Intel Archive

Moore's Law has helped keep the IT industry riding along on ever faster and more complex hardware for 40 years, but its author now says the software side of the equation needs some serious work.

Intel yesterday formally began selling its Pentium 4 6xx series, rolling out four versions of the 90nm, 2MB L2 cache chip. The chip giant also added its latest P4 Extreme Edition to its official price list. The P4 630 (I got one of these), 640, 650 and 660 are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, respectively. All four chips support an 800MHz frontside bus. They also bring Intel's AMD64-like 64-bit addressing technology, EM64T, to the mainstream desktop, along with the latest version of the company's SpeedStep power management system, to minimise energy consumption. The anti-virus 'execute disable' bit is also supported.

According to a CRN article, Intel has "has made good on its vow last year to rewrite its product road map to focus on dual-core and multicore processors." In addition to imagining chips aimed at mobile, lightweight, and other boutique applications, the processor giant also (with MIcrosoft's backing) reiterated its commitment to move desktop processors to 64 bit with all possible haste.

The wireless USB protocol will be completed by the end of March and the access controller specification should be approved by the end of the year. Wireless USB is designed to be used at ranges of less than 10 metres and will allow peak data speeds of 480Mbps. Also, Intel has unveiled its first proposals for 802.11s, a new mesh wireless networking standard.

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt announced that Intel has refused his request to permit that the firmware for their wireless chipsets be made freely distributable. He explains, "I had asked for free terms under which we (and Linux, anyone) can redistribute the firmwares for their wireless chipsets. Without these firmware files included in OpenBSD, users must go do some click-through license at some web site to get at the files. Without those files, these devices are just bits of metal, plastic, and sand."

Intel is expected to release a faster version of its powerful but expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor this week, alongside the introduction of a chip set that uses a faster front-side bus to connect the processor and the memory. The Extreme Edition is basically the same as the Pentium 4, but features 2MB of Level 3 cache instead of 1MB. It's also extremely expensive: $999.

Intel is dumping plans to release a Pentium 4 processor that runs at 4GHz, saying will boost performance on next year's chips using other means that clock speed.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the most aggressive promoters of Intel's Itanium family of processors, is 86ing its line of workstations that use the chips. The decision by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant will likely be interpreted as a large symbolic blow to Itanium's fortunes.

Intel's high-end Itanium chip is not making the kinds of inroads that Intel had hoped. It's Xeon chip still rules the roost for servers. In response, the company will be launching a program that lets potential users try out Itanium hardware before they buy. A ZDNet article covers where Intel's going with the Itanium and Xeon.

AMD's Opteron struck a chord by offering 64-bit, x86-compatible processing at 32-bit prices. Now Intel has jumped into the same game with the 64-bit "Nocona," a new Xeon that smokes previous models. Here's how one of the first Nocona servers performed under a full barrage of benchmarks at InfoWorld.

Intel said today that it plans to release the "Foundation code" of its next-generation firmware technology -- a successor to the PC BIOS -- under the Common Public License (CPL), an open source license, later this year. More than 20 years old, the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) is the oldest software technology in PC platforms.

Paul Otellini showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors. Otellini said: "What's next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".

Intel's forthcoming 915 (the Grantsdale) and 925 (the Alderwood) series of chipsets, expected to hit the market in June, will not bundle drivers for either Microsoft Windows 98 or Windows ME operating systems (OS), according to sources at Taiwanese motherboard makers. The new chipsets will only offer Microsoft support for the more up-to-date versions of the Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the architecture, benefits, and features of the Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface, a modular, platform-independent architecture for implementating boot and other BIOS functions recently. The Framework, developed by Intel, is driver-based, enabling binary-linking of modules; and it is C-based, clean, scalable, and modular, allowing it to support diverse CPU architecures - such as Intel's IA-32, Itanium & XScale - within a single source tree.