Intel Architecture Labs

Intel Architecture Labs, also known as IAL, was the personal-computer system research-and-development arm of Intel Corporation during the 1990s.

IAL was created by Intel Vice-President Ron Whittier together with Craig Kinnie and Steven McGeady to develop the hardware and software innovations considered to be lacking from PC OEMs and Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s. IAL pursued both hardware and software initiatives, but the latter became de-emphasized after the efforts collided with similar activities by Microsoft. For example, Native Signal Processing (NSP) was a software initiative to allow Intel-based PCs to run time-sensitive code independently of the operating system, allowing real-time audio and video processing on the microprocessors of the mid-1990s. Microsoft refused to support NSP in its operating systems and convinced PC makers that the NSP drivers would render their systems unsupported, and Intel pulled back from promoting the software, leaving NSP as an orphan. IAL also tangled with Microsoft by supporting Netscape and their early browser, and by producing a fast native x86 port of the Java system. Most of these projects were later shelved, and after 1997 IAL tended not to risk competing with Microsoft. The details of IAL's conflicts with Microsoft over software were revealed in Steven McGeady's testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial.

Not all of IAL's software efforts met bad ends due to Microsoft—IAL developed one of the first software digital video systems, Indeo(tm) - technology that was used in its ProShare videoconferencing product line but suffered later from neglect and was sold to another company in the late 1990s.

However, IAL successes in the hardware world are legendary, and include PCI, USB, AGP, the Northbridge/Southbridge core logic architecture and PCI Express. USB, in particular, was developed in the Oregon offices of IAL, where the architects of PCI and the Plug and Play initiatives assisted in building the first peripheral interconnect that would work with devices without requiring the PC to be dismantled. The USB specification was spearheaded in IAL in a small team of software and hardware architects & engineers, and a team of chip designers in another Intel campus (Folsom, CA) who designed the hardware to match the USB specification. The USB software stack was initially developed on Windows 95 using the Virtual Device Driver (VxD) model of Windows 95. The VxD-based USB driver stack was helpful to Microsoft as they implemented a brand new USB stack using the emerging Windows Driver Model (WDM) largely because of Microsoft's strategic shift towards Windows NT, and away from Windows 95. WDM was uniquely compatible with both operating systems, and the decision to abandon the VxD stack was a win-win for Intel and Microsoft. The collaboration between IAL and Microsoft improved during the development of USB 1.0, largely driven by the software developers that Intel hired into its IAL labs. Software developers at Microsoft were able to speak a familiar technical language with their fellow software developers from IAL, allowing the group to work as a single unit to drive the USB standard into the Windows-based PCs of the 1990s and beyond.

In 2001, after the departure of all of its creators, IAL was disbanded and replaced with the very different Intel Labs under Pat Gelsinger, though most of the creative talent that had been in IAL was by then scattered across the company or had left entirely. In a 2005 re-organization, Intel Labs itself was reorganized with the intent of rebuilding a research function.

Compare Intel's Architecture Development Lab.

References

• Dan Fost (August 28, 1998). "Intel's Dream Factory: Firm's labs look for new uses for computer chips". San Francisco Chronicle.
• Millison, Doug. The 800-Pound Gorilla, Computer Currents 11(24):80-82
• John Spooner (July 24, 2000). "Inside Intel: Betting on the future". ZDNet News. Archived from the original on December 18, 2007. Retrieved July 18, 2006.