Free Republic

Intel Corp. today announced that it expects to ship a six-core processor to resellers in the second half of this year. With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel's new 45 nanometer technology, according to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group."The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," Gelsinger said during a press briefing today about the company's product road map and its upcoming Intel Developer Forum, slated to be held next month in Shanghai....

A new study commissioned by the Pentagon has reviewed over 600,000 documents captured in the invasion of Iraq, and the analysis shows no evidence of operational ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. It did find operational ties and more between Saddam and other terrorist groups, however, which will likely be lost in an avalanche of I-told-you-sos: An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this...

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices in order to "re-architect it". The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMD's x86 license is a non-transferable one... Indeed, shareholders of AMD are hardly pleased with the company's performance in the recent quarters as well as issues with the launch of quad-core microprocessors and the release of DirectX 10 graphics processing units. Nevertheless,...

The problem is not merely that someone who is himself so clearly a "rabid ideologue" might have been responsible for vetting the Iran NIE and then letting a skewed declassified summary of it out the door. Given how recently Immerman took his job, his precise role in the fiasco is unclear, although it is suggestive that his direct supervisor is Thomas Fingar, one of the authors of the controversial document. The real problem is that someone like Immerman, nakedly contemptuous of the administration in which he nonetheless sought a job, was appointed to a position of such high responsibility--or any...

Intel Corp. may release six-core microprocessors as early as in the second half of this year, according to a number of media reports. However, if those claims are correct, then it may mean not only another powerful central processing unit for Intel and a threat to chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but also a further delay in unification of Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon platforms. Intel needs a chip to update its multi-processor (MP) enterprise server platform this year as no Nehalem-based microprocessor for the MP market segment is planned for 2008... However, it seems like unified Quick Path Interconnect...

Last week Microsoft rolled out three prerequisite updates to prepare users computers for the first service pack for Windows Vista. However, one of these updates apparently caused serious issues among some users, prompting Microsoft to quickly suspend automatic installations of KB937287 after customers complained that their PCs wouldn't boot up properly once the update had been applied. For affected users who already received the update, the only solution is to reboot their computers, boot from their original Vista disc and restore their computer to a state several days prior. However, some users have reported hardware and hard disk problems after...

European Union antitrust regulators expanded their investigation of Intel before the world's largest chipmaker had a chance to answer pending charges, the chairman of Intel's board said on Thursday. Asked whether he was surprised that the European Commission had raided Intel in a new probe while still pursuing it on other charges, Craig Barrett said: "You have to ask the EU why they are expanding it at this stage." ...The Commission this month raided Intel offices in Munich and retailers in Germany, France and Britain, seeking evidence they acted illegally to exclude rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices... Also on Thursday,...

For those who crave more performance than what four processing cores and a single graphics card can deliver today, Intel Corporation has introduced the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Formerly codenamed "Skulltrail," this is one of the first enthusiast desktop platforms to support two Intel quad core processors for a total of eight processing engines and a choice of multi-card graphics solutions from either ATI or NVIDIA. "When it comes to delivering innovation to the ultimate enthusiast, our new 8-core desktop platform is a winner," said Jeff McCrea, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home...

<p>The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has detained at an unknown location a former Sudanese Air Force pilot who may have been planning to hijack an airliner and fly it into a target in the United States, U.S. officials told CNN on Friday.</p>

Excerpt - DALLAS (AP) — Dell Inc. has stopped selling many computers with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on its Web site, although it will continue selling some through retailers. The news was a setback for AMD, which wooed Dell for years before breaking the computer maker's exclusive supplier relationship with Intel Corp. in 2006. Intel still made the processors used in most computers sold on Dell.com. But AMD raised its profile in the chip field by being inside some Dell machines. Shares of Dell rose 2 cents, to $19.45, while AMD shares fell 25 cents, or 3.8 percent,...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2008 – The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency gave the Senate Intelligence Committee an assessment of military threats confronting the United States during testimony before the panel yesterday. Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples told the committee that several global military trends concern the U.S. armed forces. He then went on to delineate specific threats to the United States, its allies and its interests. General threats include proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, more mobile and accurate ballistic missiles, improvised explosive devices and suicide weapons as weapons of choice for terrorists, and the continued development of...

You horrible cynics out there looked at Intel's mushy Montvale chip and scoffed. "That's the end of the Itanic." Ah, but there's a fresh monster on the horizon known as Tukwila, and systems based on that puppy should fly if its brand new QuickPath interconnect arrives as expected. Next week Intel will disclose details on QuickPath at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. [It's like the Folsom Street Fair - Google at your own risk - but with more brain and less testicle torture - Ed.] What will Intel say? Well, according to the conference program, showgoers...

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday that his office has subpoenaed documents and information from Intel Corp. in an antitrust probe into whether the semiconductor giant tried to coerce customers to exclude rivals from the marketplace. In a press release, Mr. Cuomo said the subpoena is seeking documents and information concerning Intel's pricing practices and possible attempts to exclude competitors, including its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., through Intel's dominate position in the market, "Our investigation is focused on determining whether Intel has improperly used monopoly power to exclude competitors or stifle innovation," Mr. Cuomo said...

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 ...