Intel brings on the Pentium III

By Chris Barton

Intel has officially launched its Pentium III processor in New Zealand, promising PCs with the new chip from $4000 and up to 35 per cent better performance over the Pentium II for graphics and multimedia applications.

But it glossed over the privacy concerns that the chip's unique identity number has raised and incorrectly told journalists that the processor would ship from its fabrication plants with the feature turned off.

New Zealand general manager Scott Gilmour later admitted that the processor serial number, which is hardwired into the chip's silicon, is an "enabled" feature.

But he pointed out that, due to privacy concerns, Intel is advising all manufacturers to sell systems with the identity feature disabled and is shipping it with a software utility that sets the identifier to the "off" position.

A number of hardware vendors are protecting buyers one step further by also turning the feature off with the BIOS (basic input/output system), the PCs boot-up firmware, which is a more secure method of disablement than the software utility.

A German technology publication reported last week that it had discovered a way to read the identity code without a user's knowledge or permission.

Intel has confirmed that under certain circumstances there is a moment when a hacker could read the serial code, even if the user had turned the number off.

But it said the hack required considerable expertise and that if such an individual was after your PSN (processor serial number) that was probably the least of your concerns.

A week ago in San Jose, Intel chairman Andy Grove said the company had learned from its 1994 PR disaster in which the Pentium processor was sullied by an obscure floating point bug, even though overall sales were not affected.

"We are a lot less righteous than we were then.

"We were lobotomised in our response to the floating point."

Intel said the feature was added to improve computer inventory tracking and management and to make electronic commerce more secure.

Company spokesman Andrew Barker said the identifier was also put in place as the first step to bringing trust to the Internet, "because you don't know who you can trust on this network."

Later this year Intel intends to use "thermal noise" from the Pentium III chip to generate "high-quality random and non-deterministic numbers," which will enable secure encrypted communications.

Software application vendors are taking advantage of the serial number feature, mainly for computer asset management, but some, such as Rainbow Technologies' i-Guard, are using the PSN to offer a caller ID-like service for the Internet.

This solution, which first "blinds" the number before using it, offers a way to control access to Web-based data at e-commerce sites, chat rooms and on-line gaming sites, where simple password access is deemed insufficient.

Intel also released performance statistics for the new chip, which has 9.5 million transistors, about 2 million more than the Pentium II and a little short of the 14 million or so it should have to comply with Moore's Law.

Mr Grove said there was no theoretical reason why, according to Moore's maxim, the number of transistors and the performance of a processor should not double every 18 months until 2011.

But while physical limits - the wavelength of light to print circuits onto silicon and the molecular thickness of the silicon itself - were not the problem, the technology involved in achieving each step was becoming more difficult and expensive.

As a result, the performance improvement steps along Intel founder Gordon Moore's straight line to 2011 are going to be smaller and smaller.