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Heating up clock wars Whether you like it or not, the ARM revolution is happening today and these small chips are starting to matter to the world just as much as Intel and AMD chips do. They will get to many tablets and mobile phones in 2011 and onward and most of the 2011 models are dual-core. We just mentioned the 1.5GHz OMAP 4440 chip yesterday and we got confirmation from a source close to Texas Instruments that this fancy fast chip can ship in the second half of 2011. Texas (non-chainsaw) chaps do believe that that have a good...

US computer chip giant Intel posted its best earnings ever in 2010 as businesses beefed up data centers to handle services increasingly shifting to the Internet "cloud." Intel said it took in a net profit of $11.7 billion for the year on revenue of $43.6 billion, a 167 percent jump from the profit it posted in 2009. "2010 was the best year in Intel's history," the California-based company's chief executive Paul Otellini said in comments released with the earnings report. "We believe that 2011 will be even better." Intel's net profit for the final quarter was $3.4 billion, a 48...

Costly marriage of convenience Intel and Nvidia have announced a six-year cross licensing agreement that will cost Intel $1.5 billion over the next five years. Nvidia will receive the first payment on January 18 2011. In return for such a generous dowry, Intel will receive access to Nvidia’s full range of patents, while Nvidia will retain use of Intel patents in accordance with its existing six-year agreement with Intel. Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will drop all outstanding legal disputes between them. Intel general counsel Doug Melamed said that the agreement will put an end to legal...

Surely with so many terror plots developing around the world in recent days, it's understandable that someone might miss one, right? Well, for ordinary Americans, sure -- but you're held to a different standard if you're the head of U.S. intelligence. That's why U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is having a very bad day Wednesday. Clapper appeared to draw a blank when ABC's Diane Sawyer asked him about the arrests hours earlier of 12 men accused of plotting an al-Qaida-type attack in London. What, Me Worry? YOU BETCHA!

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too “ambiguous,” the Obama administration acknowledged Wednesday morning that retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Clapper had not been briefed about the arrests at the time of the interview. “Director Clapper had not yet been briefed on the arrests in the United Kingdom at the time of this interview taping,” said ODNI spokeswoman Jamie Smith in a statement. Clapper, she explained, had been “working throughout the...

WICCOPEE — In a stunning reversal, the frequently lauded and taxpayer-funded SpectraWatt Inc. has told the state it will close its solar cell plant starting in March and lay off 117 workers. The announcement was startling because in the past two months, the company, which had been promised about $8 million in tax dollars, planned to train more workers and changed its work shifts to enable a 24-hour operation. In a news release, the company said it hopes to reverse the situation that led to the decision, but SpectraWatt officials did not respond to requests for details.

The Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel... Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1--the latter used on Apple's Mac operating systems... Certain graphics chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia already support DirectX 11... Smith also reiterated that Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon--the follow-on to Sandy Bridge--by the end of 2011... also repeated that Intel has invested "six to eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production." ...A...

Apple will use Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs in its future laptops, no surprises there, but what's interesting about these forthcoming machines is that some of them might rely solely on Intel's chip for both general and graphical processing tasks. That's the word from the usual "sources familiar with Apple's plans," who expect "MacBook models with screen sizes of 13 inches and below" to eschew the inclusion of a discrete GPU and ride their luck on the improved graphical performance of Intel's upcoming do-it-all chip. There are currently no sub-13.3-inch MacBooks, so the suggestion of one is surely intriguing, but the...

According to the draft report, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm, China Telecom, "hijacked" massive volumes of Internet traffic during the 18-minute incident. It affected traffic to and from .gov and .mil websites in the United States, as well as websites for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and "many others," including websites for firms like Dell, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft. "Although the Commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number...

In what is being described as the largest release of secret U.S. military documents ever, whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks has released a trove of classified reports about the war in Iraq, including a secret U.S. government tally that puts the Iraqi death toll between 109,000 and 285,000, according to news sources that received advanced copies of the documents.

A chip company's plan to open a manufacturing plant in Abu Dhabi has experts worried about the supply of essential computer processors. Should a war or even a serious political disagreement arise, they say, a foreign power could stop or corrupt the flow of computer chips from its plants to the U.S. Intel Corp. announced on Tuesday plans to spend up to $8 billion on state-of-the-art plants in Oregon and Arizona, meaning most of its central processing units (CPUs) -- the brains behind every computer -- would continue to be manufactured in the U.S. The company's CEO, Paul Otellini, said...

Intel's chief executive Paul Otellini took a minute at the start of today's earnings conference call to praise Apple's iPad, but said Intel has every intention of ultimately winning the category. Intel executives have made many statements about the tablet category in past conference calls. But these were typically about the category being new and only "additive" to the much larger PC market. This time Otellini made a uncharacteristically strong statement, seemingly in response to investor worries that Intel is not addressing the category aggressively enough. "I know the big question on everyone's mind is how Intel will respond to...

NEW YORK (AFP) – US computer chip giant Intel posted a quarterly net profit of nearly three billion dollars on Tuesday and record revenue of more than 11 billion dollars. The Santa Clara, California-based technology bellwether reported third-quarter revenue of 2.95 billion dollars, up from 1.85 billion dollars during the same period a year ago. Earnings per share of 52 cents were slightly better than the 50 cents expected by Wall Street analysts.

An announcement by the government trumpeting the addition of 570 new jobs at Intel’s chip manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat has created excitement in the finance sector. The upgrade -- which means an investment of NIS 10 billion ($2.7 billion) in Israel’s economy – will be carried out over an eight-year span, and is slated to begin in 2011. By 2018, the Kiryat Gat plant is expected to number about 3,100 staff members. The project is still subject to final approval from the government’s investment center and the Knesset Finance Committee.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency, headquarters for the government’s eavesdroppers and code breakers, has been located at Fort Meade, Md., for half a century. Its nickname, the Fort, has been familiar for decades to neighbors and government workers alike. Yet that nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the...

Washington (CNN) -- The Department of Defense recently purchased and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army Reserve officer's memoir in an effort to safeguard state secrets, a spokeswoman said Saturday. "DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security," Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham said. In a statement to CNN, Cunningham said defense officials observed the September 20 destruction of about 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's new memoir "Operation Dark Heart." Shaffer says he was notified Friday about the Pentagon's purchase. "The whole...

Intel's Paul Otellini predicts that the "next big thing" won't happen in the States unless government policies change. ZoomMonday night Intel CEO Paul Otellini warned government officials that the U.S. will face a huge tech decline if government policies are not altered. In fact, the "next big thing" won't be invented here in the States, and jobs will be created outside our borders. The warning was part of his observations about the Obama administration and the nation's economy during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum. He took aim at the U.S. legal environment, claiming that its become so...

In another sign the economic recovery is stalling, Intel -- whose fortunes are a key barometer of the technology sector's health -- cut its forecast for third-quarter sales, citing "weaker than expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets." The Santa Clara company -- the worlds' biggest chip maker -- said it now expects its revenue for the quarter to range between $10.8 billion and $11.2 billion, compared with its previous prediction of $11.2 billion to $12 billion.

Intel CEO: U.S. faces looming tech decline. Intel chief executive Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors will include new circuits for handling demanding multimedia tasks, according to sources, more evidence of processor changes in store as the chip giant gets ready to shift over to a new processor architecture. Sandy Bridge is Intel's next microarchitecture, or redesign, of its processors--which the chipmaker does every two years. The current design, Nehalem, was introduced in November 2008 and is used in all Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, which now populate the newest PCs worldwide. Sandy Bridge chips are scheduled to go into commercial production in the fourth quarter, and the first PCs...