Intel Archive

Intel yesterday formally began selling its Pentium 4 6xx series, rolling out four versions of the 90nm, 2MB L2 cache chip. The chip giant also added its latest P4 Extreme Edition to its official price list. The P4 630 (I got one of these), 640, 650 and 660 are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, respectively. All four chips support an 800MHz frontside bus. They also bring Intel's AMD64-like 64-bit addressing technology, EM64T, to the mainstream desktop, along with the latest version of the company's SpeedStep power management system, to minimise energy consumption. The anti-virus 'execute disable' bit is also supported.

Intel Corporation is introducing an enhanced technology to provide mobile handset users with a better multimedia experience, including clearer graphics, faster video, and improved power efficiency.

The wireless USB protocol will be completed by the end of March and the access controller specification should be approved by the end of the year. Wireless USB is designed to be used at ranges of less than 10 metres and will allow peak data speeds of 480Mbps. Also, Intel has unveiled its first proposals for 802.11s, a new mesh wireless networking standard.

Intel has begun an effort to make it easier for sales partners in China and India to sell desktop computers running Linux, starting a more active phase in the company's help with the open-source operating system.

Intel is expected to release a faster version of its powerful but expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor this week, alongside the introduction of a chip set that uses a faster front-side bus to connect the processor and the memory. The Extreme Edition is basically the same as the Pentium 4, but features 2MB of Level 3 cache instead of 1MB. It's also extremely expensive: $999.

Intel is backing the 128-bit AES encryption protocol for securing Wireless USB connections, which it hopes will replace cables for connections over very short distances . . . Intel wants Wireless USB networks to interface with the Ultra Wideband (UWB) standard to make networks that cover whole households.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the most aggressive promoters of Intel's Itanium family of processors, is 86ing its line of workstations that use the chips. The decision by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant will likely be interpreted as a large symbolic blow to Itanium's fortunes.

The Intel C++ Compiler is a full fledged C/ C++ compiler and debugger suite. This 8.1 release features support for the new Intel Extended Memory 64 technology and integration with Eclipse IDE.

AMD's Opteron struck a chord by offering 64-bit, x86-compatible processing at 32-bit prices. Now Intel has jumped into the same game with the 64-bit "Nocona," a new Xeon that smokes previous models. Here's how one of the first Nocona servers performed under a full barrage of benchmarks at InfoWorld.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and others will announce on Monday the first servers to use Intel Xeon processors augmented with 64-bit extensions, a technology with major long-term implications.

Paul Otellini showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors. Otellini said: "What's next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".

Rob Enderle visits Intel's Lab to see what's cooking in the fab. And what he finds should give IBM and Apple reason to grab their torches and pitchforks, he claims.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the architecture, benefits, and features of the Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface, a modular, platform-independent architecture for implementating boot and other BIOS functions recently. The Framework, developed by Intel, is driver-based, enabling binary-linking of modules; and it is C-based, clean, scalable, and modular, allowing it to support diverse CPU architecures - such as Intel's IA-32, Itanium & XScale - within a single source tree.

Intel Corp. chief technologist Pat Gelsinger showed off the company's first reconfigurable silicon at the Intel Developer Forum this morning, together with a yet another way to improve the efficiency of the company's general-purpose microprocessors.