is plugged in or running on battery. Even as users are confined to the home, that doesn’t mean they’re confined to one place in it, Kilford points out. They’re still switching between AC and DC user.
“It takes an awful lot underneath the operating system to still meet that expectation of 16 hours of viewing films or nine hours of hardcore browsing whatever the use case is,” says Kilford. “Those are the thresholds that we aim to satisfy as part of the Project Athena program. Otherwise, the device is pretty unattractive, no matter how sophisticated the engineering underneath.”
So Kilford advises, you need to examine performance of the whole system both plugged in and unplugged, on real world workloads: “Get the stop watch out, use your phone, get off AC and do some stuff side by side and see which is the better performing device. Build a big pdf, do some browsing, and hey, presto, you're suddenly seeing the reality of how the platforms perform side by side without the need for benchmark advocacy.”
This might sound extreme, but if this year has taught us anything, it’s that we never know precisely what’s coming next. But recognising this while taking a holistic view of performance, security and manageability will leave you better placed to adapt to the future, whether it’s the AI-powered workloads we can expect come 2023 or taking Zoom calls from the garden come next Spring.
Sponsored by Intel
Face to face meetings have been replaced by video calls, pushing audio, graphics and connectivity harder than ever. Many users will be running more demanding workloads than they originally envisaged. And workers have become semi-detached from corporate networks, raising issues around security and connectivity, and their impact on overall system performance.
Smart IT buyers will always want to build in headroom to deal with the unexpected, which is why Intel is now looking ahead to 2023 with its vPro platform.
Intel’s vPro platform has been around since the mid noughties, designating laptops and PCs built with enterprise users in mind. As Intel’s Client Compute Group UK director Jeff Kilford puts it, the vPro platform is built on four pillars: performance; stability; security and manageability. It’s a philosophy as well as a specific set of technologies, which has expanded to cater both for enterprise users and the IT teams that support and manage their machines.
So, for example, Intel® Active Management Technology allows admins back at base to manage mobile workers’ hardware remotely. Likewise, Intel® Hardware Shield includes security technologies such as Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and Intel® Threat Detection Technology (TDT, which offer protection “below the operating system”. And the Intel® Stable IT Platform Programme smooths transitions by stabilising key systems components for 15 months and validating multiple versions of Windows 10 for any given version of the platform.
The performance part of the equation has become even more important, Kilford says, because the PC has become a tool in attracting and retaining the best talent coming into the workforce. This is particularly important as companies face up to a workforce that is now over 50 per cent comprised of millennials.
So, while the current vPro platform continues to give the IT professional what they need to “protect the individual, their data and the IP of the company”, a vPro laptop also needs to be powerful and stylish, so users “can form a positive emotional connection with that device and then through the device with the company”.
And if you don’t believe that a laptop can produce an emotional response, just consider what happens when your security software starts a scan while you’re in the middle of a video call.
The workloads of 2023
The Intel vPro platform is currently built around Intel’s 10th gen Intel® Core™ processor, which features up to 10 processor cores and promises a 40 per cent improvement over a three-year-old laptop. When it comes to defining performance in the future, Intel’s starting point is that today’s machines should be able to run the workloads of 2023 - even if it’s difficult to predict exactly what those workloads will be.
So it’s worth taking a look over what else the Intel vPro platform encompasses, look forward to where it’s heading, and ask how we can actually measure the benefit of all this.
The Intel vPro platform spec for the vendor’s 10th generation core processors includes integrated support for Intel® Optane™ Memory SSDs, which delivers an 81 per cent performance improvement over standard SSDs.
The spec also includes support for Wi-Fi 6, which promises better performance for video conferencing, complementing the processor’s built-in UHD. As well as providing a significant speed boost and increased security, Wi-Fi 6 allows users to be further away from the access point - which may be as beneficial when working from home as when roaming. Wi-Fi 6 is integrated into the processor package, reducing the need to incorporate discrete components spread around the motherboard.
Peripheral connectivity comes via Thunderbolt 3, which offers transfer speeds up to 40Gbps, and support for USB, PCI Express and DisplayPort, all through a single cable.
On the security side, Intel TDT includes Accelerated Memory Scanning, which offloads scanning memory for nasties to the processor’s integrated GPU. The GPU might normally be under-utilised while users are running many day to day tasks - spreadsheets, word processing, etc. This isn’t just a benefit from the CPU utilisation point of view. As Kilford points out, this is a lower power option, compared to loading the CPU, therefore reducing the drain on battery when using the laptop unplugged.
AI technology
And if offloading complicated tasks to the graphics processor reminds you of what is happening in servers built for AI, you’d be right. The increasing use of AI and machine learning technology is a theme that runs through the vPro platform.
For example, the 10th generation-based products introduced Intel® Dynamic Tuning, which uses AI to intelligently manage CPU frequency. This makes power management more nuanced than in the past (where a machine might kick into Turboboost mode without really needing to, before throttling back as the fan starts screaming. In the meantime your knees have warmed up).
As Kilford says, “That's great for a number of reasons. It keeps the skin temperature cool. The fan might come on for very heavy workloads, but typically it keeps the fan off, and I get the performance I need in a more consistent way over a longer period of time. And it's much better for the battery.”
These are all ways in which workloads are “federated” across the platform, rather than loading everything onto the CPU, which as Kilford explains, adds up to a much better overall laptop experience.
Intel’s 11th generation Tiger Lake architecture features a neural network accelerator that does noise reduction, while the GPU is running AI workloads, together with Intel’s Deep Learning Boost technology on the CPU.
“When they aggregate together, they make for an amazing video conferencing experience, because they do a lot of video clean-up and noise filtering,” says Kilford. “On these modern workloads, everyone expects HD minimum screens and they really expect the device to be running a ton of applications at once.”
vPro platform systems based on Tiger Lake are coming in the new year, says Kilford. “We have to do a huge amount of engineering, co-engineering with the whole ecosystem, and certification of the platform to ensure that we know it's going to run workloads on 2023.”
Consistency, every time
All this might mean that you have to re-evaluate how you evaluate performance, as your traditional approach to benchmarking systems may not be capturing the whole picture.
For one thing, with other parts of the CPU package taking up so much of the grunt work, simply measuring CPU performance doesn’t give a complete picture of the work the system is doing.
At the same time, it’s worth considering the vPro platform is focused on delivering consistent performance whether or not the device is plugged in or running on battery. Even as users are confined to the home, that doesn’t mean they’re confined to one place in it, Kilford points out. They’re still switching between AC and DC user.
“It takes an awful lot underneath the operating system to still meet that expectation of 16 hours of viewing films or nine hours of hardcore browsing whatever the use case is,” says Kilford. “Those are the thresholds that we aim to satisfy as part of the Project Athena program. Otherwise, the device is pretty unattractive, no matter how sophisticated the engineering underneath.”
So Kilford advises, you need to examine performance of the whole system both plugged in and unplugged, on real world workloads: “Get the stop watch out, use your phone, get off AC and do some stuff side by side and see which is the better performing device. Build a big pdf, do some browsing, and hey, presto, you're suddenly seeing the reality of how the platforms perform side by side without the need for benchmark advocacy.”
This might sound extreme, but if this year has taught us anything, it’s that we never know precisely what’s coming next. But recognising this while taking a holistic view of performance, security and manageability will leave you better placed to adapt to the future, whether it’s the AI-powered workloads we can expect come 2023 or taking Zoom calls from the garden come next Spring.
Sponsored by Intel
stiine
As long as they stop hiring people from Intel.
yawn...
naive
The Dell i5-vPro E6510 in got from my employer 2010 is shifting Citrix pixels like a pro, maybe even in 2023 :).
I'm still betting that AMD will keep wiping the floor with Intel's processors, mobile or not