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Earlier this week Intel sent us a cryptic message: I wanted to invite you to an Intel press conference on Wednesday May 4th at 9:30am Pacific time. Intel will be making its most significant technology announcement of the year. No further details will be provided in advance. The event will be held in San Francisco so for those of you are local in the SF Bay Area please attend in person if you like. It will also webcasted live. Tune-in details and logistics are below. Please let me know if you can attend. A while ago Intel decided that a...

"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,...

We have some good news for everyone who would like to see AMD make a big comeback in style. Since the time when Athlon used to be a high-end brand, and by that we mean the good old K8 core, it's been a while since AMD had a high end part capable of competing with Intel on a par. However, initial test scores that slipped to a hands of industry source are suggesting that Bulldozer should come really close to new Core i7 six-core CPUs. Bulldozer has both six and eight cores in the pipeline and they should be launching...

You’ve sent in your questions and we’ve begun to sort through them to pull out the best.  There were plenty of common themes that were arising, so we’ll be grouping some of the bigger categories together. I am going to tackle some of the easiest ones first because some of the more technical questions will need to go to the engineers.We’ll handle this blog in four rounds, with 5 questions each.Let’s get started.” There has been some confusion among those in the tech community regarding the actual CPU architecture, with ‘modules’ and ‘cores’ being explained differently by different people. “...

The semi-annual dance of chip technology previews gets its 2010 start at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco two weeks from now, and Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Sun Microsystems (soon to be a division of Oracle), and Hitachi are going to be talking up their future chip tech. Intel's chip geeks will be showing off the company's "Westmere" family of 32 nanometer processors, which already made their debut earlier this month inside desktop and laptop machines and which are expected to come out for servers within the next couple of months. The details on the session...

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...

Terascale still moving forward With our time at IDF quickly drawing to a close, we are in the final stretch of content from the show.  While I didn’t get to the keynotes on the morning on mobility, we have the general basis of their contents here as well as some other interesting topics like terascale processors and Intel’s upcoming Extreme .Terascale Computing UpdateLast year at IDF Intel first started to demonstrate and discuss their terascale computing research project that featured a that was a dramatic shift from anything Intel had done in the past.  The was built out of 80...

Beyond3D managed to get their hands on a presentation given by Douglas Carmean, Chief Architect of Intel’s Visual Computing Group, titled the Future CPU Architectures. The article has some really good info and over two dozen slides from the presentation. Thanks to Marcus B. for the link. Our shadow warriors have scored a copy of Carmean's presentation, and we've selected the juicy bits for your enjoyment and edification regarding the showdown that Intel sees as already underway between CPU and GPU makers. Comments

The 45-nanometer process is right on time, according to Intel. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant has created test chips made on the 45-nanometer process and will likely begin shipping processors, flash, and other chips based on that process in the second half of 2007, according to Mark Bohr, director of process architecture and integration at Intel. The test chips, produced this month, are static SRAM memory chips containing 153 megabits of memory. The chips contain over a billion transistors and are nearly the same size as test SRAM chips produced by Intel in 2000 on the then-new 130-nanometer process...

Two new classes of devices threaten to make the Home Theater PC obsolete. Has the HTPC party ended before it even began, or will competing devices be crippled over fears of copyright infringement? The Evolving HTPC Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) were poised to be the next must-have toy for technophiles. The idea was to have a single component to store and play your entire digital library of music, movies, and photos. The concept was nothing new. For several years, computers have been edging out TVs, stereos, and DVD players as the entertainment appliance of choice for college students confined to...

IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faster To understand the quest to build ever faster and more powerful computers, it's helpful to understand the problems that hold them back from getting faster in the first place. While chips themselves are getting faster all the time, faster is a relative term. Even though chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM) are building more powerful chips every 12 to 18 months, other chips that go inside a computer haven't historically kept up in the performance race. If you think...

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13 — I.B.M. researchers say they have set a speed record for a type of computer memory that promises a fundamental performance increase in a coming generation of microprocessors with multiple computing engines. The announcement, to be made at a conference here Wednesday, sets up a potential confrontation between I.B.M. and Intel over the design of microprocessors that will begin to be available commercially next year. While I.B.M. now appears to be planning to integrate ultrafast memory directly into its processors, Intel has been hinting that it will instead stack memory chips on top of its processors...

The cores inside Barcelona, the quad-core chip coming from Advanced Micro Devices later this year, are going to lead independent lives when it comes to power consumption. The processor, which AMD will discuss at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) next week in San Francisco, will sport a new version of AMD's PowerNow technology that will let all four cores simultaneously operate at different speeds, depending on their work loads, to curb power. If one of the cores is running a 3D simulation, for instance, it can crank past 2GHz, while the other three can slumber at 1GHz. The...

Moore's Law, which postulates that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 to 24 months, recently faced a major roadblock: power leakage. However, by using so-called "high-k" materials, IBM and Intel both say they have remedied this efficiency problem, allowing the continued shrinking of computer chips. Worries over the imminent death of Moore's Law have apparently been greatly exaggerated. At least that is the word following announcements on Saturday from both IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) that each has developed a new energy-saving microchip design. According to the two chip makers, the advance is...

Intel claims major advancement in the 45nm technology for processors, but IBM and Intel’s rival AMD had already claimed the same thing last December. The 45 nanometer (45 nm) process is the next milestone (to be commercially viable in mid 2007 to early 2008) in CMOS fabrication. Intel stated in 2003 that high-k gate dielectrics may be introduced at the 45 nm node to reduce gate leakage current. However, chipmakers have since then voiced concerns about introducing these new materials into the gate stack. Intel’s researchers say their advancement in the 45nm technology represents the most significant change in...

Scientists have built a memory chip that is roughly the size of a white blood cell, about one-2,000th of an inch on a side. Although the chip is modest in capacity--with 160,000 bits of information--the bits are crammed together so tightly that it is the densest ever made. The achievement points to a possible path toward continuing the exponential growth of computing power even after current silicon chip-making technology hits fundamental limits in 10 to 20 years. The scientists, led by James R. Heath of the California Institute of Technology and J. Fraser Stoddart of the University of California, Los...

AN AMD panellist here in Vegas thinks that it will reach sixteen cores software programming within five years. This will be in time for the Playstation 4, the new Xbox and Geforce G2012 or Radeon whaetever they will want to call it. The next move for 2007 is to get to software quad core optimised. After that, it will go exponential and move to sixteen cores. Software should be threaded to exploit sixteen cores in the next five years, the AMD spinner spun. Intel didn’t talk about any future plans apart from software stuff where the games need to get...

LONDON, Oct 26, 2006 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- At the BroadGroup Power and Cooling Summit here today, IBM (IBM) researchers presented an innovative approach for improving the cooling of computer chips, an increasingly urgent need given the large amount of heat released by today's more powerful processors and the additional energy required for removing that heat.

Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your DesktopIf you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article. For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD - commentary - Cramer's Take) unveiled the first fruits of an initiative designed to create a new class of computers packing multiple processors from different vendors. Dubbed Torrenza, the effort would allow other companies to create special co-processors that accelerate performance for certain tasks and operate in conjunction with AMD's microprocessor. AMD positioned Torrenza to make its debut at the high end of the computing market with Thursday's announcement that several of the server industry's key chipmakers are evaluating the specifications for a standard socket for plugging in co-processors.