Intel, Google team to optimize Android for smartphones

Intel and Google announced Tuesday that they would partner to optimize future versions of the Android OS for smartphones and other mobile devices using Intel chips.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated a smartphone with the upcoming Medfield chip running on Android during a keynote at the Intel Developer Conference being held in San Francisco. However, Otellini didn't mention the version of Android running on the smartphone.

Intel wants to make x86 the architecture of choice for smartphones, and porting Android will provide a larger opportunity to the chip maker in the smartphone market, Otellini said.

"This is a significant step forward to bring Intel phones to market," Otellini said.

Intel doesn't have a presence in the smartphone market yet, but Otellini said a smartphone based on the chip would reach the market in the first quarter next year. Medfield includes a low-power Atom processor. A smartphone with the chip was due in the third quarter this year, but has been delayed multiple times. Intel also is holding a technical session at IDF to show Medfield running on tablets.

Intel and Google will work on optimizing "all" future Android releases for Intel mobile chips at the kernel level, and also in specific areas such as memory management and graphics, said Andy Rubin, senior vice president for mobile at Google, in an on-stage appearance.


Some versions of Android, such as Android 2.2, code-named Froyo, have already been ported to Intel. By porting all future Android versions, Intel and Google are now expanding their relationship, Otellini said.

Intel faces the tough task of unseating ARM, whose processors are found in most smartphones. Intel chips are considered more power-hungry than ARM processors, but the company hopes that it can establish a beachhead in the market as it continues to advance its manufacturing process to make faster, more efficient chips.

During the keynote Otellini also shared more details about the upcoming chip code-named Haswell, which is due in laptops by 2013. Haswell will achieve a 30% power reduction in standby compared with current Core i5 laptops that go into laptops. The company is engineering a new low-power framework that will enable "all-day usage" of laptops, Otellini said.

The Haswell chips are targeted at ultrabooks, which Intel is promoting as a new category of thin and light PCs with tablet-like features. Intel hopes to deliver 10 days of standby time on always-connected ultrabooks using Haswell chips, Otellini said.

The Haswell microarchitecture is a follow-up to Ivy Bridge, due early next year for ultrabooks, and also more power-efficient than current Intel Sandy Bridge chips.

Otellini also said Intel wants to drive power consumption of chips down to a point where solar cells could run computers. To illustrate Otellini's point, an Intel engineer demonstrated a computer powered by a solar panel running a small animation. But once the solar source was blocked, the computer froze. Otellini said the point of the demonstration wasn't to productize the prototype chip, but to show where Intel wants to take its chips on power consumption.

Haswell will be on ultrabooks and a range of other devices, the engineer said during the demonstration.

Download and Install Windows 8 On a New Partition

So you want to try out Windows 8. Excellent! But you're not foolhardy enough to try using a developer preview build as your main work/play operating system--you just want to dabble. We'll show you how to download and install the Windows 8 developer's preview on to a separate partition (or separate hard drive, if you have a spare). If you don't feel like mucking your hard drive with another partition, read How To Download and Install Windows 8 to a Virtual Machine for a less intrusive way to get Windows 8 up and running on your PC.

If you have a spare hard drive lying around, this process is pretty easy: Download the appropriate Windows 8 ISO from the Microsoft Developer Network site, burn it to a DVD, turn off your PC, slap the hard drive in your case, and connect it up to your motherboard. Then you just turn your system on and either press the key that allows you to access your motherboard's boot menu (or change the boot options in the BIOS so your optical drive is recognized before your main hard drive), and you should boot off your new Windows 8 disk. From there, just fire up the Windows 8 installer, and install the operating system to your new drive.


However, if you only have one hard drive in your system, you're going to have to get a little bit more creative in order to install Windows 8 without having to nuke your existing Windows installation. Welcome to the world of drive partitioning: In layman's terms, partitioning takes a hard drive's total storage and splits it into separate chunks of data. Your operating system then treats these separate data partitions as separate storage volumes.

Assuming you're currently running Windows Vista or Windows 7, open your Control Panel and open up the Administrative Tools screen. From there, double-click on the "Computer Management" option. When said window appears, look for the "Disk Management" submenu under "Storage" on the left-hand sidebar. Click that.

You'll see your hard drive (and optical drive) on the screen: Your primary drive should already be split into a "System Reserved" volume and your primary C:\ volume.

Right-click on the C:\ volume and select the "Shrink Volume" option, and then reduce the size of your volume by at least 16 gigabytes for a 32-bit installation of Windows 8 or 20 gigabytes for a 64-bit installation.

You'll now see a new, monochromatic, "Unallocated" hunk of storage appear next to your C:\ volume in the graphical display. Right-click on it, select the "New Simple Volume" option, and hit the "Next" button until you reach the screen for assigning letters and drive paths.

Feel free to assign your new volume whatever drive letter you most prefer. Click "Next" one more time and give your volume a witty name, and then hit "Next" (and then "Finish") to quick-format the volume as an NTFS partition.

Next, burn the Windows 8 image to a disc using a freeware app like Imgburn or CDBurnerXP, then reboot your PC, access your BIOS setup menu (typically by pressing Delete or another specified key while booting up), and change the boot order so your PC will boot from your optical drive instead of your primary hard drive when you restart your computer. Once your PC boots from the Windows 8 DVD, just install Windows 8 to your new partition (identifiable by the drive letter and name you picked out).

And here's an extra tip: Once you've loaded up Windows 8 for the first time, you'll be able to edit Windows' boot settings to make Windows 7 boot by default instead of 8 (which happens after a short time delay if you don't select an operating system yourself).

10 best new features of Windows Server 8

Microsoft claims 300 new and improved features in Windows Server 8, but after a few days in Redmond watching demos and stepping through lab sessions, we wonder whether the marketing guys accidentally left off a zero. It's hard to name a Windows Server feature that hasn't been tweaked, streamlined, wizardized, or completely revamped. Whatever grudge you may hold against Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 8 will almost certainly make amends.

If you're a large shop struggling to manage hundreds of Windows servers, Windows Server 8 should ease the job. If you're a small shop trying to squeeze high-end capability from a low-end budget, Windows Server 8 has plenty for you, too. With Windows Server 8, everything from server deployment to high availability becomes smoother and more automated.
In fact, there's so much of note in the new OS, it's almost a crime to stop at the top 10, listed below in no particular order. Believe it or not, data deduplication for production file servers, native PowerShell support in Hyper-V, and virtual Active Directory didn't even make the list. Look at it this way: There will be even more surprises in store when you finally get your hands on a Windows Server 8 beta.

Multiserver management. Server Manager not only gets a face-lift in Windows Server 8, donning the superclean Metro look, but opens the management horizon to the entire server environment. Pull in new servers (physical or virtual) to manage through Active Directory or DNS lookup, and Server Manager will inventory the server and add a new tile to the dashboard displaying its state. Other tiles roll up aggregates of information across multiple servers by server role and various attributes.

Views are search driven, so it's easy to pull up matching values across all rows. Search filters can be saved, so it's easy to create personalized dashboards or standard views for selected sets of machines. Instead of reaching across the screen to ye olde Task pane (RIP), you perform all actions directly on specific elements, by right-clicking and choosing from a contextual menu. Naturally, all of this remote, multiserver management goodness is built on PowerShell and WMI (Windows Management Interface). Considering Microsoft's boasts of 2,300 new PowerShell cmdlets, wizards should become more commonplace throughout the Windows Server ecosystem.



Friction-free server deployment. Windows Server 8 inherits Windows Server 2008's wizards for installing roles and features, but combines them in what Microsoft calls "scenario-based deployment." Installs can target local machines, remote machines, or virtual hard disks, with deployment to multiple machines automated through PowerShell cmdlets, WMI APIs, and "workflows" that handle suspending and resuming batch operations. Plus, you no longer have to second-guess that Server Core install. Instead of starting over from scratch, Windows Server 8 lets you move between Server Core and a full server simply by installing or removing components. You can even install the full server without the graphical shell because real servers don't have GUIs.

IP address management. Odds are you're using a spreadsheet or homegrown cobbleware to track your IP address allocations, and it's no fun at all. Windows Server 8 introduces a full-featured IP address manager that combines network discovery, static and dynamic address allocation, DNS and DHCP monitoring, and network auditing capabilities all in one place. Logging actual address usage, identifying conflicts, cross-referencing with hardware inventory, and providing an audit trail of all changes, the Windows IP Address Management Center goes way beyond record keeping. It has the potential to eliminate a huge time-suck from your to-do list.

Dynamic Access Control. Today's folder-centric model for access control makes it all too easy for permissions to get garbled -- and auditing is a horror. Dynamic Access Control doesn't replace your current file and folder permissions, but allows you to layer global policies and claims-based access controls on top of them. For example, you might create a rule to ensure that only members of the finance group can access finance department files and strictly from a managed device -- and this rule could be enforced by all Windows Server 8 file servers (and only Windows Server 8 file servers) in your organization.

Dynamic Access Control uses tags applied to the files by users, supporting applications (think Microsoft Office), and Windows Server 8 itself (automatic classification). To implement, you create claims definitions and file property definitions in Active Directory; any Active Directory attribute can be used for access control. Claims travel with the user's security token. In a nice touch, the system now goes beyond the annoying "access denied" message. Instead of the stone wall, denied users can be presented with a remediation link to open a help ticket or contact the administrator or file owner to request access.

Large Hyper-V clusters. Windows Server 8 leaps into VMware territory and beyond with support for as many as 63 hosts and 4,000 VMs per cluster. Backing up the raw numbers are a slew of features that improve performance, manageability, availability, and security in large environments: cluster-aware patching, storage resource pools, thin provisioning, storage offload for data transfers, BitLocker encryption for cluster volumes, data deduplication, and live storage migration.

For the first time, you can team NICs from different vendors, with or without LACP support on your upstream switch. Windows Server 8 also brings Fibre Channel support to Hyper-V guests. You can configure multipath I/O or cluster guests with Fibre Channel for high availability, yet still make use of live migration.

Flexible live migration. Windows Server 8 introduces live storage migration, the ability to migrate virtual hard disks or configuration files for a running VM without interruption. And it removes shared storage as a requirement for migrations. You can now migrate VMs using nothing more than an Ethernet cable; first, the virtual disk is moved, then the running VM. The only requirement is that the hosts belong to the same domain.

There's no longer a cap on the number of migrations you can perform simultaneously, apart from the limitations of your hardware. Windows Server 8 also lets you queue migrations in a single operation that moves VMs one at a time. And you can specify priority VMs to avoid failures when a cluster becomes oversubscribed. If a cluster is loaded with more VMs than it can handle in a failover scenario, Windows Server 8 will shut down low-priority VMs to allow high-priority VMs to run.

Advanced virtual networking. If you've chafed against the lack of promiscuous mode in the Hyper-V virtual switch or pined for the virtual networking capabilities in VMware, you'll be happy to know that Microsoft has dived in with both feet in Windows Server 8. Microsoft seems to have matched the VMware vSwitch feature for feature -- port ACLs, private VLANs, per-vNIC bandwidth reservations, QoS, metering, OpenFlow support, VN-Tag support, network introspection -- all without requiring expensive network devices. The switch will support third-party extensions for inspecting, filtering, modifying, sampling, and inserting packets, with management of the extensions integrated into Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Replica. One of the best features of virtualization is easy disaster recovery, but this isn't as simple as it could be in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The clumsy process for setting up virtual machine replication in R2 gives way to a simple wizard in Windows Server 8. After you choose the virtual disks to replicate and the location for the replicas, you have the option of syncing immediately, scheduling the sync, or writing the replica to a local disk -- if you want to bring up the replica on a big USB drive and ship it to the other end for the initial load. The result is an asynchronous, application-consistent snapshot that's no more than five minutes behind the primary VM. You can even specify the IP settings for the failover environment within the replica, and failback is supported.

SMB for server apps. Windows Server 8 gives a big boost to small businesses and branch offices by extending support for Hyper-V virtual hard disks and SQL Server database files to SMB2 file shares. Translation: You can run your virtual machines and SQL database from a commodity file server, no special storage system required. To protect your Hyper-V and SQL workloads, you can create "continuously available" SMB file server clusters that provide transparent failover. That's high availability made very cheap and very easy.

VDI for the rest of us. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure will change the world -- but not until it becomes a whole lot simpler to do. Setting up and managing virtual desktops on Windows Server 2008 R2 pales miserably to Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, for example, and implementing Citrix is no walk in the park. Windows Server 8 takes a big step forward toward reducing the complexity and costs of a VDI deployment.

RemoteFX no longer requires a hardware GPU, and remote connections appear to be much lighter-weight than in R2 (about 10 percent of R2 bandwidth in Microsoft's demo). Admins have per-user control over RDSH (aka Terminal Server) resource allocations. They have a single admin tool for full deployment, as well as a single unified way to deploy RDSH sessions, pooled (stateless) virtual desktops, and personalized (stateful) virtual desktops.

The virtual hard disks -- a new format called vhdx -- are specifically designed to store the changes and customizations users might want to make to the "gold image" that IT provides them. Although you can still store the virtual hard disk files on just about any SMB share, Microsoft is promising considerably better performance than the previous methods of storing roaming profiles that have given this technology a black eye. Bravo, and let the VDI wars begin ... again.

This article, "10 best new features of Windows Server 8," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on Microsoft Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.