Intel Archive

At the Linux.Conf.Au conference today, Intel has announced NDA-free programming documentation covering the 965 Express and G35 Express IGPs. Intel's display driver has long been open-source, but up until now, they have not been releasing the programming documentation for these products to the public. This move comes months after AMD announced their new open-source strategy and began releasing register documentation on their R500 and R600 GPUs. These newly released documents by Intel even cover 3D and video programming for their IGPs.

Intel announced today its line of Itanium products for high-end computing servers. Codename Montvale, the chip is an update to Montecito, the Dual-Core Itanium 2 chip which was launched in July last year, Eddie Toh, regional platform marketing manager of Server Platforms Group for Asia-Pacific at Intel, told ZDNet Asia in an interview on Monday.

"Today's launch of the latest version of Intel's vPro platform is a much bigger deal than you might think, with implications for end users that extend far beyond the enterprise arena at which vPro is initially aimed. The 2007 version of vPro represents the culmination of two of Intel's most ambitious and important plans for the PC platform: the transformation of x86 into a fully virtualizable ISA complete with virtualized I/O, and the first fully-complete implementation of all the parts of Intel's controversial contribution to 'trusted computing' technology, formerly codenamed 'LaGrande' but now called Trusted Execution Technology. Let's take a look at the new vPro and what its new virtualization and 'trusted computing' capabilities mean for ordinary users."

Intel on Tuesday said it would release this week eight technical papers describing key findings from the company's work on future programmable multicore architectures. The papers will be published in the Intel Technical Journal and will provide details on how the company expects future microprocessors with simplified parallel programming models to evolve.

"Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date."

Intel has unveiled an ambitious project aimed at developing open source software for mobile devices. The Moblin project comprises a Linux kernel, UI framework, browser, multimedia framework, and embedded Linux image creation tools, along with developer resources such as documentation, mailing lists, and an IRC channel.

"Intel and VMware announced today that Intel Capital is taking a USD 218.5 million stake in virtualization company VMWare. Intel will purchase 9.5 million Class A shares at USD 23 per share, which, at the completion of VMware's forthcoming IPO, will give Intel about a 2.5 percent stake in the company. Because VMware's stock is split between Class A shares, which have less voting power, and Class B shares, Intel won't control that many votes in the company, but they will get a board seat."

"Ars Technica recently got its hands on the new Intel Classmate laptop computer, one of the new projects competing for a share of school-aged computer users in developing countries. I was able to survey this machine thanks to Helio Chissini de Castro of Mandriva. The unit I looked at was powered by a specialized version of Mandriva 2007, with customizations aimed at school-aged children."

Theo de Raadt wrote about the Intel Core 2 Duo chip: "Various developers are busy implementing workarounds for serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 cpu. These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code." Intel has given a response to the concerns as well.

Researchers at Intel are working on ways to mask the intricate functionality of massive multicore chips to make it easier for computer makers and software developers to adapt to them. These multicore chips will also likely contain both x86 processing cores, as well as other types of cores. A 64-core chip, for instance, might contain 42 x86 cores, 18 accelerators and four embedded graphics cores. In addition, Intel has updated its Itanium roadmap.

After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over. Already, chipmakers like Intel and AMD are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance. "The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."

"Some say the Classmate PC is Intel's answer to (or competition with) the One Laptop per Child effort. Intel is hawking the lilliputian laptop in 'emerging markets' like Nigeria, India, and Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and secondary students. It's to be officially released and shipped en masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun."

What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.

"The Intel 965GM Express Chipset represents the first mobile product that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. Extending Intel's commitment to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers, support for this new chipset is provided through the X.org 2.0 Intel driver and the Mesa 6.5.3 releases. These drivers represent significant work by both Intel and the broader open source community."