Computex: Intel puts chip set on the table

The days of the shiny gold bunny suits are long gone at chipmaker Intel, what with the dot-com bubble burst, reports of supply problems in key product lines, and stiff competition from Advanced Micro Devices.

The company, however, is hoping that the release of a new family of chip sets last week and the planned release of a desktop PC chip package will help it get its groove back, and yield better security and lower management costs for businesses, to boot.

Intel used the Computex trade show in Taipei to unveil the 965 chip-set family of 90-nanometer chips, which will come in three flavors: P, G, and Q.

The P965 Express chip set is already shipping to PC makers and works with the company’s new Core 2 Duo desktop processor, which will go on sale next month, Intel said.

The G965 chip set is for use with Intel Viiv products and offers advanced video and graphics performance for home users. Viiv is a package of chips consisting of a dual-core processor, chip set, and a networking chip aimed at the market for digital home products.

The Q965 will ship in the next two months and will be paired with the Core 2 Duo. Together they form the core of vPro, an all-in-one platform that PC makers can use to get business PCs to market quickly. Intel hopes the vPro brand will duplicate the success of Centrino, Intel’s mobile CPU and chip-set combination.

VPro systems using the Q965 chip set are expected from big PC makers by September. The technology will probably carry a small premium, but the trade-off, according to Intel, will be a lower cost of ownership, according to David Tuhy, an Intel general manager.

VPro will also include Intel Virtualization Technology (VT), which is already used with the company’s Xeon-based servers, Core Duo desktop, and mobile CPUs. VT CPU extensions reduce the performance overhead of virtualization so that an Intel client or server can divide into isolated virtual computers.

After dominating the microprocessor business for decades, Intel has stumbled in recent years and lost market share to rival AMD. The company posted lower-than-expected revenue in the first quarter, citing higher-than-expected chip inventories.