Intel Archive

Intel Shows Off 48-Core Chip

"Intel's experimental 48-core 'single-chip cloud computer' is the latest step in multicore processing. Intel officials say such a chip will greatly improve performance and efficiency in future data centers, and will lead to new applications and interfaces between users and computers. Intel plans to have 100 or more chips in the hands of IT companies and research institutes next year to foster research into new software. Intel, AMD and others are rapidly growing the number of cores on a single silicon chip, with both companies looking to put eight or more cores on a chip in 2010."

Intel Roadmap Leak Shows Desktop Core i3/i5/i7 Plans

"Intel's plans to overhaul its desktop processors early next year have been detailed almost entirely in a roadmap published today. The lineup is now believed to be headlined by low-powered S versions of the Core i5-750 and i7-860 that will run all four cores at 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz respectively; they should use just 82W of power versus 95W or more and fit into tighter spaces. Each will have 8MB of Level 2 cache, though the Core i7 chips will scale up to 3.46GHz where the Core i5 will stop at 3.2GHz."

Interview: Intel Talks Moblin, Netbooks, Windows, ARM, More

"Imad Sousou is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, which is behind the Moblin project aimed at providing optimized Linux technology for netbooks and mobile Internet devices. ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK caught up with Sousou at the Open Source In Mobile 09 event in Amsterdam last month to discuss the nature of Moblin and the hardware on which it will run." The interview also covers Intel's views on the netbook and MID market, Windows 7, ARM as a competitor, and Google's Chrome OS and how Intel is working with Google.

Intel Unveils Light Peak 10Gbps Optical Interconnect

"USB 3.0 might be one of the big stories here at IDF, but Intel just showed off a glimpse of the future: Light Peak, an optical interconnect for mobile devices that can run as fast as 10Gbps. That's fast enough to do everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100-meter runs, which is pretty astounding. Intel says the idea is to drastically reduce the number of connectors on mobile devices, which should allow them to get even smaller - but the demo was on a huge Frankenrig, so don't expect to see Light Peak devices shipping any time soon."

How Intel’s Supercomputer Almost Used HP Chips

More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.

The Story Behind Intel’s Atom Processor

Intel had to hustle to catch up with competitors in developing chips for mobile devices like smartphones, but the effort led to the development of the highly successful Atom chip, an Intel exec has revealed. Intel kicked off the Atom project in 2004, when it was doing work on developing Arm chips in parallel. At the time the company was "running like crazy" to develop a chip for mobile devices to catch up with the fast evolution of wireless devices, especially voice services, which were peaking at the time.

Intel Appeals Massive EC Antitrust Fine

In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Intel confirmed that the company has filed an appeal of last May's European Commission ruling, in which the company was fined the equivalent of $1.4 billion for what it found to be antitrust violations. According to spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, Intel's theory for its appeal is that the EC was prevented from seeing critical and possibly exculpatory documents, on account of an order of the court trying AMD's civil case against Intel in Delaware.

Source: Intel To Be Found Guilty of Monopoly Abuse

Microsoft isn't the only company in the technology industry with a monopoly. Its partner in crime, Intel, has often been accused of monopoly abuse as well, and is currently under scrutiny by the same European Commission who fined Microsoft. Sources have told eWeek (which generally has a good track record) that Intel will indeed be found guilty this week of abusing its monopoly position to stifle the competition.

Intel Aims for 2 Second Boot Time with Moblin Linux Platform

At the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imhad Sousou discussed the company's plans for the next major version of its Linux-based open source Moblin platform. The aim of Moblin, Sousou says, is to improve the quality of the Linux user experience on Atom-based devices. For Intel, this is a broad mandate that reaches deep into the platform and will require improvements at many different layers of the stack. One especially important aspect of Intel's platform improvement agenda is to reduce overall startup time.

Intel Details ‘Moorestown’ Platform, Two New Atom Chips

At the Intel Developer Form in Beijing this week, Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher introduced and detailed Intel's 'Moorestown' - the next generation of the Intel Atom-based MID platform. In addition, Intel used the anniversary of the introduction of the Atom processors to offer two new Atom chips: the Z550 and Z515. These two new Atom processors are designed with gaming and small form factors in mind.

Performance-Testing Intel’s Nehalem

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia put Intel's new Nehalem to the test and found the technology a "game-changing development". Using an HP ProLiant DL580 with four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core as a baseline, Venezia's Nehalem system - which ran two quad-core Intel Xeon W5580 CPUs at 3.2GHz per core with HyperThreading enabled - performed roughly 60 percent faster across a battery of tests, including gzip compression, WAV-to-MP3 encoding, MPEG-4 to Flash Video conversion, and mysql-bench. Even more impressive, Venezia found, was that the Nehalem system did all that while serving double-duty as his workstation. "At the same time the Nehalem was executing my battery of tests, it was driving a 30-inch and a 24-inch monitor off an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500, playing an MPEG movie in full-screen on the 30-inch monitor, and running more than 500 processes across four virtual desktops, including dozens of terminal sessions, Firefox browser sessions, Java applications, and streaming audio — and it still put up these numbers."

Intel Details Future Graphics Chip at GDC

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco - sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player. During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at AMD's ATI unit.

Intel Moblin v2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!

"Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today."

Intel’s SIMD Accelerator Gives Better Graphics, Saves Energy

Details are sparse, but Intel has let out word of a spiffy new graphics accelerator designed for mobile devices. This SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) accelerator renders graphics more efficiently than any other available component in that it renders them faster and at higher quality and-- here's the kicker-- it consumes ten times less energy than similar available components, providing longer battery life. Again, there's not much to go on at the moment, but Intel says that these lovely little buggers will definitely be showing up in future mobile devices be they MIDs, UMPCs, or netbooks.

Intel Unveils New Atom CPUs

Not only has Intel teamed up TSMC to produce Atom CPUs, the company has also unveiled four Atom chips that will go into devices such as entertainment systems for cars, videoconferencing devices, robots and interactive kiosks. "The Z500-series Atom processors are integrated chips the size of a penny that draw little power and do not require fans to operate. The chips draw 2.5 watts of power or less and run at speeds of between 1.10GHz and 1.6GHz. They offer integrated 2D and 3D graphics and will be manufactured using Intel's existing 45-nanometer process."

Intel Outsources Atom Production to TSMC

The Atom processor, the only bright spot on Intel's balance sheet, will soon no longer be manufactured by Intel itself (CNet has more). Intel has signed an agreement with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), outsourcing the production of the successful chip to Taiwan. While it's not the first time Intel outsources production of its silicon, it is still an unusual move for the company to outsource the production of such a major chip.