Is There Victory in VoIP?
The channel’s biggest stumbling block with VoIP may be a mental one...
SANTA ROSA ARRIVES
Your numbers may not match the major analysts’ stats, but they’re probably close. Desktop sales continue to slip while notebook sales continue to climb like mad—roughly 20% year-over-year growth as of Q1, according to IDC. If you’re not finding a way to succeed with laptops, your days of being in the PC business are numbered.The big question is one of strategy. Do you sell a tier-one OEM or a whitebook? The correct answer, of course, is: both. If a customer walks in with cash and asks for HP or Dell or Acer, you’re certainly not going to turn down an easy invoice. Then again, you might smile, start to write up the sale, and say, “By the way, you’re not interested in a notebook that would be easier to service, are you? Or able to be remotely managed?” If the customer hesitates at the hint of how a whitebook can offer superior overall value, then you have an opening to educate and upsell.
Without question, upselling is the key. If you can’t upsell on service, features, or ROI, then you’re down to battling over price-for-specs, and the odds are that you’re going to end up with a low-margin OEM sale. That’s fine; no harm done. If nothing else, you’ve retained your customer and left the door open for follow-up or add-on sales.
But when you sell an OEM brand, part of what happens is that the OEM’s brand is promoted and not your own. Most resellers want and benefit from in-house brand recognition. If a guy works in an office full of HP machines and he needs to buy a personal system, what brand will he think of first? This is one of the reasons why whitebooks are so critical to the long-term health of the channel. And yet whitebook market share versus OEM can be measured in the single-digit range.
 |
| The Plus of Socket P. The mobile Core 2 Duo, code-named Merom, enters its second generation sporting the same innards but a new pin-out that’s compatible with Intel’s coming 45nm platform. |
Santa Rosa has the potential to improve matters for whitebooks and their resellers. The Verified By Intel (VBI) program is part of this, and the improved specs in the new mobility platform have their own upselling prospects. But perhaps the most exciting part of Santa Rosa is that it embraces Intel’s digital home and digital office platforms—two developments that play particularly well into the hands of smaller, nimbler solution providers. All told, Santa Rosa may be the most significant change yet in the world of whitebooks. Are you ready to make the most of it?
What is Santa Rosa?
Santa Rosa is the code name for the fourth generation of Intel’s Centrino mobile PC platform. History buffs may recall that we’ve been through Carmel (2003), Sonoma (2005), and Napa (2006). Taken in a historical perspective, Santa Rosa might seem at a quick glance to be another incremental upgrade: a little faster, a new feature or two, and maybe a fresh round of bundle incentives pushed through distribution. This may have been true of Sonoma. Napa was more interesting because it allowed for upgradeability to a dual-core processor and accompanied the launch of the VBI program.
Santa Rosa is the hottest Centrino launch since, well, the original Centrino. First things first, though. Let’s dig into the platform’s required hardware components one at a time and see what new advantages Intel is offering.
 |
| Santa Rosa at a Glance. Here you see the core chipset behind the new Centrino, the GM965 northbridge and ICH8M southbridge, and the wealth of features and cutting-edge components they enable. |
Processor: Merom Redux
With Napa, we had a good example of Intel’s “tick-tock” development strategy. One year, Intel will advance a product architecture (tick), and the next year it will advance the fabrication process for that architecture (tock). Napa launched with the Core Duo (“Yonah”) processor, based on the 65nm process. When Napa refreshed last July, the process stayed the same, but the architecture advanced from single-core (T5000 family) to dual-core (T7000 family, dual-core “Merom” ). This year, the situation reverses. We’re getting an architecture upgrade from a 667 MHz to an 800 MHz front-side bus (FSB), and later this year, the Core 2 Duo will keep its feature set but transition into a new 45nm process technology, whereupon the chip will be code named “Penryn”.
Penryn will require a new processor pin-out, and, in preparation for this, Intel has integrated the new Socket P (for Penryn—get it?) into today’s Santa Rosa design. There’s good and bad news to this. The bad news is that owners of 667 MHz bus Merom chips will not be able to bring their processors forward into Santa Rosa clamshells; the pin-outs are incompatible. The good news is that those who buy Santa Rosa now will have a long road map before them, spanning from the just-launched 800 MHz FSB Merom well into the Penryn generation.
There are four new mobile Core 2 Duo parts: the T7100 (1.80 GHz), T7300 (2.0 GHz), T7500 (2.2 GHz), and T7700 (2.4 GHz), which displaces the 2.33 GHz T7600 as the mobile king of the hill. Like other T7000 models, this new series boasts 4MB of L2 cache shared across two processing cores. While the new SKUs use an 800 MHz bus, all T7000 chips share the 65nm fab process and are recommended for the 965 chipset family. Features such as Execute Disable Bit, 64-bit extension support (EM64T), Intel Virtualization Technology, Advanced Smart Cache, and Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost all stay constant.
The major feature addition with second-gen Merom is Intel Dynamic Acceleration. To explain this idea, Intel likes to invoke the image of two showerheads connected to the same plumbing. When you turn one head off, there’s more pressure available for the other head to push out more water.
“We call this processor Core 2 Duo, but really it’s Core 2 Duo on steroids,” noted Intel’s mobility chief, Mooly Eden, at the recent IDF event in Beijing. “This microprocessor is going to be more powerful than the previous generation. The new chips will be able to overclock one of the cores if the other core is not being used. If you are running a single threaded application, one of the cores can go to sleep, and the leftover power can be used by the other core. We give it a turbo boost, the ability to run faster than it used to. This is not overclocking. Overclocking is when you take a chip and increase its clock speed and run it out of spec. This is not out of spec. Here, it is within the spec of the dual cores. We just identify when one core is not using the headroom and we give it to the other core.”
Now, we can argue just how likely true single-core usage is in an age of rampant background apps and multiple browser windows. But smart system builders have the ability to talk with users about their applications and help fine-tune operation. Users who need raw horsepower for a single task, such as a single-threaded game, may benefit from having the second CPU core disabled in the BIOS. With Intel Dynamic Acceleration enabled, this will result in benefits never before available on a Centrino platform.
While less publicized, the Merom refresh also provides a new feature called Dynamic Front Side Bus Frequency Switching. This is a new twist on the old SpeedStep power saving scheme. Here, when possible, the FSB drops into a lower clock frequency and the chip into a lower core voltage. The CPU has a new, lower-power active state dubbed “super low frequency mode.” This mode is in addition to other Merom tweaks that let the processor stay in the Enhanced Deeper Sleep (C4) state longer because of redirected snoop cycles from the chipset.
Chipset: The 965 Goes Mobile
Santa Rosa’s Central Nervous System. Without the GM965/ICH8M chipset, none of the inter-component bus speed advances, improved graphics, or home/office platform extras would be possible.
We’ve spent a lot of time in Tech Insight detailing Intel’s 965 Express chipset, most recently in our Issue 4 vPro coverage. A full retelling isn’t necessary here. Suffice it to say that the mobile version of the 965, code named “Crestline,” comes in three varieties: the front-running GM965, the IGP-less PM965, and the more budget-oriented GL960, which features a 400 MHz graphics core versus the GM965’s 500 MHz. All models come paired with the ICH8M southbridge and support an 800 MHz FSB, dual-channel DDR2-667 memory, and Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) 2.5. (Note that this is an incremental improvement over the AMT 2.0 found in vPro’s first wave of components.) The PATA interface is gone, and the ICH8M tosses AC’97 in trade for HD Audio.
There are a few quirks in this chipset group. For example, the GM965 features Intel Matrix Storage Technology 5.5 while the PM965 sports Intel Matrix Storage Manager 7.0. Version 7.0 is largely a collection of bug fixes, but the question is moot since very few notebooks—channel whitebooks in particular— are likely to offer more than one hard drive bay. (Cool trivia: Simply implementing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager will result in an approximate 300mW power savings.) Nobody cares about RAID 5 support in a notebook. Similarly, it may be comforting that the mobile 965 family supports 10 USB 2.0 ports; we’d sure like to see a notebook offering even six.
More noteworthy are two new battery-saving features Intel builds into Santa Rosa’s chipset. The first of these is Dynamic Display Power Optimization (D2PO), a technology Intel co-developed with Toshiba Matsushita Display primarily for use on ultra-mobile PC machines (UMPCs). In short, D2PO tells the display system to use progressive scanning on high-movement images and to revert to interlaced scanning for low-movement or static images. With half of the frames displayed, obviously inter- laced output draws less power. Intel brands this technology as Display Power Saving Technology 3.0, and it can save up to 400mW of power.
The other major battery-related innovation with Santa Rosa is Intel Display Refresh Rate Switching. Obviously, TFT panels don’t have refresh rates per se. But the liquid crystal cells within the panels do twist and untwist a certain number of times per second. Panel vendors have been racing to improve these “refresh” speeds for years to better appeal to gamers and movie viewers. However, most apps don’t need blazing display speeds, so the number of LCD twists per second can be dropped considerably when actively monitored through a feature like Display Refresh Rate Switching.
 |
| All in the Features. Centrino’s new chipset enables loads of new and improved capabilities, including remote management, Vista Aero graphics support, Clear Video Technology, and HDMI output. |
However, the X3100 is not the X3500. This mobile iteration steps down in clock frequency for longer battery runtimes, supports OpenGL 1.5 rather than the X3500’s version 2.0, and meets the Shader Model 3.0 spec rather than 4.0. Of course, in a mobile form factor, these aren’t exactly must-have features—not in 2007, anyway. The value-add features most likely to be appreciated, such as 1080p and Vista Premium support, are here. Also note that the GM965 supports HDMI output. Since we’re starting to see high-def, blue laser optical drives creep into the whitebook market, you need to keep a close eye on HDCP support. An HDMI port does not guarantee HDCP, and without HDCP you have no HD DVD or Bluray Disc playback. In addition to HDCP decode circuitry, a compliant graphics solution requires an HDCP license. The Jackson Bay motherboard (see below) has this license; the Tawas board does not.
Last but not least, be aware of the difference between the ICH8M southbridge and the ICH8M-Enhanced. The Enhanced version is the one offering AMT 2.5, Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), and compatibility with the Viiv and vPro platforms (also below). The Manageability Engine built into the Enhanced southbridge enables vPro-friendly features such as the packet filtering System Defense and wireless AMT. And because of new controller link functionality added between the major platform components, the Manageability Engine can communicate through multiple interfaces, including the WLAN and Gigabit Ethernet controllers.
LAN: Gigabit At Last
Wireless to the Nth Degree. Intel’s 4965AGN (“Kedron”) Mini Card connects to three antennas built into the Santa Rosa notebook shell. Three antennas are needed for 802.11n’s superior performance.
Finally, Gigabit Ethernet arrives as a standard feature on Santa Rosa notebooks—and only a couple of years after Gigabit switches drew near to price parity with their 10/100 counterparts. The primary part here is the 82566 LAN controller chip family. There are two mobile parts, the MM and MC. The 82566MM is geared for vPro, with support for legacy ASF 2.0, AMT 2.5, and Virtualization Technology through the Intel Virtual Gigabit Network Connection. You also get Auto Connect Battery Saver, which shuts off the network PHY when no LAN cable is present, and a reduced link speed mode when running on battery. This saves on the compute resources necessary for packet processing, as do a handful of network calculation functions designed to offload some of the LAN burden from the CPU.
The 82566MC aims at mobile entertainment systems. While this part echoes the battery-saving features in the MM chip, the MC is the only part that supports the Viiv software stack and Viiv’s Quick Resume feature.
Wireless LAN: Fast Ethernet Flies Free
For formality’s sake, we’re going to point out that Santa Rosa uses what is commonly known as Draft N, the now-pretty-much-for-sure-upgradeable-to-final version of the 802.11n wireless LAN spec, which isn’t due for final publication until September 2008—or April 2009, depending on which source you read. Either way, product didn’t start shipping based on the Draft 2.0 specification for 802.11n until just recently in May. But because all save the earliest Draft N gear has so far proven good on its word at being firmware upgradeable all the way through final ratification, we see no danger in calling Santa Rosa’s 4965AGN PCIe Mini Card an “802.11n” part. Not taking this leap now will only create more end-user confusion.
For those used to seeing roughly 50% actual sustained wireless throughput compared with the stated spec throughput (think 20 to 30 Mbps for the “54 Mbps” 802.11g), the real-world numbers on 802.11n should come as no surprise. Admittedly, the first-gen Draft N results were abysmal, with most reviewers showing numbers near or, in some cases, worse than 802.11g. The 802.11 Working Group states that eventual 802.11n throughput of 200 Mbps is feasible. For today, Fast Ethernet-like speeds exceeding 100 Mbps are increasingly common thanks to the way in which 802.11n “bonds” up to 27 channels across the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency ranges.
Throughput is further aided via multiple-input multiple- output (MIMO) technology. In older wireless systems, the ways in which radio signals can fragment and multiply as they bounce off of objects results in multiple signals reaching the target at staggered times, tending to hamper signal integrity and throughput. Rather than fight this phenomenon, MIMO embraces it, analyzing the various signal streams and sending discrete data sets over each. The Centrino specification requires only two MIMO antennas, but performance is optimal with three. The 4965AGN adapter uses three, and we have yet to hear of an 802.11n-equipped Santa Rosa notebook that didn’t come with three antenna wires built into the clamshell. In addition to greater throughput, MIMO generally doubles the reception range found with 802.11g.
As its name implies, the 4965AGN, code-named Kedron, supports 802.11a, 802.11g (and therefore 802.11b), and 802.11n connection modes. This makes the adapter a very strong future-proofing play, even for customers that have yet to upgrade their access points and routers to 802.11n gear. Still, if dollars count and the buyer doesn’t see a need for 802.11n functionality, the 4965AG strips off the 802.11n functionality yet still meets Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro requirements. Both versions of the 4965 support AMT 2.5 as well as Cisco Compatible Extensions v4, which helps with everything from key management to improvements in VoIP quality. Keep in mind that, unlike some competing 802.11n products, Intel’s NICs implement a “good neighbor” assurance, meaning that 40 MHz channels (two 20 MHz channels bonded) will only happen in the 5 GHz spectrum in order to minimize negative impact on nearby 2.4 GHz networks and devices.
Traditional 54 Mbps is probably fine for most workplace wireless needs. Note that while there is no Viiv version of Centrino Duo per say, the 4965AG is Viiv-compatible. However, this deserves a cautionary note. A year ago, we watched a Viiv client try to stream video over a 54 Mbps wireless connection in an area with lots of competing network traffic. The results were essentially unusable, and this is consistent with other DVD-quality or better streaming video tests we’ve attempted. As an application, video simply requires faster and more stable bandwidth. We strongly encourage system builders to only consider 802.11n deployment for notebooks destined for video streaming.
Intel Turbo Memory
Pick the Right Router. The best 802.11n adapter in the world won’t do you any good without an 802.11n router to connect with. D-Link’s Gigabit Ethernet-enabled DIR-655 is a solid example.
Honestly, Intel Turbo Memory, formerly codenamed Robson, isn’t a Santa Rosa requirement; it’s optional. But given all of the hubbub surrounding the flash memory add-on component, we felt it deserved equal footing with the required platform pieces. According to Intel, Turbo Memory can offer significant benefits to mainstream and especially budget buyers.
Santa Rosa notebooks generally feature two PCIe Mini Card connectors. (A few have one; Compal makes some units with three.) The first is for the wireless NIC; the second can be for any compatible card but is usually meant for Turbo Memory. You’re probably familiar with the ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive caching features of Windows Vista, which use USB and hybrid hard drive fl ash memory respectively. Both of these flash approaches aim to mitigate the considerable latencies involved in accessing data from platters. The power draw (8% to 10% of the total mobile platform) of spinning those disks is another problem. By stashing needed data in flash memory, access times can be improved and hard drives left powered down. While there are some differences between these two approaches, both take advantage of the Windows SuperFetch memory manager to optimize memory handling, and they generally complement each other.
In discussing how ReadyBoost uses flash memory resources, Matt Ayers, a program manager with the Windows Client Performance team, recently clarified matters, using the 256MB of NV memory found in upcoming Seagate and Samsung hybrid hard drives as an example. His following comments appeared on Microsoft’s 8/1 Episode of TechNet Radio.
“Of that 256MB, we reserve 32MB for write caching, and the remainder we use for three purposes: One will cache information that’s useful for accelerating boot and resume from hibernate; since we trust the device, we can put the unique content on there. And then we take the remainder and we split it between read caching for OEM applications. So if an OEM wants to accelerate their media center experience or their diagnostic or help tools, they can run those directly out of the cache and have accelerated applications launch. So the three parts I’ve talked about so far—we’ve got the write cache, we’ve got boot and hibernate acceleration, we have the OEM area, which we call the OEM pinning area, [and] everything left over is used as a read cache based on the Super Fetch database.”
Intel Turbo Memory is essentially ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive in one internal card operating at PCI Express bus speeds. This offers several benefi ts. You now need to inventory only one product type instead of two. (For that matter, on paper, Intel Turbo Memory is slated to come in 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB SKUs. But there is minimal interest in the 512MB part, and the 2GB card is still classified under “TBD,” leaving only the 1GB model for your shelves.) The majority of USB fl ash drives on the market are not fast enough to meet ReadyBoost requirements, which further complicates sourcing. As of this writing, few if any hybrid hard drive (HHDD) models are shipping, and the most common flash capacity in slated drives is only 256MB. USB flash drives are not only slower, they’re also more power-hungry. A 1GB SanDisk Mini Cruzer consumes about 400mW versus about 70mW for a Turbo Memory card. And let’s not forget how easy it is to snap off USB drives when moving notebooks about.
 |
| Turbo Memory Exposed. Strip away the screws and layers of a Santa Rosa notebook and you’ll find the Mini Card slots waiting for a 1GB Turbo Memory card like this one. |
How well does Turbo Memory work? In the real world, that depends on the notebook’s configuration. If nothing else, the disk-filtering option ROM (DFOROM) software that accompanies Turbo Memory will allow the flash chips to be accessed at the BIOS level. This allows system boot files to be stored in the flash memory and drops the overall boot time by up to 20 percent. But general performance gains will depend on several factors, most notably the size of the system RAM. According to Intel tests conducted on a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 with 2x512MB of Hynix DDR2- 667 modules, loading a Google Earth fly-through followed by a 48-photo slideshow creation in Photoshop Elements 5.0 took 189.7 seconds without Turbo Memory; with Turbo Memory enabled, the runtime dropped 127% to 83.5 seconds.
Of course, this is something of an optimal config for Turbo Memory. Going the other way, some tests have shown that 1GB of Turbo Memory will yield about 80% of the performance benefits of adopting a second gigabyte of system memory. In general, as system RAM increases, expect the benefits of Turbo Memory to lessen. This is why we said Turbo Memory is more of a mainstream and value play. When notebook costs need to stay low, Turbo Memory can deliver a surprisingly large bang for the buck. With 1GB of Turbo Memory costing less than $25, you can sell a notebook with 1GB of RAM plus 1GB of Turbo Memory for the same sticker price as a system with 2GB of RAM. However, the first configuration will leave you with over $30 of extra margin along with a trio of value-add selling points: 20% faster boot time, extended battery life, and less wear and tear on the hard drive.
Help for Whitebooks
As we mentioned early on, whitebooks are critical to the ongoing health of the channel. Since the dawn of the Centrino platform, Intel has been working ceaselessly to provide ever more tools and programs to help system builders compete effectively against tier-one competitors. Probably the greatest step of all materialized with the VBI program, which melded Intel support with the Common Building Blocks (CBB) initiative. In short, resellers could get VBI notebook support for two years, including warranty exchanges, direct from Intel rather than the ODM or OEM. The CBB component effort sought lower manufacturing costs and easier inventorying on standardized hard drives, optical drives, 14” and 15” LCD panels, 6-cell battery packs, AC adapters, and keyboards. Santa Rosa delivers three enhancements to the CBB lineup: a 9-cell battery pack for longer runtimes, higher resolution (1440x900) LCD screens, and a new 13.3” LCD option for smaller systems.
As many who tried out VBI discovered, sometimes it takes a while to work out the rough edges on large program launches. The biggest hitch came with availability. There were few VBI SKUs from the three launch ODMs (ASUS, Compal, and Quanta), and what units were shipping were often bottlenecked at the main distribution hub. By the time of Santa Rosa’s launch, both of these issues had been largely remedied. Procedures at the U.S.-based distribution hub have substantially improved, and resellers now have the option of buying direct or through aggregated distribution. Mitac has joined the ranks of VBI ODMS, and between all four, there are at least 12 shipping Santa Rosa VBI designs.
Stepping outside of VBI, Clevo, ECS, MSI, and Vestel are additional ODMs building Santa Rosa notebooks with multiple CBB components. In a bold but increasingly necessary move, Intel is now requiring that new Santa Rosa ODMs not only implement CBB features but also submit their notebook designs and test results to Intel for review. Intel is also pushing these non-VBI manufacturers to build with 12.1” and 17” displays in order to keep whitebook offerings varied and competitive. Keep in mind that the tier-ones have been slower to adopt CBB components, perhaps in part because doing so might cut into their high-margin, proprietary replacement parts business. So the more you can emphasize CBB adherence in your notebook sales, the greater the advantage you may enjoy.
Santa Rosa brings another exciting development you’re not likely to hear trumpeted much: an Intel-designed motherboard. We’re all very familiar with the benefits of form factors such as ATX. Form factors create industry adherence, and from that comes lower prices and greater serviceability. Now, Intel is not promoting its notebook motherboard designs as a form factor. They’re not even a CBB component. The primary ODMs still have too much control and too little cooperation to allow for standardized boards. But Intel’s effort could turn out to be a move in the form factor direction. Should that pan out, we might just see a deepening of system builder opportunity in the mobile space as individual pieces rather than pre-built clamshells become the lowest common denominator in whitebooks. Needless to say, don’t hold your breath for an overnight miracle.
Intel is making its two notebook motherboard designs— the 8222T “Tawas” for Centrino Pro and 8222J “Jackson Bay” for consumer/multimedia—available to all ODMs. With the Santa Rosa launch, Mitac is the first to build these two boards into its shells, and the initial models with either board will be VBI clamshells. Facing an uphill battle, Intel is trying to demonstrate leadership by bringing novel features onto these parts. With the 8222T, there’s the Trusted Platform Module necessary for vPro as well as a special 58-pin connector designed to link with devices such as Targus’ forthcoming ACP30 port replicator. Unlike most port replicators, which use an integrated chipset to replicate device signals, the ACP30 passes through all video, audio, USB, and LAN signals directly from the 8222T board—what you see on the motherboard is what you get through the port replicator.
With the 8222J, there’s integrated consumer IR support for Philips code remote controls. More importantly, the 8222J is the first-ever Viiv-compatible motherboard to build in an HDMI port, which also includes in-line digital audio capabilities along with the video stream.
Santa Rosa doesn’t deliver a major whitebook infrastructure boost akin to the launch of VBI. Rather, Intel is continuing to refine and improve existing whitebook options. The added attention to non-VBI designs marks a subtle change in philosophy. A year ago, nearly all of Intel’s mobile messaging was devoted to VBI—and for good reasons. But the unfortunate downside was that when some salespeople encountered resistance to VBI models for this or that reason, the sales discussion ground to a halt. Now, Intel leads with the advantages of VBI but then says in the next breath, “If VBI notebooks don’t exactly fi t a client’s needs, we have an even broader selection in non-VBI models that still carry the advantages of CBB components. And if that doesn’t work, you can always resell a tier-one notebook. Don’t get stuck. The object of the game is to sell Centrino notebooks, whatever flavor they might be. But our hope is that those sales will bolster the channel as much as possible.”
Santa Rosa in the Home
Viiv in Your Lap. Most people agree that the media center idea remains solid. With Santa Rosa, users can now run the Viiv platform on their couch as well as from it.
OK, so maybe Viiv, Intel’s digital home entertainment hardware/software platform, didn’t exactly become the ubiquitous success some had hoped. You could argue that, like Viiv, the entire home theater PC movement is still in a state of development. Viiv offers a lot of cool, value-add functionality for multimedia consumers—essentially for free—but the market still has yet to decide how it prefers to converge the PC and home theater worlds. Until this happens, Viiv and other efforts like it are liable to keep slowly building until critical mass strikes. For now, Santa Rosa can deliver Viiv’s benefits without sporting a Viiv badge...or an inflated price.
To recap, Viiv combines certain features found in Intel hardware, starting with dual-core processors and the 945 (DH or Enhanced version southbridges) chipset family. Then the platform incorporates Microsoft’s Windows Media Center and Viiv-specific software to deliver a range of compelling features. These include things like Quick Resume, which gives a Viiv PC the ability to power “on” and “off” in only a few seconds, much like a regular entertainment appliance. Viiv also offers scores of 10-foot UI-based applications spanning movies, TV, music, games, and photo categories from providers like ESPN, Movielink, Napster, AOL, Ubisoft, and Adobe. More recent additions in Viiv 1.5 significantly improved how multiple Viiv machines can network and share content, both unrestricted and bound with DRM protection.
To be clear, there is no merging of the Centrino and Viiv platforms. Centrino plus vPro equals Centrino Pro (see below), but there is no equivalent new brand on the consumer side. Rather, there are some Santa Rosa models with all of the requisite ingredients to be Viiv-compliant. A Viiv-enabled Santa Rosa notebook makes sense for several reasons. One of the reasons home theater PCs have met with resistance is that some people don’t want to spend the money on a PC dedicated to sitting next to a television. A Viiv notebook has the ability to power a home theater plus pack up and be used elsewhere, so there’s greater utility per invested dollar. Viiv media content can travel with the user, and the power-saving benefits of enjoying Viiv content versus a traditional DVD will be obvious in battery runtime on the user’s next long-distance flight. Viiv on the road further offers additional power management centered on being in an “unwired” state. For example, on battery power, closing the lid will generally stop media streaming, but when on AC power, closing the lid won’t suspend media serving. Centrino Duo systems running Viiv software can also wake from sleep modes (Wake-on-Wireless LAN, or WoW) in order to stream content when requested across the network.
 |
| Desktop Performance to Go. With the next version of vPro and its emphasis on virtualization, don’t be surprised if Centrino Pro starts touting wireless VoIP running in a virtual machine as a selling point. |
By no small coincidence, Media Share mirrors the X3100 IGP in that it supports HD resolutions in MPEG-2 and WMV9 formats. In standard-def, the software supports MPEG-2, WMV, DivX, and MS-DVR. It acts as a client for UPnP media servers as well as a Viiv “soft DMA” media server. Similarly, you’ll find DLNA 1.5 support, including two-way sync. Most of these cool features will arrive with the version 1.5 Media Share release due out soon, and v1.5 will be compatible with non-Viiv notebooks as well, which could offer a boost to your Viiv server sales.
“Intel Media Share software makes a notebook into a Viiv client,” says Intel’s Bill Davidson. “Actually, it makes it into a client for several different flavors of media server, Viiv being one. It’s got a nice graphical interface to get to your content that’s on the notebook or on the network. So if you want to listen to music, play a movie, or whatever, you can do that over the network with this interface.”
The argument for Viiv in consumer notebooks is the same as on consumer desktops: Viiv technology carries practically no price premium. You do need the Enhanced version of the ICH8M southbridge, but Intel even lets you slide with the 3945 WLAN card if necessary. The question is: Why wouldn’t you sell a Viiv-capable consumer notebook? The platform gives you plenty of value-add differentiators and more eye-catching functionality for little to no extra cost.
Santa Rosa Goes vPro
Little Chip, Big Results. A TPM 1.2 chip, shown here from Intel’s DQ965GD motherboard, is also employed in all Centrino Pro systems. This is the key component behind vPro’s cryptographic security.
Perhaps even more exciting for SMB resellers is the induction of Intel’s vPro platform into the Santa Rosa line, now branded as Centrino Pro. Again, we’d refer you back to Tech Insight’s prior issue for all of the vPro information one brain can handle. But in a nutshell, the vPro platform is a hardware/software combination aimed at addressing three areas: remote manageability through AMT functionality; improved performance-per-watt throughout the system; and security through the joint efforts of Virtualization Technology in the CPU and northbridge, packet filtering technology in the network controller and southbridge, and software protection via the Trusted Platform Module.
If vPro has one standout feature, it’s probably the ability to manage and inventory systems out-of-band, meaning even when the client’s operating system is unavailable, as when up at a Blue Screen of Death or when the whole system is powered down.
The vPro platform is a very big deal throughout the world of corporate desktops, and its benefits are equally needed with business notebooks. After all, notebooks are even more prone to picking up malware because of their mobility. With vPro, an infected notebook brought into an office can be quarantined, cleaned remotely, and brought back online with no user intervention. And because of their portability, notebooks without the manageability vPro offers can be far harder to track accurately in inventory.
Moreover, Centrino Pro adds very little to a notebook’s costs. In fact, elements of Santa Rosa, such as Intel Turbo Memory’s power savings and performance increases, can make vPro even more persuasive in a notebook, which is more prone to entering hibernation modes, than on the desktop.
Provided that a notebook is running on AC power from the wall and connected to the network via an Ethernet cable on the LAN, then Centrino Pro offers the complete spectrum of vPro manageability, including all of the out-of-band features. Manageability features start peeling away as you get more removed from a purely direct-wired situation. On a wireless connection using 802.11i or WPA2 security, for example, you preserve remote diagnosis and repair capabilities but lose the ability to remotely power on the notebook. This makes sense since you obviously couldn’t maintain the trickle charge necessary for remote management and still hope to preserve long battery runtimes on the road. When connecting via VPN, whether wired or wireless, you keep some remote asset tracking capabilities but lose all remote diagnosis/repair and power-on functions.
Future refinements to the Centrino Pro platform may address some of these things. In particular, it would be good to see more management capabilities added to Centrino Pro units connecting via a wired VPN. For now, though, compared with standard issue whitebooks, Centrino Pro marks a major advance in business notebook functionality and quality control. Even for small companies who don’t yet need asset management and remote remediation, the additional security capabilities of Centrino Pro alone should be enough to persuade buyers. This will only become more compelling as more support and tools for Intel’s second-generation digital office platform (“Weybridge”) arrives in the third quarter, particularly those emphasizing security and virtualization. And keep in mind that remote management is a solid services opportunity for resellers of all sizes. Check out software and platform companies like SyAM and Level Platforms that can help you generate recurring revenue streams without a heavy investment in infrastructure or expertise. Centrino Pro now marks one of the first and best services plays in the world of whitebooks.
The Open Door
One Happy Family. On paper, Santa Rosa is mostly a collection of parts: CPU, chipset, wireless NIC, and so on. Resellers must turn them from a clutch of chips into a value-added solution.
With prior Centrino generations, Intel mostly sought to make whitebooks competitive with tier-one offerings. Particularly with Carmel and Sonoma, much emphasis was placed on trying to let whitebooks achieve price parity with the name brands. While this approach might have paid off with high-end models, tier-ones retained a clear advantage in the entry- and mid-level segments.
By Napa and the VBI rollout, the strategy had shifted to letting resellers deliver features and value beyond what the big brands could match. Santa Rosa continues that trend by delivering more options for crafting high-performance systems, expanding VBI options, pushing CBB deeper into the whitebook market, and opening the door to platform upselling with Viiv and vPro. Once you sell a customer on platform benefits, then you’re no longer talking about selling a box. Instead, you’re discussing networks, accessories, ROI, and management—all ways in which the value and utility of the box can be deepened. This increases customer satisfaction while simultaneously boosting your profits.
Analyst numbers show that whitebook adoption needs help. Santa Rosa brings help in spades. If you’re still not selling many notebooks, or if the notebooks you sell are predominantly tier-one models, give the Santa Rosa opportunity careful consideration. This may just be the chance you’ve needed to start building your own mobility brand and to address the burgeoning portability needs of your clientele.