Intel has announced a new brand for business products it hopes will help it hang on to market share by making it easier for companies to maintain fleets of personal computers.
Intel, which last week posted a sharp drop in quarterly earnings, hopes the new brand, called vPro, will help it regain ground lost to rival Advanced Micro Devices, whose chips are increasingly popular with businesses and consumers.
Intel is counting on the effort to become a success similar to Centrino, the name it gave three years ago to a set of components that provide wireless capability for laptops.
Scheduled to launch in the third quarter, vPro follows the introduction earlier this year of the Viiv consumer brand aimed at turning the PC into a hub of living room entertainment.
VPro PCs will have their processors and related hardware configured to make it easier to fix, update remotely and guard against viruses and other security threats. That could lower corporate technical costs by eliminating the need for expensive visits from technical staff.
Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said nearly 90 per cent of corporate technical budgets was spent on maintenance, and 13 per cent of computer problems accounted for nearly half of all maintenance expenses.
The heart of vPro is Intel's new Core processor, which is more powerful and uses less energy than their predecessors, the Pentium 4.
The Core lineup answers a key challenge posed by AMD's chips, which have become popular in business computers because they have typically used less energy than their Intel counterparts.