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INTEL HAS CUT the prices of its Pentium 4 in advance of the expected launch of a new 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor Thursday, according to a research note distributed by Merrill Lynch & Co. Tuesday. Advanced Micro Devices is expected to follow suit, the note said. The approximate price of the new processor, Intel's first on the desktop to feature its hyperthreading technology, will be in about the mid-$500 range, according to Merrill. To bring slower processors in line with the new chip, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 will fall in price from $508 to $401, and the 2.67GHz and...

Itanium and Opteron contrasted Letter What are the options for Intel? By The Letternan: Saturday 09 November 2002, 10:04 THE COMPARISON SPECS on Itanium 3 and Opteron here look pretty good. This appears to show both processors passing the current fastest server chip by a significant lead. However, for x86 code, Opteron looks like it will hit the market as fast as the fastest x86 processor while Itanium 3 is a joke on x86 code. It is too bad that there are not specs available on Yamhill because I have a very strong suspicion that it was killed, not because...

AMD's new CEO, Hector Ruiz, has one hope to save his company, a new microprocessor technology called Hammer. But first he has to shake AMD's spotted history -- and a ferocious competitor named Intel. Hector de Jesus Ruiz, the new chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is a short, balding fellow who is so quiet and soft-spoken that his sentences often disappear into an inaudible mumble. In fact, sitting at a conference table in his office in Sunnyvale, Calif., hands folded in his lap, describing his company's "long history of being resourceful and sticking with it," the 56-year-old Ruiz...

It is a well known fact that there are scores of computer professionals who have been laid off and are out of work in this country. Those positions include software engineers, network engineers, and electrical engineers. Those who have lost their jobs in the past 24 months know what I am talking about. We all know WHY we've been laid off. It is because indentured servants from other lands have overrun our country with the help of Congress due to the false premise of a labor shortage by IT industry lobbyists. Here we have an opportunity to "layoff" those who...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Part three Hammer in the house [Part 1: Serious about servers ] [Part 2: Would you switch to AMD?]By Mario Rodrigues: Friday 25 October 2002, 09:39 IT IS PRETTY clear (see part two) that AMD has fully demonstrated the exacting requirements that the business world demands. Market perception of AMD's supposed inferior platform quality has taken all this time to erode. HP's decision to offer AMD supported (Compaq branded) desktop and notebook business class PCs should be all the assurance that one would need that AMD is now ready to aggressively...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Part two Would you switch to AMD? [To read Part One click here] By Mario Rodrigues: Wednesday 23 October 2002, 17:59 IN MARCH 2001, Web hosting company Rackspace managed over 3,000 servers. Patrick Condon, one of the company's founders, estimated at the time that 80% of their servers used AMD processors. "We use a lot of 1 GHz AMD Athlon processors. We found they are incredibly reliable," he said. "In fact, we have well over 1500 AMD-based servers that have been up and running 24 hours a day for over two...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Analysis Serious about servers By Mario Rodriques: Monday 21 October 2002, 18:37 OVER THE YEARS, much has been written and discussed about a perceived AMD weakness - stability. Many will remember Michael Dell's famous comment about the AMD environment being "too fragile". Unfortunately for AMD, even with the product recalls that plagued Intel over the years, this perception, like a ball and chain, had unjustifiably clasped itself to the chipmaker. Because stability is a prerequisite that has to be met before any major enterprise buyer would look at a company's products,...

AMD's Opteron could spur dual-core processor showdownBy Rick Merritt, EE TimesOct 16, 2002 (9:00 AM)URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021016S0019SAN JOSE, Calif. — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said its upcoming Opteron microprocessor will feature better integer performance than all other server processors, setting up a possible race with Intel Corp. to move to dual-core server processors as early as next year.AMD's 64-bit X86 processor running at 2 GHz in a 32-bit mode will hit an estimated SPECint base2000 performance rating of 1,202 and a SPECfp base2000 rating of 1,170, said Fred Weber, chief technology officer of AMD's computation products group, at the Microprocessor Forum...

<p>SAN JOSE, Calif.--Offering a possible peek at how Itanium processors may look in 2007, a senior Intel Corp. engineer on Tuesday unveiled the blueprint for a 1 billion-transistor processor.</p> <p>Although he discounted the idea that he was making a product announcement, Intel Fellow John Crawford nevertheless appeared to strongly suggest that his blueprint of a four-core processor would likely be developed to power future computers.</p>

SAN JOSE, California, Oct 10, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A federal judge in Texas ruled against chip-making giant Intel Corp. in a long-running dispute with Intergraph Corp. over patents involving the Itanium processor. U.S. District Judge T. John Ward agreed Thursday that Intel's high-performance chip infringed on the patents invented by Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph, now a computer services company. In the suit, Intergraph claimed Intel's Itanium processor infringed on two patents related to parallel instruction computing. Intel's total liability is limited to $250 million because of a previous agreement reached as part of another patent fight between...

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Wednesday warned of a "substantial operating loss" and sharply lower-than-expected revenue in the third quarter, citing a weak personal computer market. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, which is Intel Corp.'s principal rival in the market for microprocessors, said that it now expects revenue for the third quarter ended Sept. 29 of about $500 million. Analysts had been expecting third-quarter revenue of $614 million and a per-share loss of 49 cents, according to Thomson First Call. AMD said that, in light of the persistent weak demand for PCs, it had...

Intel will triple its engineering staff in Russia.

1. What are TCPA and Palladium? TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features. 2. What does TCPA / Palladium do, in ordinary English? It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with...

THE PEOPLE'S DAILY reports that China has built its first server chip which uses a localised form of Linux, and which it dubs the "Dragon Chip". The CPU was built and developed by the Computer Institution of the Chinese Academy of Science, and is part of its "Soaring Dragon" project to take advantage of the fact that it will be the second biggest semiconductor market in the world by 2010. And indeed, if the US doesn't watch out, it might also be the biggest producer of semiconductors even earlier than that, according to analysts at iSuppli. The semi market is...

Hardware Intel: Where no chip has gone before By Michael Kanellos Special to ZDNet NewsSeptember 12, 2002, 11:50 AM PT SAN JOSE, Calif.--The nanotechnology era is here, and Intel is looking at all the options. News FocusIntel Developer Forum news On Thursday, at its Developer Forum here, The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker disclosed a number of technology changes and avenues of research that will direct the future development of its chips. The company, for instance, confirmed that it is working on a multiple-gate transistor, called the Tri-Gate transistor, that will, if eventually incorporated into commercially released chips, increase the...

Intel Rubbishes AMD's Hybrid Plans DATE: 09/12/2002 The head of Intel Corp's server chip division rubbished AMD's 32/64-bit hybrid processor proposition yesterday, saying that if it's such a good idea, why hasn't anyone done it before? Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's enterprise, speaking after a keynote speech at the vendor's developer forum in San Jose, questioned the logic of supporting both 64-bit and 32-bit computing on the same processor. Advanced Micro Devices Inc is pushing its hybrid approach as a way for corporations to smooth their transition from legacy 32-bit applications to 64-bit computing. Fister...

AMD Announces Technology to Enable Ten-Fold Performance Leap in Future Transistors World's smallest version of innovative design can foster better products and lower manufacturing costs Sunnyvale, CA -- September 10, 2002 --AMD today announced it has fabricated the smallest double-gate transistors reported to date using industry standard technology. These transistors, measuring ten nanometers, or ten billionths of a meter in length (gate), are six times smaller than the smallest transistors currently in production. AMD's research breakthrough could foster the placement of a billion transistors on the same size chip that currently holds 100 million transistors, enabling a vastly richer computing...

Speed limits on P4 could open window for AMD Can Barton scale to high speeds fast? By Mike Magee in San Jose: Sunday 08 September 2002, 23:47 THE MOST RECENT roadmap we saw from the Intel Corporation warns motherboard makers that with the introduction of 3.06GHz Pentium 4 in Q4, the designers are creating a somewhat new die layout for the Northwood process. This new layout might well be related to some significant errata in the processor, which we reported a few weeks ago. But with the introduction of 512K cache "Barton" AMD XP chips, we think that Intel may...

Intel, Rambus wave goodbye on platform as gravy train shunts out SIS left holding PC Rambus babies. Sniff By Mike Magee: Wednesday 04 September 2002, 10:27 IT'S NOW CLEAR from the latest Intel roadmaps we've seen that the 850E, and by definition Rambus RDRAM memory, is not much longer for the PC planet. Unless, that is, SIS comes to the rescue of the memory type during 2003. The RDRAM gravy train is being shunted out of the INTC station. As we reported yesterday, graphics on the roadmap show that the 850E, which will be validated for 1066 RDRAM come early...

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is one of America’s most respected reporters on intelligence and national security matters. His new book, Breakdown—How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11, will be released this week by Regnery Publishing, a sister company of Human Events. (Gertz previously authored the 1999 bestseller, Betrayal—How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, also a Regnery book.) On August 20, Human Events Editor Terence P. Jeffrey interviewed Gertz about some of the many revelations in Breakdown. Human Events: In your reporting, did you discover how many CIA-recruited spies the United States had in Iraq back in...