Intel Looks to Drive Upgrades via 6th Gen Intel Core vPro Processors

What Does 2016 Hold for the Evolving Security Landscape?

Besides paving the way for accelerated adoption of more modern operating systems such as Windows 10, Intel envisions that the 6th Gen Intel Core vPro processors for client devices announced today will significantly affect everything from manageability and authentication to the quality of the wireless device and unified communication experience provided to end users.

Tom Garrison, general manager for Intel’s Business Client Unit, says not only are 6th Gen Intel Core vPro processors going to drive a major jump in overall business PC performance, Intel has been specifically working on making devices that run these processors more appealing to IT organizations.

Intel claims that the 6th Gen Intel Core vPro processors are 2.5 times faster overall, provide a 30 times increase in graphics performance, and three times more battery life than a system that is five or more years old.

To make systems that incorporate these process more appealing to IT departments, Garrison says that Intel is previewing multi-factor authentication, dubbed Intel Authenticate, which will one day soon make traditional passwords obsolete. Instead of constantly dealing with passwords that are easily stolen or forgotten by end users, Garrison says multifactor authentication, embedded in the hardware, will provide higher levels of security using, for example, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections without negatively affecting application performance. As a result, Garrison says it’s now only a matter of time before traditional passwords become extinct.

At the same time, Garrison says these devices will be more secure because IT organizations will find it much easier to invoke the V-Pro capabilities. While V-Pro has been around for a while, Garrison says that challenges associated with deploying V-Pro have stymied adoption of dedicated processors to manage security.

Meanwhile, on the end user side of the equation, Garrison says technologies such as Intel Unite have been enhanced to make it possible for unified communications applications to invoke a 180-degree view of a room using two-way cameras. The goal, says Garrison, is to ultimately eliminate the need for separate handsets to invoke unified communications applications.

Finally, Intel expects 6th Gen Intel Core vPro processors to drive more adoption of a range of wireless technologies, from wireless docks that take advantage of WiGig networking to displays that no longer require wired connections in order to share an application running on a PC.

Naturally, the degree to which 6th Gen Intel Core vPro processors will be able to drive PC upgrades remains to be seen. But it is apparent that Intel has come to appreciate the fact that speed in and of itself is not always going to be enough of an incentive to get organizations to sign off on a major upgrade of their client computing device portfolio.