Even though Intel just managed to market its first chips manufactured on a 22nm technology node with 3rd generation Core CPUs (aka Ivy Bridge), a couple of slides leaked on-line show how much – and how far – Santa Clara is looking into the future of microprocessor technology.
First published by X-bit labs with a couple of quotes credited to Intel CEO Paul Otellini, the slides contain a “R&D Pipeline” stating that Chipzilla is already developing a 14 nm manufacturing process: production of the first chips with 14 nm transistors should start in 2013, the slide says.
Sony has updated its S Series range of laptops to include the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, while its E Series is also getting two new screen sizes.
The S Series devices been given an upgrade that introduces the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, for some models at least. Ivy Bridge aims to provide a serious serving of processing power as well as greatly improved graphics performance over its predecessor. The high-end quad-core i7 chip will be available in the 13-inch model. Sony hasn't been specific on the other models but it's likely that Intel's lower-end Ivy Bridge Core i3 and i5 processors will be on offer, although they haven't been officially unveiled yet.
Intel may rule the PC processor industry, but in the growing world of smartphones, other companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm provide ARM-based designs for most smartphones. Now Intel says it is ready to finally make its move into the smartphone chip business.
As part of its quarterly financial conference call on Tuesday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini stated, "Expect to see another important milestone for our business later this week. The launch of the first Intel architecture-based smartphone."
A few days ago, Lenovo revealed that its upcoming IdeaPad Yoga PC, an Ultrabook-tablet hybrid, could cost as much as $1,900 when it is released later this year running on Windows 8. Now Intel has chimed in with a price for another such Windows 8 hybrid product. This time its for a design called Cove Point, previously known as Letexo.
The design was first shown by Intel at CES 2012 and the company showed it off again last week as part of its Inter Developer Forum event in Beijing. Wired reports that the 12.5 inch touch screen of the Cove Point design rest on top of the device for tablet use. The screen can also slide up and out to expose a full notebook keyboard.
Windows 8 could live or die on how well the operating system sells on tablet devices. Now Intel has said it is working with as many as 10 different PC vendors to create tablets that will run Windows 8 and will have Intel's processors running things inside.
PCWorld.com quotes Intel China chairman Sean Maloney as saying, "You'll probably see many Intel-based tablets by the end of this year." He declined to say which vendors will be making Windows 8 tablets. However some companies such as HP and Dell have already announced plans to make a business-themed tablet for Microsoft's next operating system.
A former Intel engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from the chip giant before leaving the company, according to a Bloomberg report.
The worker, Biswamohan Pani, 36, of Chelmsford, Mass., stole the sensitive chip-related information "to advance his career with a competitor," according to Bloomberg. He worked at an Intel chip-manufacturing plant in Hudson, Mass.
Pani gave notice to Intel on May 29, 2008, with his last day set for June 11 and began work at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on June 2, "while retaining access to Intel's data system," according to prosecutors.
Even though Intel has yet to release its new 22nm Core processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, sources in Taiwan have already found out when the chip giant plans to introduce its next-gen Haswell CPUs.
According to DigiTimes, the outfit has scheduled the official introduction of these processors, and that of the accompanying Lynx Point chipsets, for March of 2013.
No specific date was mentioned as we are still a year away from the alleged launch, but this report seems to confirm a leaked Intel slide, which made its appearance about a month ago, revealing that Haswell is scheduled for a March-June release.
Intel may be trying to launch an online Internet-based television service. The Wall Street Journal reports, via unnamed sources, that it has been meeting with US media companies for the past several months to offer them a chance to join what Intel is apparently calling a "virtual cable operator".
Under the plan, Intel would launch its own set-top box for the service. The article claims that Intel wants to launch the product and the service by the end of 2012. So far the company has yet to make any solid deals with any media companies to join them on this venture; Intel has not yet confirmed or denied this story.
China's biggest processor company Loongson says it is designing chips it claims can take on American CPUs on price and efficiency — with a little help from Chairman Mao.
China is the world's biggest manufacturer of computer components, a position cemented when Chinese firm Lenovo bought IBM's entire PC business in 2004. But while your computer might be made in China, its processor almost certainly isn't: not a single one of the world's top 20 chip manufacturers is Chinese. That's a source of frustration for the Chinese government, which wants China to transition away from making cheap goods into more lucrative hi-tech manufacturing.
Motorola has promised that some of its previously released Android 2.3 smartphones, including the Droid RAZR, would be getting an upgrade to Android 4.0. Motorola is also working on smartphones that will have Google's new mobile operating system, otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich, out of the box. Today new images leaked out on the Internet that seems to show what the first Motorola Android 4.0 would look like.
The images, as seen on Pocketnow.com, show what looks like a fairly standard smartphone case for the device. However, the article adds that the unnamed Motorola Android 4.0 product will have Intel's mobile phone processor inside. If true, this would be one of the very first such smartphones that will run on Intel's hardware, which is a version of its Atom PC processor.
Intel is buying video patents and software from RealNetworks for $120 million, giving the chipmaker new muscle in a market that's increasingly important but filled with intellectual-property obstacles.
RealNetworks is selling about 190 patents, 170 patent applications and its next-generation video encoding technology in the deal, the companies announced today.
The VGA (Video Graphics Array) and DVI (Digital-Visual Interface) video ports for PC desktops and laptops are a very familiar sight to PC users. VGA was first launched back in 1986 while DVI support was launched more recently in 1999. However, it looks like those two ports will be disappearing from newer PCs in the next few years to make way for more modern technologies. PCWorld.com reports that a new study from NPD In-Stat predicts that in the next five years, new PCs will no longer have VGA or DVI ports.
The study claims that Intel and AMD will phase out their own chipset support for VGA ports by 2015. AMD has also announced it will phase out chipset support for DVI ports by 2015. PC makers will likely not want to add extra support for VGA or DVI ports after that date since it will likely make the cost of making PCs more expensive.
Intel’s collaboration with Google seems to have led to more than just an x86 port of the Android operating system, as the chip maker has recently confirmed that its upcoming Medfield SoC will include a series of hardware optimizations specifically designed for this mobile OS.
In a meeting with the Technology Review website, where Intel has presented to the publication a Medfield-running tablet and smartphone, the chip maker also talked a little bit about the SoC’s Android optimizations.
The most important of these cover Web browsing and a series of Android apps, but some dedicated imaging processing circuits were also thrown into the mix.
Intel’s Celeron brand has been with us for over ten years now, but according to some recent reports the chip maker is now getting ready to retire this name from its lineup and replace it with Pentium CPUs.
While nothing is sure at this point in time, Tweak Town seems to believe that the introduction of the recent Pentium 350 aimed at micro-servers seems to be a sign that the Celeron line will be replaced with Pentium CPUs.
At the 2012 ISSC (International Solid-State Circuits) conference, that is scheduled to take place in February of next year, Intel will disclose additional details about its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors based on the 22nm fabrication process.
The talks will focus on an entry-level Ivy Bridge desktop or notebook processor which uses four IA-32 cores, a graphics-processing core, memory and a PCI Express controller, all built on the 22nm fabrication node, according to EETime’s findings.
Other details about this chip were not released, but we do know that the Ivy Bridge presentation will be accompanied by another Intel talk dedicated to a low-power CPU.
Windows 8 is going to be a big focus for Intel in the next year, according to a speech from the company's CEO Paul Otellini. News.com reports that Otellini, speaking at the Intel Capital Global Summit, said that Microsoft's next PC operating system will also be of great importance to Intel as it continues to promote its thin and light ultrabooks notebook design to PC makers.
The Metro-style touch interface for Windows 8 will be a major part of Intel's push for the ultrabooks design which was first introduced in May. The first notebooks that incorporated Intel's concept started shipping last month. For 2012, Otellini hinted that the next generation of ultrabooks would have touch screens. He stated, "Starting with Windows 8, you have a mainstream operating system incorporating touch. Our view is that in the ultrabook lines, touch is a pretty critical enabler. When users see that new Windows interface, they're going to want to touch it. If the screen does nothing, you have disappointed [the] consumer."
Strange things can happen in the technology world which can turn even the most bitter rivals into allies if they both share a similar goal.
This is exactly what rumored to happen with Intel and ARM, as a Notebook Italia report suggest the former is interested in licensing the Mail T658 graphics core from ARM.
The Santa Clara chip maker is most probably interested in using this inside its next generation Medfiled Atom SoC devices that are expected to arrive in 2012 targeting the same low-power tablet and smartphone devices as ARM's own Cortex A9 core.
Shortly after the first desktops powered by Intel's recently released Sandy Bridge-E processors were announced, iBuyPower also sent out a press release to inform us that its systems can now be configured with the Core i7 3960X and Core i7 3930K CPUs.
This includes the company's high-performance Paladin XLC and Erebus custom built desktops equipped with liquid cooling, but the chips can also be added to a host of other PCs from the company's lineup.
“We are excited to offer the highly anticipated Intel Sandy-Bridge-E Processors,” said Darren Su, Vice President of iBuyPower.
We're still roughly five months away from Sandy Bridge's die shrink, Ivy Bridge, but Intel is already preaching the virtues of its 2013 microprocessor technology. Codenamed Haswell, the architecture was first announced during September's IDF with limited info, but freshly leaked slides have revealed further details. We already knew that Haswell would use the same 22nm fabrication process and 3D tri-gate transistors as Ivy Bridge to create an ultra-efficient package that reduces platform power by a factor of 20 without sacrificing performance.
Based on the latest information, Haswell will be a part of a platform dubbed "Shark Bay" and the chips will require entirely new motherboards -- desktop versions will interface via LGA-1150 while mobile iterations will use either rPGA947 or BGA1364. Desktop Haswell parts will carry two or four processing cores alongside an on-die graphics chip that supports DirectX 11. They'll also support Intel's Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost technologies as well as the AVX 2.0 instruction set, dual-channel DDR3 1600MHz RAM and PCI Express 3.0.
If you have a big server operation, it is very likely that the processors that are running things inside were made at Intel. Now HP, the world's number one server maker, has announced Project Moonshot, a new way to build server operations that will cut costs and energy use. The most interesting thing about Project Moonshot is that, at least at first, the servers will use ARM-designed Cortex processors created by Calxeda.
This is pretty huge for the server market as it represents the first time ARM-designed chips will be used inside an HP server machine. According to the press release, the first ARM-based servers will be used in the first part of 2012 via the HP Redstone program. It states, "It incorporates more than 2,800 servers in a single rack, reducing cabling, switching and the need for peripheral devices, and delivering a 97 percent reduction in complexity."
Intel has abandoned attempts to sell x86 processors to TV manufacturers, concentrating instead on portable devices as the natural home for its Atom-based chips.
The chip company put its weight behind Smart TVs in September 2010, when CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated a Google TV mixing up IM, Facebook and web browsing on top of a live TV transmission. At the time, the company promised a "completely different TV viewing experience, enabling consumers to interact with their TV like never before, seamlessly integrating a broad array of Internet content, broadcast programming, personal content, and virtually unlimited applications — all viewable on one TV screen".
Date: October 19, 2011
Place: President Hotel, Gospitalnaja street, 12, Kyiv 01023, Ukraine
Employees of IT-departments are invited: IT-managers, IT-directors, system administrators and active participants of online community Intel IT Galaxy.
Intel Experts make presentations and demonstrations of the latest Intel products for business. Managers of IT-division of Intel's talk about the actual implementation of new technologies will be introduced for IT-solutions in company.
Conference Intel IT Galaxy - is a unique opportunity for IT-professionals to meet their colleagues from IT-Services Intel, to get an idea of the tools, techniques, strategies and best practices relevant to help the most successfully solve the most complex modern IT-problems.
It seems Intel's latest Atom processors might not be delayed as long as originally rumored -- if at all. The Cedar Trail parts were originally bound for launch this month but sources claimed they would be postponed until November because of an issue stemming from their DirectX 10.1 graphics drivers (they supposedly failed Microsoft's certification). However, two of the new components have been added to Intel's official price list (PDF).
Priced at $42 and $52 (in quantities of a thousand), the D2500 and D2700 are based on Intel's 32nm fabrication and feature two processing cores and 1MB of cache. The cheaper chip is clocked at 1.86GHz with a 400MHz integrated graphics core and supports two threads, while its pricier sibling runs at 2.13GHz/640MHz and handles four threads courtesy of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. Both have a 10W thermal design power.
In the upcoming year, Intel will intensify its assault on the tablet and smartphone market by releasing two Atom system-on-a-chip devices built using the 32nm fabrication technology, not just one as previously thought.
The first one of these chips is known by the code name of Medfield and is the company's first Atom SoC solution targeting the mobile market.
Unlike the previous Atom designs, Medfield will include not only the processor cores and the GPU on the same die, but also the I/O functionality that was previously enclosed in the northbridge such as SATA and USB interface or the PCI Express links.
Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology, which shuffles data between PCs and devices like displays and external storage, could be years away from getting optical technology, an Intel executive said this week.
Thunderbolt, originally introduced in February on Apple's Macintosh computers, was pitched as being optical technology but currently uses copper wires. Fiber optics are expensive to implement, and copper wires are working much better than expected, said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in an interview at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco.
Thunderbolt, originally known as Light Peak, was announced in 2009 and was designed to use fiber optics to transmit data among systems and devices. However Intel and Apple released Thunderbolt based on copper, with data transfer rates between host devices and external devices of up to 10Gbps (gigabits per second). The trend of using copper wires could continue, and it could be many years before fiber optics are used in Thunderbolt.
The new DeepSAFE technology developed by McAfee and Intel will bring innovative advancements to virtual security by making an efficient combination between hardware and software resources that will work from an inferior level compared to the operating system to better detect and prevent potential breaches.
Because cybercriminals are inventing ways of taking over computing machines, the security solutions providers must also come up with new means of dealing with attacks.
The methods used by DeepSAFE will rely on technologies already available in hardware products, to help protection applications deal with infections from a "deeper" position.
Collaboration will produce phones using Atom and successor chips as Intel tries to break into smartphone market Android phones featuring Intel chips should be available in the first half of 2012, Intel executives said on Tuesday at its annual developer conference in San Francisco.
While Microsoft showed off Windows running on ARM-based systems, Intel and Google on Tuesday launched a development partnership to get the Android mobile operating system to run on Intel's lower-powered Atom chips.
The move is the latest effort by Intel to get into the booming smartphone market, where processors based on the ARM architecture devised by the Cambridge-based company of the same name dominate.
Next week Microsoft will hold its first annual BUILD Conference in Anaheim, California. The event is expected to reveal a lot more about Microsoft's plans for its Windows 8 operating system along with perhaps a release of a developer preview to its attendees. But the BUILD Conference isn't the only major tech oriented company event happening next week. Intel will also be holding its annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco from September 13-15.
An examination of IDF's panel agenda shows that Intel will be holding at least two panels where the company will discuss how its products will work with Windows 8. One is called "Microsoft Windows 8 on Intel Architecture" on September 14 while the other is titled "Hot Topic Q&A: Intel and Microsoft – Windows 8", to be held on September 15. Both panels will feature speakers from both Intel and Microsoft as they talk about the operating system and how Microsoft is working with Intel to help develop Windows 8.
It’s hard to believe that MeeGo is little more than eighteen months old. It was first announced at Mobile World Congress early last year as a joint venture to merge Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms.
Plans for MeeGo were ambitious but not entirely unrealistic. It was hoped it would extend to a wide range of devices – from mobile phones and tablets to televisions and computers, and even embedded scenarios such as in-car computing and point-of-sale terminals – with different user interface layers applied to suit specific usage requirements. By the end of 2010, AMD had also jumped on board, and a growing number of companies were making interested noises about MeeGo’s prospects.
But since those optimistic days, the platform has struggled to gain traction, hindered further by Nokia’s decision earlier this year to abandon almost all of its involvement with MeeGo in favour of selecting Windows Phone as its preferred smartphone operating system.
Intel, who purchased the rights to a game graphics engine a few years ago and then dumped it in 2010, is getting back into the game graphics engine business again.
This week Intel's Havok division announced it has acquired Trinigy, the owners and developers of the Vision Game Engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Vision Game Engine has been licensed for use by a number of console and PC game developers and publishers. Ubisoft used the engine for its recent strategy game The Settlers 7 and Firefly Studios is using the technology to help create the upcoming RTS game Stronghold 3. Robot Entertainment is also using the engine for its debut game Orcs Must Die.
