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At least a part of it In order to make Intel's IDF 2011 parade a bit more sour, AMD announced that its yet to be released FX-8150 CPU was already overclocked to 8.429GHz, which earned the company the Guinness World Record for the highest achieved frequency. AMD's own Sami Maekinen as well as Brian Mclachlan, Pete Hardman and Aaron Schradin had some fun with AMD's eight-core FX-8150 CPU. Just for reference, previous best AMD record was set at 7378.25MHz with the Phenom II 955 Black Edition. Of course, if you take a look at the CPU-Z screenshots, you will...

SpectraWatt, the solar-cell manufacturer that began operating here in early 2010 to great acclaim, only to close a year later, has filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy code. The company is seeking court permission to auction off tens of millions of dollars worth of assets. SpectraWatt blames its failure on a combination of vendor disputes and competitive pressure from countries with higher subsidies and lower costs of production. The petition filed Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Poughkeepsie lists about $34 million in assets and more than $38 million in liabilities. The assets include...

SAN FRANCISCO—Spectrawatt Inc., the solar cell manufacturer that was originally spun off from Intel Corp. in 2008, has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code, according to multiple reports. Spectrawatt (Hopewell Junction, N.Y.) closed its factory last December, laying off 110 people. The factory opened in May 2010. On Tuesday, Middleton, N.Y.'s Times-Herald Record reported that Spectrawatt filed for bankruptcy last week, seeking court permission to auction off tens of millions of dollars worth of assets. The company blames its failure on vendor disputes and competitive pressure from companies that manufacturer solar cells in countries...

For a week, people have been asking, “Why won’t the president release Osama bin Laden’s photo?” That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, “Why was Barack Obama in such a hurry to tell us bin Laden was dead?” The White House says the information in bin Laden’s compound is the equivalent of a “small college library,” potentially containing incalculably valuable and unique data on al-Qaeda operations, personnel, and methods. “It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” a government official told Politico’s Mike Allen. I’m no expert on such matters — though I’ve...

Ted Hoff saved his own life, sort of.Deep inside this 73-year-old lies a microprocessor - a tiny computer that controls his pacemaker and, in turn, his heart. Microprocessors were invented by - Ted Hoff, along with a handful of visionary colleagues working at a young Silicon Valley start-up called Intel. This curious quirk of fate is not lost on Ted. "It's a nice feeling," he says. > Ted was recruited and became Intel employee number 12. In 1969, the company was approached by Busicom, a Japanese electronics maker, shopping around for new chips. It wanted something to power a new...

Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr showed off the company’s revolutionary new 3D transistors in an announcement this week in San Francisco. The power, performance, and real estate gains are impressive. Moore’s Law seems to be holding. Video at Link.

Fast forward to a day in Anbar Province, Iraq. Mr. Pottinger, now an intelligence officer supporting an infantry battalion, is standing over the body of a high level al Qaeda operative that his unit has just killed. It was an intense and lengthy manhunt. Mr. Pottinger is rifling through the man’s pockets, looking for additional documentation. Nearby is the mangled body of the man’s guard, who moments before detonated a suicide vest in a last, and failed, effort to kill the attackers. “I was standing over this guy’s corpse, looking down at him and thinking of all of the resources...

The assault force of Navy SEALs snatched a trove of computer drives and disks during their weekend raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, yielding what a U.S. official called “the mother lode of intelligence.” The special operations forces grabbed personal computers, thumb drives and electronic equipment during the lightning raid that killed bin Laden, officials told POLITICO.

Watching Intel now is a little like Michael Jordan’s second comeback. It’s hard to explain to younger folks that the sluggish, behind-the-curve tech giant was a dynamo back in the 1980s and 1990s. Intel has struggled to expand into mobile chips. Now smartphones and tablets are slashing demand for traditional PCs. Can the PC king respond?

“Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results” - Sun Tzu Like espionage networks from the Vietnam War, in Afghanistan, anyone local could be a spy, making it difficult to identify the “friendlies” from the bad guys. Taliban leaders use this historical model to gather intelligence to plan for suicide attacks and decide where to place IED to hamper supply routes. While we can’t be sure, it would be safe to assume that this operation is being...

The roots of al Qaeda were famously planted in Afghanistan in the 1980s, fighting the Soviet Union. Many current al Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden, were then mujaheddin rebels that benefited greatly from American arms and covert military training against a better-equipped fighting force. Today, in Libya, a ragtag group of rebels fight a seesaw battle against Muammar Qaddafi's better-equipped forces, and a debate rages over whether to provide them arms and training. However, whispers are growing that al Qaeda may already be among them, complicating the current debate over arming the rebels. Qaddafi's troops push rebels further from...

The U.S. shouldn't arm Libyan rebels because there's no telling whose hands those weapons could eventually reach, the chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee said. “As we publicly debate next steps on Libya, I do not support arming the Libyan rebels at this time," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said in a statement Wednesday. "We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them. It’s safe to say what the rebels stand against, but we are a long way from an understanding of what they stand for."

"Obama met with Apple Inc (AAPL.O) CEO Steve Jobs and other technology industry leaders in northern California on Thursday as part of a campaign to promote technological innovation as a means of boosting the struggling economy and reducing the 9 percent U.S. unemployment rate. Construction of Intel's plant should kick off in the middle of this year, it said in a statement. When completed, the plant will churn out next-generation 14-nanometer line-width transistors and microchip wafers of 300 millimeters. Intel said in October it plans to spend $6 billion to $8 billion on high-tech manufacturing facilities in Arizona and Oregon,...

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...