Intel Archive

Will Intel Get Its Groove Back with ‘Woodcrest’?

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-26 Intel 11 Comments

Server makers are lining up a host of new and enhanced systems armed with Intel's new 'Woodcrest' Xeon processor, a chip built on a new architecture that promises better performance coupled with greater energy efficiency. Intel initially said the Xeon 5100 family - based on Intel's new Core microarchitecture - would be released in the third quarter. However, earlier this month the giant chip maker pushed up the date to June 26 in an attempt to take back momentum from rival AMD. Ars' Hannibal gives his view on the new processors.

Intel Announces Core 2 Chipsets, Confirms Launch Schedule

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-07 Intel 14 Comments

At a Computex event today, Intel officially unveiled its 965 Express chipset (the P965, codenamed 'Broadwater') for use with its forthcoming line of Core 2 Duo processors. The company confirmed the accelerated launch schedule for the Core 2 rollout: Woodcrest (a Xeon replacement) in June, Conroe (for desktops) in July, and Merom (for laptops) in August. There's also an ultra low voltage Merom in the works for use in very thin portables from Dell and HP.

Intel Takes Wraps off of Woodcrest

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-24 Intel 27 Comments

"Earlier this month, Intel held a 'reviewer's workshop' event where they invited a number of representatives from hardware review sites to spend a few days benchmarking and learning about their new Core 2 microarchitecture. The star of the show was Woodcrest, which is the top end of the Core 2 lineup and will be replacing the last Netburst-based Xeon processor in June. The participating reviewers got to benchmark both Dempsey and Woodcrest, and the results of those benchmark runs are now available. In all, Woodcrest looks like a stellar performer that massively improves on its predecessors in both raw horsepower and power efficiency."

The Second Coming of Intel’s Core Duo

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-07 Intel 30 Comments

Intel has decided to borrow the sequential naming scheme it used for its famous Pentium brand and apply it to the new Core line of chips, the company is expected to announce Sunday. Earlier this year, Intel released the Core Duo processor, and in a few months it will unveil Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duo name will be used for desktop chips based on the Conroe chip, as well as for notebook chips based on the Merom chip. Merom processors consume less power than Conroe chips, but they're otherwise very similar.

Intel Announces Massive Restructuring Program

Thom Holwerda 2006-04-27 Intel 9 Comments

"Intel invented the first microprocessor, the 4-bit 4004, in 1971. Since then the company has gone on to become a corporate powerhouse, growing almost as fast as the transistor count in their CPUs. However, the company has posted some disappointing earnings results recently, including a 38 percent drop in profit for the first quarter of 2006, and has been losing marketshare and mindshare to its rival AMD, especially in the high-end, 64-bit computing arena. Otellini thinks the best cure for the company's blues is an old fashioned corporate restructuring. The CEO announced the plan at an analyst conference today in New York City."

Into the Core: Intel’s Next-Generation Microarchitecture

Thom Holwerda 2006-04-06 Intel 6 Comments

"Over a year ago at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum, Intel formally announced that they would be dropping the Pentium 4's Netburst microarchitecture in favor of a brand new, more power-efficient microarchitecture that would carry the company's entire x86 product line, from laptops up through Xeon servers, into the next decade. This past IDF saw the unveiling of some significant details about this new microarchitecture, 'Merom' or 'Core'. Intel presented many of these details in a presentation on Core, and others were obtained by David Kanter of Real World Technologies. The present article draws on both of those sources, as well as my own correspondence with Intel, to paint what is (hopefully) an accessible picture of the new microarchitecture that will soon be powering everything from Windows Vista servers to Apple laptops."

Intel’s Next Generation Microarchitecture Unveiled

Submitted by Hakime 2006-03-15 Intel 13 Comments

"Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) for Spring 2006 has a rather obvious focus: the announcement of Intel's next generation microarchitecture. Intel’s new core will almost certainly leapfrog arch-rival AMD for integer and commercial computing performance. That alone should make this IDF one of the most exciting in the last several years."

Itanium Allies Make Open Source Move

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-13 Intel 19 Comments

In the newest of a series of moves to try to impart momentum to Intel's Itanium processor, allies backing the chip are funding work to improve a key programming tool. Some of the $10bn in five years that members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance are spending on Itanium market and technology development will go to Itanium-specific improvements to the GCC. The Gelato Federation, an organisation dedicated to boosting Linux on Itanium computers, is overseeing the work, the allies said this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Intel Demonstrates Quad-Core PC, Server

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-07 Intel 19 Comments

Intel demonstrated two quad-core processors Tuesday, 'Clovertown' for servers and 'Kentsfield' for PCs, directing attention toward the future during a more troubled present. Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, demonstrated both processors in a speech at the company's Intel Developer Forum here. Both chips are built using Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing process and will ship in the first quarter of 2007, Intel representatives said.

Partnership Set to Run RISC Software on Intel Chips

Submitted by Frank Kenya 2006-03-07 Intel 16 Comments

Transitive's translation software will be used to let software from rival RISC processors run on Intel's Itanium and Xeon server processors. The partnership is designed to make it easier for customers to scrap competitors' gear in favor of Intel-based systems. "With this relationship with Intel, Intel is funding development and providing us access to engineers so we can accelerate the development of processor-operating system combinations," Transitive Chief Executive Bob Wiederhold said in an interview.

Strike Three for Intel

Submitted by netpython 2006-03-05 Intel 17 Comments

"Intel warned on Friday that its revenue for the first quarter would come in at between $8.7 billion and $9.1 billion , roughly $500 million lower than estimates the company issued in January. The chipmaker cited a weak market and a 'slight' market share loss. Analysts generally agree about the market, but are putting more emphasis on the loss of share. Some have pointed to the momentum shown by AMD, which has been far more aggressive over the past 18 months. The rival chipmaker has been strengthening its ties to PC makers, most prominently with HP, and keeping prices low."

10 Billion More on Itanium: Is This a Wise Investment?

Submitted by Robert Escue 2006-03-01 Intel 22 Comments

"On January 26th, 2005, the Itanium Solutions Alliance (Intel, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, NEC, Hitachi, Bull SA, Fujitsu, and Unisys) proudly announced that its members had banded together to invest $10 billion over the next four years to improve Itanium's features and functions and strengthen its market position. This huge investment in this architecture at this time forces us to ask a lot of tough questions about the wisdom of this action... "

IDC: Itanium Is Looking Good

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-19 Intel 40 Comments

"Many people in the industry assumed that Itanium had a low - and poor - profile among end users. That was what the folks at IDC assumed until recently, when they surveyed 500 members of their Enterprise Server Customer Panel. The results were somewhat surprising, they said. Not only was there a high level of awareness among the users - more than 80 percent knew of the platform - but that their intent to buy an Itanium system was fairly strong. About 24 percent of those polled said they had bought at least one Itanium system, though only 13 percent of non-HP users had done so. However, more than a third of all participants said they were highly likely to buy an Itanium system within the next 12 to 18 months."

Intel EIST SpeedStep Investigation

Submitted by Michael 2006-02-16 Intel 5 Comments

"Looking over our EIST results today using a Pentium M 750, Intel's technology certainly has its advantages. Switching between the five power-modes, there was evident change in the CPU temperature as well as the power consumption. In addition, the frequency/voltages immediately scaled appropriately when switching between demanding and non-demanding environments. For those, however, seeking to over-ride the switching process at a low frequency/voltage, in order to conserve the battery life, heat output, and noise will find the performance to be severely hampered. As the last portion of our tests had shown, the compilation time had increased 212%, encoding time 218%, frame-rate had decreased 5FPS, and the Mflops had dropped over 233%."

Review: ASUS W5F Notebook, Featuring Intel Core Duo

Submitted by Chandan Mehta 2006-02-15 Intel 10 Comments

"If we were to get dramatic, we would say: 'Intel came, Intel saw and Intel conquered.' The fact of the matter is, Intel did just that. It promised the holy grail of mobile computing by increasing performance without battery life trade off, and delivered on all promises. If you waited for the Core Duos to come out, you made a wise decision. Intel's Core Duo is the best you can buy in mobility right now. It runs cooler, faster and more efficiently than anything anyone has to offer right now."

Intel Core Duo USB Issue: a Mischaracterized Bug

Submitted by aaron 2006-02-14 Intel 22 Comments

"We set out on investigating this issue immediately after it was discovered, but soon found out that it was a lot more complicated than we thought upon first glance. We've spent almost the past two weeks performing non-stop battery life testing on five notebooks with up to 4 different USB devices, testing theories, trying to pinpoint exactly what causes this problem and testing Microsoft's fix. What follows is the process that we went through in our labs when faced with this strange bug."

Intel Shows Off Quad Core

Submitted by MaxxTotal 2006-02-13 Intel 20 Comments

Just as the bragging rights for dual-core chip supremacy are dying down, Intel gave the first glimpse of a quad-core chip coming next year. Clovertown, a four-core processor, will start shipping to computer manufacturers late this year and hit the market in early 2007. Clovertown will be made for dual-processor servers, which means that these servers will essentially be eight-processor servers. The company will also come out with a previously announced version called Tigerton around the same time for servers with four or more processors.

Intel Pushes Conroe Extreme Edition, Viiv, Averill Pro, Vista

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-09 Intel 5 Comments

Chip firm Intel has told customers close to its plans that a combination of the Conroe next gen chip and the 965 chipset will be good to go for when Microsoft Vista arrives. And it has a new 'platform' to play with. Averill Pro will be introduced in the third quarter with Conroe, the Q965 Express chipset but matched with 'Averill Fundamental', which will use the Q963 Express and the Pentium D chip. Intel now estimates it will be able to shift more than two thirds of its desktop processors to dual core by year end.

Intel Shows off Multi-Threaded Xeon Chip

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-07 Intel 6 Comments

Chip firm Intel presented a 65 nanometre dual core multithreaded Xeon with a shared 16MB on die level three cache at the Solid State Conference. The Xeon has 1.328 billion transistors, a 1MB unified L2 cache per core, and has a die size of 435mm2. It delivers 3.4GHz at 1.25 volts and 150 watts TDP, and comes with a 667 and 800MT/s three load front side bus interface. This chip is compatible with existing chipset designs and Intel claims it has the largest cache and device count for an X86 processor.

Microsoft Driver Bug Saps Core Duo Power

Submitted by Dually 2006-01-28 Intel 9 Comments

"Connect any USB 2.0 device to your notebook and lose more than one hour of battery time: Tom's Hardware Guide's tests of a Windows-based Intel Core Duo mobile processor platform revealed a serious power consumption issue that, according to Intel, is caused by a Microsoft driver bug - a bug that has been known by Microsoft for some time, but kept from the public eye until today."