This is Intel’s secret museum-laboratory: a brilliant idea that allows thousands of old products to continue to be supported

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This is Intel's secret museum-laboratory: a brilliant idea that allows thousands of old products to continue to be supported
this is intel's secret museum laboratory: a brilliant idea that allows

When Mohsen Fazlian tried to get an old processor from the Sandy Bridge family, he ran into a problem: he works for Intel, but his company didn’t have one available. What did? Buy it on eBay.

His search was not trivial: Fazlian is part of a unique team that Intel has created to set up a secret museum-laboratory in Costa Rica. One that already keeps 3,000 old components and applications and that has become the key to continue supporting those old products and to reproduce security flaws that can be corrected.

Saving products from the past is key to providing good service in the future

Intel, like many other companies, makes dozens of products a year, but not long ago had no formal processes for cataloging and storing technology products that were lagging behind.

Intel Museum 3

This is much more important than it seems, because in many cases these products end up being victims of security flaws that later need to be fixed. If you do not have the product in your hands, it is very difficult to check if the solution works, and at Intel they realized that the best they could do was create a kind of museum-laboratory.

The project started in mid-2018 and was finally put into operation in the second half of 2019. The result was the Long-Term Retention Lab, a secret 1,300-square-meter laboratory. which is located in an undisclosed location in Costa Rica.

That “warehouse” currently has about 3,000 hardware and software products, but Intel is already preparing the expansion of that laboratory so that it has 2,500 square meters and 6,000 products can be stored.

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Thanks to this laboratory any Intel engineer you can ask to have a machine “fitted” with a specific configuration and that often includes older software and hardware components that would be difficult to obtain today.

Those machines are prepared by technicians and then made available to Intel engineers. thanks to remote and private connections in a cloud created by Intel for this purpose. The laboratory works constantly, and about 25 engineers are usually present in those shifts that allow us to continue supporting old components.

With it it is possible to have a centralized point where you can run security tests from anywhere in the world. Intel’s own engineers who have ended up on other projects or even left the company have ended up contributing to this unique museum by providing documentation or even components.

One of those responsible for the laboratory, Marcel Cortes Beer, explained how the laboratory receives about 1,000 requests per month to assemble equipment for remote security tests, and about 50 new devices are received every week.

Anders Fogh, an engineer working at Intel in Germany, commented how “I can create an exact replica of the system that someone who publishes a report has [de seguridad]. The same CPU, the same version of the operating system, the same microcode, or the same BIOS. All of this increases the possibility of reproducing the problem, which is often the best starting point. [para solucionarlo]”.

Intel’s museum-laboratory has indeed become an important element of product development itself: now all of them end up having samples destined for the laboratory and documentation It is created to allow engineers to support that product for at least a decade.

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It is therefore unlikely Mohsen Fazlian having to go back to eBay to find an old component. Nothing bad.