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LAS VEGAS (MarketWatch) - Intel Corp. demonstrated that its commitment to WiMax, a next generation wireless technology, has not wavered even after the collapse of a important partnership between Sprint and Clearwire - two of the technology's strongest proponents - in November. At the Consumer Electronics Show, the Santa Clara chip maker used a small fleet of cars to drive the press and other guests around to demonstrate the power of the wide-ranging wireless technology. WiMax, which has a much larger range than the popular Wi-Fi standard, can be used in rural environments, congested cities with skyscrapers, and mountainous regions....

“BLOWBACK” is an intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Some in the intelligence community have been working with liberal journalists and Democrats on Capitol Hill to embarrass President Bush and to stymie his foreign policy initiatives. The most successful of these covert operations was the Valerie Plame affair, in which White House officials were falsely blamed for “outing” a CIA undercover officer who was not in fact undercover. (It was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Sixty years after transistors were invented and nearly five decades since they were first integrated into silicon chips, the tiny on-off switches dubbed the "nerve cells" of the information age are starting to show their age. The devices - whose miniaturization over time set in motion the race for faster, smaller and cheaper electronics - have been shrunk so much that the day is approaching when it will be physically impossible to make them even tinier. Once chip makers can't squeeze any more into the same-sized slice of silicon, the dramatic performance gains and cost...

Already new materials are creeping into modern chips. As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip. To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium. The material's development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s. But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger...

Everyone always claims to be the fastest in X or Y. We know that and accept that. Such was not the case with the Pentium 4, or at least for one small group of people. They opted to take Intel to court because Intel's claims of performance boosts weren't quite factual. Then again, anyone who used the Pentium 4 through its various iterations remembers how dismal it was in the beginning. Was it really worth suing over? Now, years later, a judge has said no. Or, at least, he has said that a lawsuit against Intel for "misrepresenting" the speed...

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- IBM announced two major scientific achievements Thursday, both in the field of nanotechnology. Researchers said the breakthroughs will enable scientists to further explore the building of structures and devices out of ultra-tiny components as small as a few atoms or molecules. In the first report, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., describe major progress in identifying a property called magnetic anisotropy, which determines an atom’s ability to store information. That research, said IBM, could lead to storage of as many as 30,000 movies in a device the size of an...

Intel Cites Breakthrough in Transistor Design By Duncan Martell SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) has devised a new structure for transistors -- the tiny switches that make up semiconductors -- in a development it said could lead to microprocessors that run at blazing speeds and consume far less power than conventional ones. The technology, Intel said, solves two of the more intractable problems facing the development and manufacture of microprocessors today as more and more transistors are packed onto each chip: power consumption and heat. In addition, as the geometries on chips become ever smaller, it ...

Big Blue researchers’ feat suggests the material could be a candidate to replace silicon in chips. IBM researchers have achieved a milestone by creating an integrated circuit out of a single carbon nanotube, a feat that makes the material a likely candidate to replace silicon as the main ingredient for making chips. Big Blue plans to detail the accomplishment in the journal Science on Friday. Long thought to be a good candidate for replacing silicon, carbon nanotube has posed great challenges for scientists who try to coax transistors out of the material and create an integrated circuit (IC). ICs are...

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips Out of order speculation By: Thursday 18 August 2005, 07:20 AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different. If it was just a Pentium M variant I don’t think there’d be such a fuss about it. Intel is portraying this as the biggest change since the original P4, yet there have been several...

AMD WILL ONLY LAUNCH the Phenom 9500 and 9600. Even though the channel already got its hands on the Phenom 9700 (2.4 GHz) part, it will have to be pulled off from the shelves. In a weird deja-vu, it turns out that the company found an errata in the TLB (Transition Lookaside Buffer), just like Intel did earlier this year with complete Core marchitecture. However, unlike Intel, that has a micro-code update function in all of its CPUs, AMD is forced to delay the introduction of the part. This comes as a huge hit to AMD, at the time that...

Japan's Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. said on Tuesday they would jointly develop 32-nanometre chips to better keep up with rivals. The companies will continue talks about jointly producing the chips, and aim to reach a decision in 2008, they said. The two had also approached Fujitsu Ltd, but spokesman Etsuro Yamada declined to comment on whether or not Fujitsu would join the group, only saying that "Fujitsu was considering various options." Chip makers are racing to halve the production cost per function of a chip every year or two. Samsung Electronics Co., IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., Infineon...

<p>Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.</p>

FORT HUACHUCA — The defense of the United States is going to require highly trained military intelligence professions, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Friday. Preparing critical intelligence providers is being done on this Southern Arizona post, said U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who assumed the chairmanship of the committee in January. Having an intelligence force that is the best will ensure the United States can counter any future enemy, he said. “It’s going to be the intelligence world that makes the difference,” he said after spending an afternoon on the post. It was Skelton’s first trip...

IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) improved their standings Monday in the newest tally of the world's fastest 500 computers, a closely watched measure of progress in the industry. The list, published twice a year by academic researchers, once again was topped by an IBM Corp. supercomputer in the Lawrence Livermore national nuclear lab. The BlueGene/L system, as it is known, was recently upgraded and showed the ability to perform at 478 teraflops - 478 trillion calculations per second. That's tens of thousands of times faster than your average desktop PC today. The No. 2 performer was an IBM supercomputer...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of processors Monday, flexing its manufacturing muscle with a sophisticated new process that crams up to 40 percent more transistors onto the company's chips. The world's largest semiconductor company expects to start shipping 16 new microprocessors -- which also boast inventive new materials to stanch electricity loss -- for use in servers and high-end gaming PCs . The most complex chips being launched Monday have 820 million transistors, compared with the 582 million transistors on the same chips built using the current standard technology. Intel's first chips,...

WASHINGTON -The U.S. government spent $43.5 billion on intelligence in 2007, according to the first official disclosure under a new law implementing recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell released the newly declassified figure Tuesday. In a statement, the DNI said there would be no additional disclosures of classified budget information beyond the overall spending figure because "such disclosures could harm national security." How the money is divided among the 16 intelligence agencies and exactly what it is spent on is classified. It includes salaries for about 100,000 people, multibillion dollar secret satellite programs, aircraft,...

The question of how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexicans entering the United States each year has become a divisive issue across the country. President Bush signed a bill last year that authorized the construction of a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, which would cost billions of dollars. Related Stories Mexican President Felipe Calderon has called the idea of building the fence "deplorable," and said today on "Good Morning America" that he wanted to strengthen the Mexican economy to keep Mexicans there. "Let me tell you, I think that the only way to stop migration...

They weren't out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley's ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor. Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at...

Members of the Senate intelligence committee have requested the withdrawal of the Bush administration's choice for CIA general counsel, acknowledging that John Rizzo's nomination has stalled because of concerns about his views on the treatment of terrorism suspects. The decision followed a private meeting this week in which committee leaders concluded that the troubled nomination could not overcome opposition among Democratic members. It comes less than a month after a key member, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), announced his intention to block the nomination indefinitely. Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, has drawn fire from Democrats and human rights groups because of...

File this in the category of “Revealing Much More Than Intended.” A print ad for a new computer processor made by Intel Corp. was yanked before it ever appeared in the United States, with one minor exception. The ad’s problem? At the very least, it’s racist.