"It was the first chance we had to get European journalists together. Everyone in Europe is on holiday around [VPro launch day] August 27," said David Rogers, Intel's professional platform marketing manager for Europe.

It was the second press invasion Modena had suffered in as many days -  the town was still recovering from the influx for the funeral of its most famous son Luciano Pavarotti. Still, there was a lot of the region's Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (top) left to sample, particularly as the launch was held at the headquarters of the consortium controlling the product (which is not, incidentally, to be confused with the imitation Parmesan hard cheese to be found in shops masquerading as the real thing -  that is at the  centre of a long-running legal dispute).

Surprise, surprise… it turned out that the cheesemakers had adopted both the new VPro and the 7300, which they said had reduced the time to run their forecasting package from five hours to one. It has had no effect of the cheese, however, which still takes two years to mature. We sampled it to the sound of an excellent Italian a capella group called Vocalica.

The first version of VPro (the brand for Intel's business platform, as Centrino is for notebooks) was largely about enabling the central maintenance and management of fleets of mobile and tethered computers.

The new version, according to Rogers, is focused more on security, bringing protection down from the operating system into the hardware.

A new hardware layer packs scores of security filters, which can be programmed by third-party software vendors such as Symantec, to trap both incoming and outgoing threats such as viruses independently from the operating system.

The system is designed to run on virtualised servers, which optimise energy use and processing power by running many virtual machines on a single processor. Each virtual machine is partitioned from the other so that even if one does hit trouble, such as a virus, the others are not affected.

The downside, as some industry figures at the launch observed, is an increase in complexity that can produce costly problems of its own. Some companies may decide that these outweigh the benefits of virtualisation; but energy costs and heat problems in big server farms are so high that virtualisation is seen as inevitable.

The move to multi-core, multiprocessors (the 7300 can be packed four to a board, giving a machine 16 cores) also helps consolidation - jargon for a reduction in the number of servers required to perform a set of tasks.

I'll be writing a little more about VPro in the magazine. Meanwhile you can admire this other local  product of the region, a 1936 Maserati 6CM, which won the 1936 Goodwood Trophy and is on show at the Hombre farm where the event was held, which doubles as museum.