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Though we still like to think of Intel first and foremost as a computer CPU company, the fact of the matter is the company is trying its hardest to expand their horizons. Among their expansion efforts are a push in to the smartphone space, and to further that Intel is at Mobile World Congress 2011 making their latest smartphone-related announcements. The first announcement, and of course the one nearest and dearest to our hearts, is on the CPU side of things. Medfield – Intel’s next-generation Atom-based smartphone SoC is now sampling and will ship later this year. Intel still hasn’t...

While I was scheduling my Mobile World Congress meetings I got an email request from Intel. It wanted to give me a quick tour of the latest MeeGo UI for tablets. MeeGo, as you may remember, was the combination of Intel's Moblin OS and Nokia's own efforts. While MeeGo isn't completely abandoned by Nokia, it's looking unlikely that Nokia will be a major player in it going forward considering the fresh partnership with Microsoft. Intel is still trucking away with MeeGo and unfortunately appears to be retaining the less-than-ideal name despite the recent shakeup with its partner (at least Moblin...

Just hours after National Intelligence Director James Clapper made the shocking statement this morning that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization, his office tried frantically to “clarify” his remarks. In a statement to ABC News, Jamie Smith, director of the office of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Clapper was commenting on the political system in Egypt rather than the make up of the group itself: To clarify Director Clapper’s point — in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak’s rule, one that...

RBS (LON:RBS) have today advised that they remain buyers of ARM Holdings Plc (LON:ARM) in light of recent developments at HP. Last night, HP announced it would use the Palm/WebOS in its PCs later this year. According to RBS this could help ARM penetrate the PC market as the WebOS is based on ARM CPUs. Didier Scemama at RBS says: "We believe this announcement is potentially significant for ARM as HP, the leading PC vendor, intends to use a different OS than MSFT’s Windows, in its PCs. "Currently all HP’s PCs are based on x86 processors from INTC or AMD....

I just got off the phone with Intel’s Steve Smith (VP and Director of Intel Client PC Operations and Enabling) and got some more detail on this morning’s 6-series chipset/SATA bug. The Problem Cougar Point (Intel’s 6-series chipsets: H67/P67) has two sets of SATA ports: four that support 3Gbps operation, and two that support 6Gbps operation. Each set of ports requires its own PLL source.

In our Sandy Bridge review I pointed out that Intel was unfortunately very conservative in one area of the platform: its chipset. Although the 6-series chipset finally brought native 6Gbps SATA to Intel platforms it failed to fix issues with 23.976 fps video playback. Intel also failed to deliver a chipset that can support SNB's processor graphics as well as overclocking. Today, things just got even more disappointing. Intel just announced that it has identified a bug in the 6-series chipset, specifically in its SATA controller. Intel states that "In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time,...

Big GHz fight in 2011 Qualcomm has decided to show its dual Scorpion based MSM8x60 mobile CPU and it also told the world that this CPU can hit 1.2GHz, per core that is. The chip has an Adreno 220 GPU that we know little about and of course its a 45nm chip since 28nm should be only ready in the latter part of 2011. The chip should be able to do high definition stereoscopic 3D video, and multi-party video conferencing as well as some nice gaming. It is intended for tablets and phones and you can bet that you will...

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.