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Linus Torvalds prays Intel will adopt Yamhill And so adopt AMD's X86-64 By INQUIRER staff: Monday 29 July 2002, 11:26 A POSTING BY Linus Torvalds on the LINUX KERNEL newsgroup yesterday has him praying that Intel will adopt its secret "Yamhill" project and turn to the ways of X86-64 righteousness. Torvalds, who had a key part to play in Transmeta's fortunes at startup, says in the post that Linux developers are "generally praying that AMD's X86-64 succeeds in the market." That, he says, would force Intel to make Yamhill its standard 64-bit platform and allow for improvements in the Linux...

Desktop Roadmaps 1066 validation, price cuts, Springdale, and more By Mike Magee: Tuesday 23 July 2002, 10:57 THE LATEST INTEL ROADMAPS show the Prescott 90 nanometer processor appearing in the second half of 2003. Prescott will be introduced at 3.20GHz in the second half of next year. And Intel will introduce hyperthreading in desktop CPUs at speeds of 3.06GHz and bove. While Intel will also introduce a 3.20GHz Pentium 4 in Q2 of next year. As we said earlier, Intel will introduce its Pentium 4 2.80GHz processor this quarter – it will cost $508 at launch, the 2.6/2.66 Pentium 4s...

Why the Buzz on Hammer Just Won't QuitJust in case you haven't been paying attention, AMD's upcoming 8th generation processor has been generating a steady buzz of discussion almost since the first of the year.  This has led to an occasional outburst of exasperation from editors at various websites, some of whom have complained the web community in general is too focused upon Hammer.  Hammer is, their argument goes, an unproven product with a distant and uncertain launch date, and should not be focused on so heavily.  It's also been suggested by some that much of the Hammer hype itself...

Advanced Micro Devices is building a 64-bit field of dreams. As Intel accelerates the launch date of its 3GHz Pentium 4 chip, arch rival AMD continues to build the foundation for "ClawHammer." The 64-bit Athlon processor is expected to come out early next year, giving desktop PCs a performance similar to that of workstations used in research labs at DaimlerChrysler or NASA. To make sure ClawHammer arrives on solid footing, AMD is working with a long list of partners who will build that hardware and software that can take advantage of such a chip. The company has already sent tens...

Intel's Rio Rancho fab hit by Act of God Wafers toasted, roasted by lightning By Mike Magee: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 09:49 LOCAL NEWSPAPER the Bradenton Herald reported Monday that Intel's Rio Rancho plant in Albuquerque was hit by a bolt from the blue, temporarily shutting down production at the leading fab. The report said that Intel lost $800 million worth of chips because of the lighting strike. That sounds like an overestimate to us, unless the lightning strike really ripped through the facilities. The paper quotes a fire expert from the US National Lighting Safety Institute as reporting that...

Hollywood adopting Linux Rendering, cheap and fast By Egan Orion: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 06:09 BIG MEDIA COMPANIES have a well-deserved reputation for being deeply clueless about information technology. Studio executives view it as a necessary evil, albeit useful for padding byzantine accounting in order to pay their actors and investors as little as possible. But the smaller studios producing the computer animation wizardry driving many popular movies are more sophisticated. They are moving to Linux on x86 platforms, and are realizing both lower costs and higher performance. Thus Cnet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic(ILM), the operation responsible...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. is moving up the introduction of its Pentium 4 processor running at 3.0 gigahertz, an industry source said on Monday, as the world's largest chipmaker looks to tap the benefits of efficiencies in its chip manufacturing. Santa Clara, California-based Intel, the world's No. 1 chip maker, now plans to have the processor to PC makers in time for the year-end holiday shopping season, the source said. Intel had planned to introduce the 3.0 gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, the brains of a personal computer, by the end of the year. In additional, Intel also...

Might Apple ditch PowerPC for Satanic chips? Citizen Smith Resolution wavering? By Tony Smith: Monday 22 July 2002, 10:17 IS APPLE SERIOUSLY thinking about switching processor platforms? There's been no end of speculative answers to that question over the past few years, but Apple itself has been resolute on the point: no we're not. That stance may have changed, if comments made by CEO Steve Jobs at the company's quarterly earnings confab. Asked whether Apple is now mooting a move to x86 chips, Jobs noted that that couldn't happen until the vast majority of its users and - more importantly...

Intel's accounts are whiter than white By Mike Magee: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 08:22 JOB CUTS AT INTEL will still leave the firm with around 80,000 employees, the size of a small town. And like a small town, Intel has its own newspaper called Circuit News. Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, used Circuit News to deliver a webcast to his employees yesterday which varied in some details from the official statement on its second quarter results. The article is interesting about Intel's view on company trading during the entire Enron debacle, and we don't think that using the word BUM...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Intel Corp., the world's No. 1 chipmaker, may be on the verge of announcing massive layoffs or other cuts amid a slow market for personal computers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Intel's chief executive officer, Craig Barrett is scheduled to speak to employees after stock markets close, and about the same time as the chipmaker discusses its second-quarter results in a conference call with analysts, the paper said. Intel declined to comment on what Barrett will discuss, nor on the possibility of any work-force reduction, though word of the speech spread on Monday...

Column Heigh-Ho Celeron! By Andrew Busigin: Thursday 11 July 2002, 19:14 INTEL'S LATEST developments around future Celeron performance make for an interest study in marketing. It appears that once again, Intel Marketing folks are steering the engineering team, and it shouldn't surprise anyone, since the Celeron has always been a marketing phenomenon more than an engineering product. See Intel to shift P4 Celerons to Northwood core History Lesson The origin of the Celeron, for those of you more recently come to the party, was a marketing coup for Intel, whereby they managed to create an artificial segmentation of their CPU...

Muhammad Ali’s home town seems an unlikely setting for the 2002 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) but the sleepy town of Louisville, Kentucky, is where 1,238 high school students from 40 countries congregated in May to compete for more than $3 million in awards and scholarships in the world’s largest pre-college science fair. At breakfast on the day of the final judging, the Indian kids are wide-eyed and ebullient. Says Akshat Singhal, here with the document management software he developed: "Before coming here, who’d have imagined that we’d meet people of our age from Costa Rica?" What is...

Big backing for Opteron, if true By Adamson Rust: Tuesday 09 July 2002, 09:27 THE WALL ST JOURNAL could hardly be described as a rumour mongering site so the rumour it mongered yesterday in a story it wrote about Intel's Itanic has to be taken more seriously than, say, any British publication whatsoever. The Wall St Journal has been known to fact check a story so much that the hacks feel they're being given the third degree. Yesterday, a long and worthy piece about whether big corporations will follow up their IA-32 server farms with IA-64 "big tin" terminated with...

No systems spotted on the horizon By Paul Hales: Tuesday 09 July 2002, 12:58 INTEL YESTERDAY TRUMPETED the launch of its new high-end server ship (Oops...) and said that a whole gang of systems makers were lining up to build nice, robust server boxes based on the fantastic new Itanium 2. So where are they? Well, apart from the "New HP", which has embraced the announcement whole-heartedly and even produced a cheesy little a cartoon here on its corporate propaganda pages, (we don't recommend it) to herald the new age of IT2, other "partners" have been conspicuously quiet amidst the...

Opteron and Itanium: Two Roads to 64-bit ComputingBy Johan De Gelas Friday, July 5, 2002 7:51 AM EDT A flood of articles have already been written about AMD's Opteron, otherwise known as Sledgehammer and Clawhammer DP. Quite a few editorials believe it will become a very popular server and workstation CPU which will force Intel to follow in AMD's footsteps and introduce 64-bit extensions in their current 32-bit x86 line. At the same time, Intel and many industry analysts claim that 64-bit CPUs for the workstation and desktop are more of a marketing gimmick than anything else, at least...

PALO ALTO, Calif. -(Dow Jones)- If at first you don't succeed, bring out Itanium 2. That is what Intel Corp. (INTC) will do on Monday to rising expectations that this new top-of-the-line chip will do what its predecessor couldn't: compete for the most demanding of corporate computing jobs. That will mean taking on the titans of high-tech computing, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), all of whom make the powerful Unix servers companies rely on for their internal business systems. Intel is expected to unveiled three Itanium 2 chips, and computer makers such...

Microsoft gets into PC hardware business Launches "Dream Machine" with FIC By Mike Magee: Thursday 04 July 2002, 08:49 INTEL IS NOT GOING TO LIKE this one little bit if it's true. A report in the Economic News claims that Microsoft and FIC will jointly launch a so–called "Dream PC" which doesn't even use an Intel chip, but instead makes use of a Via C3. The report claims that the first jointly developed "Dream PC" will be introduced towards the end of this month and that Microsoft will also show quite a few so called "baseline" or cheap machines which...

Intel faces coughing up to Intergraph again On-going Itanic courtcase could cost Intel $250mil By Paul Hales: Thursday 04 July 2002, 09:43 CHIPMAKER INTERGRAPH must be miffed with Intel -- or grateful. Chipzilla paid Intergraph $300 million earlier this year after the five years of legal wranglings in a courtcase that charged that Intel had infringed Intergraph's patents in the design of the Pentium processor. Now, a district court judge in Texas is to decide whether Intel has again infringed Intergraph's patents again, this time on the Itanium processor. And, Intergraph says Intel has already agreed to pay Intergraph $150...

Intel Corporation today provided a planned update to the company's Business Outlook for the second quarter, which ends June 29.Intel expects second-quarter revenue to be between $6.2 billion and $6.5 billion, compared to the previous range of $6.4 billion to $7.0 billion. The lower revenue expectation is primarily due to softer than expected demand in Europe. Microprocessor units are at the low end of the normal seasonal pattern, with a weaker than expected mix. Intel's enterprise, mobile and communications businesses are in line with expectations. The company continues to expect a seasonally stronger second half.The second-quarter gross margin percentage is...

US intelligence has received new reports that Osama Bin Laden recieved a kidney transplant in late February.Defense officials have recieved persistent reports that the Al Qaeda leader has severe kidney problems.The latest reporting, believed to have come from informants, again suggest that Bin Laden recieved treatment with the help of dialysis machines supplied by Pakistan's Intelligence agency.He may have recieved the surgery in Afghanistan or Pakistan.