Science and technology news blog

AMD’s Barcelona processors are going to re-ignite the processor wars. AMD’s entire future depends on the performance of its new Quad-core range of processors. Since the launch of Intel’s Core processors, AMD has taken a huge beating and all its market share gains in the last few years has been evaporated thanks to Intel’s superior processors. However, come August and AMD will launch its counter-attack with its “native” quad-core processors.

AMD calls it quad-core processors native because it has 4 cores on one die. Intel’s quad-core offering at the moment is two dual-core processors joined together, or in AMD’s words “Stitched” together. On paper it would seem that having 4 cores on a single die would quite obviously be better than having 2 dual-core processors. However, in real world applications its all a different story. AMD seems to be a victim of its own theory. For years, Intel has always had the edge when it came to clock speed, but AMD always had the edge in performance. This time around though its Intel that has the edge in performance in the dual-core products from both the companies.

AMD’s Barcelona processors are going to re-ignite the processor wars. AMD’s entire future depends on the performance of its new Quad-core range of processors. Since the launch of Intel’s Core processors, AMD has taken a huge beating and all its market share gains in the last few years has been evaporated thanks to Intel’s superior processors. However, come August and AMD will launch its counter-attack with its “native” quad-core processors.

AMD calls it quad-core processors native because it has 4 cores on one die. Intel’s quad-core offering at the moment is two dual-core processors joined together, or in AMD’s words “Stitched” together. On paper it would seem that having 4 cores on a single die would quite obviously be better than having 2 dual-core processors. However, in real world applications its all a different story. AMD seems to be a victim of its own theory. For years, Intel has always had the edge when it came to clock speed, but AMD always had the edge in performance. This time around though its Intel that has the edge in performance in the dual-core products from both the companies.

Both Google and Intel have joined a bunch of other IT companies in what could be a major boost to the effort to reduce carbon emissions by computers. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is setting a new 90 per cent efficiency target for power supplies which, if achieved, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54m tonnes per year – and save more than $5.5bn in energy costs.

They are joined by major companies like IBM, Microsoft, Dell, HP to name a few. If this group is able to reach their target then they would have, atleast theoretically, have removed the equivalent of 11 million cars’ worth of emissions. This move also improves the brand image of these companies as global warming is a hot topic these days.

Intel will demonstrate on Monday an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives say provides a model for commercial chips that will be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years.

The new processor, which the company first described as a Teraflop Chip at a conference last year, will be detailed in a technical paper to be presented on the opening day of the International Solid States Circuits Conference, beginning here on Monday.

While the chip is not compatible with Intel’s current chips, the company said it had already begun design work on a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.

The chip’s design is meant to exploit a new generation of manufacturing technology the company introduced last month. Intel said that it had changed the basic design of transistors in such a way that it would be able to continue to shrink them to smaller sizes — offering lower power and higher speeds — for at least a half-decade or more.

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Intel has filed a countersuit against Transmeta Corp, a chip designer company, alleging that the company infringes on seven of its patents, media reports said Friday.Intel, the world’s largest computer chipmaker, accused Tuesday Transmeta in a U.S. District Court in Delaware, saying that Transmeta chips under the Crusoe, Efficeon and Efficeon 2 brands infringe its seven patents relating to microprocessor technology.

On its part, Transmeta, in October 2006, claimed that Intel’s Core 2 Duo, Core and Pentium processors infringed 11 of its patents, and sued Intel in the same place.

“As expected, Intel has filed a timely response,” said Greg Rose, a Transmeta spokesman, noting that the company “is not able to comment until it has had a chance to review the cross-complaint.”

Transmeta, founded in 1995, is one of the early pioneers of energy-efficient chips, filing some of its patents as far back as 1991—predating Intel’s Pentium Pro, Transmeta said.

Both lawsuits seek injunctions against the offending company’s continuing sale of infringing chips, as well as unspecified damages.

Advanced Micro Devices will be able to collect evidence about events outside the U.S. for an antitrust lawsuit against Intel.

AMD alleges Intel used its dominant position in the microprocessor business to pressure system makers not to use AMD chips in their products. Its suit, before Judge Joseph Farnan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, is scheduled to be heard beginning April 2009.

Intel had argued against allowing discovery, or the collection of evidence, for documents involving activities outside the U.S. But it decided not to object to a Dec. 15 recommendation by Special Master Vincent Poppiti that foreign discovery should go forward, said Intel spokesman Chuck Molloy. A special master is a specialist appointed to overlook certain aspects of a suit.

Intel told Judge Farnan in a letter yesterday that it wouldn’t fight Poppiti’s recommendation. The same day, Farnan ordered Intel to produce documents and other evidence sought in discovery that concern its business outside the U.S. In a press release today, AMD hailed the order as a major victory in its suit, which was filed in June 2005.

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is reportedly coming up with a new line of processors that consume less power.

These new processors will be made by shrinking the AMD Athlon 64 FX chips used inside desktop computers. The new chips will be manufactured using just a 65 nanometers wide circuitry. Presently, the chips come in a standard size of 90 nanometers.

According to AMD, the new manufacturing technique is a step towards offering healthy competition to rival Intel. Intel has been using an advanced chip manufacturing process for the past one year. Hence, this move is being seen as an attempt at bridging the manufacturing gap between the two companies.

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) showed a laboratory version of its promised “Barcelona” quad-core Opteron 8000 server chip to analysts gathered in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday, and said it plans to begin selling the product in the second quarter of 2007.

AMD will pitch the chip to users of high-end, commercial workstations and servers. Customers could see performance improvements of up to 70% in database applications and 40% in floating-point applications, when compared to AMD’s dual-core “Rev F” Opteron, the company said.

The demonstration was AMD’s second effort Thursday to show that it is keeping up with quad-core chips from rival Intel Corp. AMD also launched its “4×4” Quad FX Platform, a motherboard with two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips intended for the desktop gaming market.

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HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam—Intel Corp. could have selected any country to build its largest chip assembly and testing plant. But the world’s biggest semiconductor company decided to make the $1 billion investment in a relative newcomer to the high-tech game—Vietnam.

Intel announced earlier this month it would more than triple its initial investment to expand the planned factory in southern Ho Chi Minh City from 150,000 square feet to 500,000 square feet. It is expected to begin operations in 2009 and could employ up to 4,000 workers.

Vietnam’s first semiconductor facility represents the country’s biggest single foreign investment. And Intel officials say the decision ultimately came down to Vietnam’s people.

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Intel launched its first microchips with four processing cores on Tuesday in an effort to slow the momentum of its smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices.

Intels quad-core chips will be featured in servers and workstations under the Xeon brand and in a gaming PC with the Core 2 Extreme moniker. AMD plans to introduce quad-core chips during the middle of 2007.

Both companies want to expand the number of processing engines on their chips to help them process information faster and more efficiently.

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Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, lifted the lid today on its much anticipated quad-core processor, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The new chip, codenamed Kentsfield, has four physical processing cores, making it capable of advanced multitasking at extreme speeds.Although Intel has made the chip available to computer manufacturers and developers for testing, the processor will not be widely available until November 14.

The Core 2 Extreme runs at a clock speed of 2.66 GHz, the same as a Core 2 Duo E6700, but it packs two Core 2 Duos together on a single chip, resulting in two 4-MB caches, totaling 8 MB.

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Tests show that Intel’s first quad-core chip, the 2.66-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700, should bring impressive speed boosts to complex video-editing and 3D-rendering work. But while you might think that since two cores are good, four cores will be twice as good for all your computing tasks, our exclusive tests of the new chip tell a different story.

Although PCs with the new quad-core chip (formerly code-named Kentsfield) offer plenty of speed, our tests reveal that many users will get more bang for their buck by sticking with Intel’s other Core 2 Extreme chip, the 2.93-GHz, dual-core X6800. For the same $999 price, the X6800 chip offers just a bit more clock speed than the 2.66-GHz QX6700 does, and with few mainstream applications tuned to take advantage of four or more CPU cores, the extra clock speed provides a real performance advantage on most tasks. Systems with the new chip should be available this month.
Graphics Speed

We looked at a preproduction QX6700 chip in a reference system with a preproduction D975XBX2 motherboard and our standard set of components, including 2GB of DDR2 memory, a pair of SATA hard drives configured in a striped array, and an nVidia GeForce 7800GT-based graphics card. We also looked at three high-end, fully decked-out commercial systems—the Alienware Area-51 7500 ($4479), CyberPower Gamer Infinity 1950 ($3599), and Xi MTower IGE ($4149)—equipped with the quad-core processor. We then compared these systems with previously tested reference PCs as well as with an Extreme X6800-based CyberPower Gamer Infinity SLI Ultra and a 2.67-GHz Core 2 Duo E6700-based Dell XPS 700 (click the icon below to see our complete chart).

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Intel Corp., the world’s top chip maker, shipped 5 million of its new dual-core processors in the first two months of its sales, amid signs of strong demand for laptop PCs this quarter, company executives said on Monday.

Intel reached the sales mark for its new Core 2 Duo chipsets, which use a pair of chips at their core, within the first 60 days of their going on sale on July 27, Thomas Kilroy, vice general manager of the digital enterprise group, said at a developers’ forum hosted by Intel in Taipei.

Intel gave the sales figure as other executives forecast a strong fourth quarter for notebook PCs, despite some concerns about possible shortfalls due to a string of recent recalls involving batteries from Sony Corp.

“We believe that notebooks will be strong in the fourth quarter,” said Mooly Eden, general manager for Intel’s mobile platforms group.

“The overall perception is that we will have a strong fourth quarter,” he said, citing data from industry tracking groups and Taiwan firms that make most of the world’s laptop PCs, such as Compal Electronics Inc. and Quanta Computer.

Despite some reports of shortages and rising prices following the recall of Sony laptop batteries by the likes of Toshiba, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, Eden added his company was not feeling a major fallout from the issue.

“Regarding the battery recall, I don’t see yet any shortage or any cancellations due to it,” he said.

Intel is in the midst of a major overhaul, including price and job cuts and new product roll-outs, as it tries to stave off recent advances by rival Advanced Micro Devices, which has gained steady market share in the last few years.

The new dual-core processors, and future generations of chipsets that use multiple chips in a single processor, are part of its new product strategy to take back share from AMD.

In September, Intel announced it would cut 10,500 jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force, following a three-month top-to-bottom review of operations.

Analysts have said the firm needs to take drastic action to reverse sliding profits and halt steady market share erosion.

Highlighting Intel’s recent difficulties, market research firm iSuppli said last month the firm’s share of total microchip industry revenue hit a four-year low in the second quarter.

The wait is almost over for those wanting to get their hands on Intel’s Core 2 Duo laptop processors with systems based on the new microarchitecture expected to be announced over the next few days.

Starting at just US$209 for the T5500 (2MB cache) and scaling up to US$637 for the T7600 chips (4MB cache) (in 1000 quantities), the mobile version of the Intel Core 2 Duo processors should quickly become the industry standard for business laptops.

That is certainly what Intel willbe hoping as it tries to drive yet another nail into AMD’s laptop coffin. The chip cements Intel’s position as the leading mobile processor. Combined with aggressive pricing, the Core 2 Dup release is likely to force competitor AMD into even more of a corner than the Core Duo (Conroe) processors did earlier this year.

Intel says more than 200 mobile designs from PC manufacturers, resellers and integrators are already scheduled for release.

“In just one year we’ve taken extraordinary leaps in mobile and desktop computing with the launch of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor,” said David (Dadi) Perlmutter, senior vice president of Intel’s Mobility Group.

“For laptops the new processor has doubled the performance, giving consumers and businesses an immersive mobile experience while keeping power consumption and battery life unchanged,” he said.

“The dual-core processing power of the Core 2 Duo processor helps people handle the toughest of multi-tasking scenarios no matter where they are.”

Like the already familiar Core Duo processors, the Intel Core 2 Duo processors have two processing cores to handle multiple tasks in less time with less power.

A joint venture between UK telco, Pipex, and Intel says trials of Airspan WiMAX gear have proved successful and it is gearing up to provide WiMAX networks in several UK cities, starting with Milton Keynes.
If the claimed results of the trial are true, they will give the nascent WiMAX technology, already buoyed by the recent announcement from Sprint Nextel, a further boost.

In a statement Pipex Wireless said performance in the trial, in Stratford Upon-Avon, had exceeded expectations. “Performance has been evaluated using both indoor and outdoor antennae, powered by Intel Rosedale chipsets, with the trial showing that WiMAX can deliver near symmetric services in most environments.”

Speeds in excess of 2Mbps up and down have been achieved indoors at a range of 1.2km from the base station with no direct line of sight, Pipex Wireless claimed.

Drive tests using the indoor antenna in a vehicle at various distances from the base station have shown symmetric speeds of 5Mbps. Speeds of 10Mbps down and 9Mbps up have been achieved to external antennas at the test house at 1.2km from the base station. Longer range tests with external antennas have achieved 6Mbps down and 4Mbps up at a range of 6km from the base station.

Airspan’s CTO, Alastair Westgarth, said the trial had given his company “the opportunity to prove that our software defined radio base station and indoor, self install CPE fit the needs of a solid WiMAX service provider such as Pipex. The combination of range and throughput demonstrated by the achievements to date are very encouraging and provide an added baseline for our continuing product development of this platform.”