Intel Details Its ‘Long-Term Retention Lab’, Which Currently Houses Nearly 3,000 Platforms

Here at Techgage, we retain a handful of modern platforms for our testing and retesting purposes. Our benchmarking never ends after a launch review, as we always want to track how performance can improve over time, and of course introduce new workloads as they arise. While our key focus is on performance, for a company like Intel, there’s so much more to cover, with security proving to be the most crucial. After all, if aging systems are suddenly vulnerable, it’s key to remedy the problem fast.

Today, Intel details its ‘Long-Term Retention Lab’, or LTR Lab for short, which houses a huge number of platforms that its engineers will be able to quickly access when any sort of validation needs to be done. While it’s easy to assume that any company will retain at least one copy of all old products in the event they need to be revisited, it might surprise you that Intel actually has been in situations where it didn’t have the hardware it needed on-hand.

Within these LTR Lab details, Intel admits that it’s had to turn to eBay in the past to secure needed hardware, but that should be a thing of the past, as the current state of the Lab has a total of 2,800 platforms on-hand, with the oldest dating back to 2012. In the future, the company anticipates expanding this count to a staggering 6,000.

The LTR Lab seems like a well-oiled machine, as any engineer who needs to validate patches or anything else with a platform should be able to access it quickly, thanks to the fact that staff is available 24/7. Even if someone isn’t physically at the lab, they will be able to virtually access the hardware once it’s activated by the support staff.

So far, Intel has said that bulking up its lab has helped with the company’s ability to address issues quickly and easily – which is to be expected. Could you imagine being an engineer at Intel trying to tackle a critical issue, only to not have the platform you need be available? That could be a nightmare.

As you can see by the above photos, there’s a lot going on at the LTR Lab, with an obscene amount of wiring, but seemingly all kept neat and tidy, as it should be. Intel notes that its hardware of all stripes can be found here, from notebooks to desktops to servers – essentially anything fairly recent that Intel has produced should be nearby. Considering how much product the company pushes out, it’s easy to understand why it expects to hit 6,000 platforms next year.

If you want to dig in a little more, you can check out Intel’s newsroom post.