After reporting a $344 million fourth-quarter loss last week Micron today said it is going to reduce its global workforce by approximately 15 percent during the next two years. Most of the workforce cuts will occur in Boise.

The combination of declining customer demand and product oversupply in the marketplace has driven selling prices for NAND flash memory significantly below manufacturing costs,

Micron said in a statement.
As a result, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), a joint venture between Micron and Intel, will discontinue the supply of NAND flash memory from Micron's Boise facility. The NAND operation shutdown will reduce IMFT's NAND flash production by approximately 35,000 (200 millimeter) wafers per month, according to Micron. Production in the other two joint ownership NAND flash facilities in Lehi and Utah will continue operating at full speed for now.

AMD spokesman reassured today that the deal between AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company won't violate any of the patent agreements AMD made with its main competitor Intel. Let me remind you that earlier that day Intel said it would review its processor licensing agreement with AMD, especially the agreement which allows AMD to use Intel's x86 chip instruction set, to ensure the ATIC deal does not violate any patent agreements. Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman, wrote in an e-mail today:
"We are completely confident the structure of this transaction takes into account our cross-license agreements,"
"Rest assured - we plan to continue respecting Intel's intellectual property rights, just as we expect them to respect ours."
Financial analyst Hans Mosesmann even believes that the dispute between the two giants may become a weapon for Intel to solve some of its problems in court. If Intel manages to find something is wrong with this deal it can use it against Advanced Micro Deviced and make AMD drop the long-standing anti-trust suits against the company. Continue reading the full story here.

Remember the A-DATA DDR3 triple channel memory and the ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard? They are both detailed on our page, but this story aims to show how both parts perform when working coupled with a quad-core Core i7 engineering sample CPU. The results you're about to see below are achieved by three 1600MHz A-DATAs overclocked to over 2000MHz. The result is system memory read/write speeds of up to the incredible 20515/16946 MB/s. The latency time is also worth mentioning - 22.9ns.

Intel Corporation today announced that Peter Cleveland, chief of staff to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) since 2006, will join the company as its new vice president for global public policy and head of the chipmaker's Washington, D.C., office. Cleveland will join Intel immediately after the Nov. 4 presidential election.

Here's an interesting story I found today. It's short, but I'm sure it won't end just like that and there'll be a lot more to discuss later.

Intel Corp. said on Tuesday it has "serious questions" about a deal announced by Advanced Micro Devices to spin off its manufacturing business and focus on chip design, and is ready to defend its patents. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said that AMD and Intel have a patent cross-licensing agreement under which AMD pays royalties to Intel. "Intel has serious questions about this transaction as it relates to the license and will vigorously protect Intel's intellectual property rights," Mulloy said of AMD's announcement. Mulloy said Intel has asked AMD to make the agreement public but he said it would not, so he was not at liberty to discuss the matter in detail.

Recent reports indicate that memory manufacturer Kingston Technology has teamed up with chip maker Intel to market flash memory-based drives to top makers of laptops and servers. Under the partnership, Kingston will buy SSDs from Intel and then rebrand them and resell them to its partners. Kingston is also set to provide technical support, testing and sell the drives to big brands like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and others.
"We have had both an engineering and marketing relationship with Intel for more than a decade," spokesman David Leong said. "This is one market where we believe it will grow quite a bit. The opportunity was there to jump into it right now with Intel," he added.
At the moment Intel produces a few solid state drives, aimed at the notebook and desktop markets as well as models for the server market. It's unclear whether Kingston will take the consumer path, or the server SSD side. The story is yet to be confirmed by both companies.

Nehalem does promise to be a processor to look out for, it would be Intel's next installment, post the successful Core 2 series processors. This time however, Intel made a core modification with the way the system handles memory. The Bloomfield processors house a massive 192-bit wide memory controller for supporting tri-channel DDR3 memory. It however was found that the controller could bring in limitations to the DIMM voltages that the system could support.

The retail version of ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition motherboard was unboxed by XFastest. Being the retail product, as usually, it comes with precautionary labels attached to parts of the motherboard. The one that covers the 6 DDR3 DIMM slots reads:

According to Intel CPU SPEC, DIMMs with voltage setting over 1.65V may damage the CPU permanently. We recommend you to install DIMMs with voltage setting below 1.65V.

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, today announced an agreement to acquire a $20 million stake in Telligent Systems, makers of social computing solutions and business intelligence tools. Based in Dallas, Telligent will utilize the funds to expand its sales teams and territories, including growth in international markets, as well as increase its marketing and advertising initiatives and product development plans. "Intel Capital makes strategic global investments to help provide enterprises with the latest tools they need for growth, innovation, productivity improvement and cost savings," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and executive vice-president of Intel.

Intel would be rolling out an elite fleet of desktop processors based on the new Nehalem architecture soon. The first derivative, the Bloomfield core, is supposed to be the architecture's flagship for the desktop PC market. And for it, Core i7 Extreme 965 is supposed to be the leading processor. Priced at US $999, the processor is clocked at 3.20 GHz and features four cores and eight logical processors thanks to HyperThreading Technology (encore). Details of it are covered here.

Mobile01, unboxed the i7 965 before launch. The contents show a massive stock cooler and the processor itself. The stock cooler is composed of the same fins projecting radially, just that they are much thinner, and more in number (to boost surface area of dissipation). The cooler uses 50% of fins made of copper and the rest 50% made of aluminum. The large CPU contact base is made of copper and pre-applied TIM. The box pictured is the "white-box" part, expect the retail box to be of that exact size.

Back in March 2008, Thermaltake introduced its first phase change cooling prototype. At the time, we were able to reveal only a few pictures, without knowing what was to come. Today Thermaltake said that after four years of research, the company's first DC inverter type micro refrigeration cooling system is finally ready to hit the market. The so-called Thermaltake XPRESSAR utilizes cyclic refrigeration method based on the vapor-compression refrigeration, to take away the heat produced by processors. Vapor-compression refrigeration systems use a circulating liquid refrigerant as cooling medium which absorbs and removes heat from the space to be cooled and subsequently reject that heat elsewhere. All such systems have four components: a compressor, a condenser, an expansion valve, and an evaporator. For now the XPRESSAR phase-change cooling will be paired with a Xaser VI case and sold as XPRESSAR RCS100. The total weight of both parts will equal to 22.2kg. Thermaltake ensures that such a system will result in 20ºC better temps than most liquid-based systems, and also be compatible with all Intel LGA775 and LGA1366 (Nehalem) processors (maybe an AMD kit will be released sometime later). More information on the XPRESSAR RCS100 can be found here. Pricing and availability are still to be announced. It's time for the reviews now.

New reports suggest that on October 19th (on my birthday) Intel is planning to cut the prices of several Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors. According to the report on that date prices of the 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 will drop from $193 to $183, and from $224 to $193 respectively. Intel's dual-core 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E7300 will fall from $133 to $113. In addition the company plans to introduce a new 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo E7400 part on that date too.

Intel has officially begun shipping a 45nm dual-core Intel Atom Processor known as the Intel Atom Processor 330. The newest member of the Atom family is designed specifically for nettops, which are affordable desktops purpose-built primarily for web surfing, email, and basic Internet usage. The dual-core Intel Atom Processor 330 features a 1.6GHz processing core, 1MB of level 2 cache, an 8W TDP and support for DDR2 667. The new processor is available as an integrated package and has been validated with the Intel 945GC Express Chipset, featuring built-in Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 and Intel High Definition Audio.

Habey USA, leading manufacturer of embedded and server storage products, today announces BIS-7750, the first Intel SoC based fanless NAS/Network Appliance embedded platform. BIS-7750 is based on Intel's latest EP80579 Tolapai Integrated Processor with Intel QuickAssist Technology. It offers five PCIe Gigabit Ethernet ports, Ethernet bypass segment, PCIe 4x slot, mini-PCIe slot for expansion, dual SATA II channel and supports up to 2GB of system memory. It is designed for small-to-medium business (SMB) and enterprise security and communications appliances (including VPN/firewall and unified threat management), transaction terminals, interactive clients, print and imaging applications, wireless and WiMax access applications, SMB and home network attached storage (NAS), converged IP PBX solutions, converged access platforms, IP media servers, and VoIP gateways.

Thanks to some inside information that was published today by various hardware portals, now we know that Intel has decided to enhance the overclocking capabilities of two of its still to be released non-Extreme Core i7 processors. Intel's LGA 1366 Core i7-940 and Core i7-920, which are clocked at 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz respectively will now boast unlocked memory controlers, meaning that users will be able to change the memory multiplier and thus the memory frequency beyond the stock DDR3 800/1066MHz speed. The unlocked memory multiplier will also allow the QPI speed to be changed. The Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) bus resembles AMD's Hypertransport bus. A slide change in the memory frequency will result in higher QPI bus speed, just like in the current AMD processor family. Previously, we knew that only the Core i7 Extreme processors like the 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition will have these overclocking features. I sincerely hope that with this last minute change Intel will make us overclockers really happy.

Intel has updated its plans with the desktop CPU lineup across segments with some of the current products getting discontinued from manufacturing. The company will send product discontinuance notices (PDNs), documents sent to relevant firms in the industry, notifying them of a time-frame in which the company plans to stop production of a product. Some products are also slated to reach end of life (EOL). Along with this, there are also plans to bring in new products based on the current architecture.

Sources at motherboard vendors tell that by Q1 2009, the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and QX9650 discontinue, with PDNs being issued. They will be totally phased-out by Q2. The company will also send out PDNs for four quad-core CPUs including the Core 2 Quad Q9450, ten dual-core CPUs including the Core 2 Duo E8300, three Pentium CPUs including the Pentium E2220 and the Celeron E1200 starting in November, and all products will phase out between the first and second quarters next year. Other highlights include:

Later this year, Intel will launch three models of processors based on a newer socket, a newer architecture. The processors are based on the Nehalem-derived Bloomfield core, and require a compatible motherboard with the 1366-pin land grid array (LGA) socket. There are three models lined up, one in each category of extreme, performance and mainstream. They carry the Core i7 brand name and here are its model numbers:

• Core i7 Extreme 965 (PIB model: BX80601965)
• Core i7 940 (PIB model: BX80601940)
• Core i7 920 (PIB model: BX80601920)

The 965 is a Extreme series product that sits on the top of the pile, it should be the fastest desktop processor ever made. The 940 falls into the performance category, given its price. It is trailed by the 920 which seems to have the best price to clock speed, it falls into the mainstream category. A table explaining parameters in detail and model prices is provided.

The Intel Core 2 Duo E7000 series has brought in great performance at a low price point. They are basically current 45nm Wolfdale core based processors with 3 MB of L2 cache and 1066 MHz FSB. What it also means that it comes with higher FSB multiplier values to achieve the designated clock speeds. For applications that aren't cache intensive, and for users with appropriate tweaking skills, the E7000 series is a boon. Sources claim that on October 19th, Intel will release the Core 2 Duo E7400 processor, a successor to the current E7300. The release also affects prices across its segment.

The E7400 comes with a 2.80 GHz clock speed. It comes with a FSB multiplier of 10.5x for and 3 MB of L2 cache. Coming to its price, it displaces the E7300 from its current price of US $133 and pushes it down to $113, the E7400 will be priced at $133. In its segment, the E7400 will compete with AMD's Phenom X3 8750 and Phenom X4 9550, though it is expected to perform better than AMD's offerings in that price-range given today's applications.

Intel Corporation has extended its lead in the high-end server segment, setting new standards in virtualization performance with the launch of seven 45 nanometer (nm)-manufactured Intel Xeon Processor 7400 Series products. With up to six processing cores per chip and 16MB of shared cache memory, applications built for virtualized environments and data demanding workloads, such as databases, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and server consolidation, experience dramatic performance increases of almost 50 percent in some cases.

Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture brings in a host of changes. One of the most important of them is that the processors now carry memory controllers. From what is known so far, the upcoming Nehalem processors come with official support for DDR3 800 MHz and DDR3 1066 MHz though talk is that it just could slip in DDR3 1333 MHz support on an official scale. Here's a complication: Some of the computer enthusiasts with plans of retaining their current DDR3 1800/2000/beyond may have severe problems running the memory at their rated frequencies on a Nehalem chip. They might not work on their rated frequencies at all.

The reason behind this is that Nehalem has processor and memory voltages synchronized. Fresh studies suggest that a voltage of 2.0 V can fry a Nehalem processor. It was earlier noted that this voltage limit was 1.60 V to 1.70 V. It would need extreme caution for you to set the core to run at even 1.8 V since at that voltage the processor could start degrading and finally cease to work. The conclusion is that the Nehalem platform, with its synchronized CPU and memory voltages, will be limited by the DDR3 modules ability to reach high frequencies at lower voltages. This could have implications on the kind of memory kits that come out in the near future. Manufacturers could offer high-end kits that function well within 1.6 V with the supposedly high frequencies albeit loose timings, just to keep the memory and processor operating safely.

Intel Corporation announced today it has begun shipping Intel X18-M and X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives (SSDs) based on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash technology for laptop and desktop computers. The new high-performing data storage devices give computer buyers a new level of system responsiveness in a lightweight, rugged, low-power package that can replace traditional hard disk drives. Validated for Intel-based computers, the X18-M is a 1.8-inch drive and the X25-M a 2.5-inch drive, offering several advantages over hard drives including faster overall system response, boot and resume times. With no moving parts, SSDs run cooler and quieter and are a more reliable option than hard drives. In addition, SSDs remove input/output (I/O) performance bottlenecks associated with hard disk drives that help maximize the efficiency of Intel processors, such as the company's Core family of products. For example, lab tests show that the Intel X18-M and X25M increase storage system performance nine times over traditional hard disk drive performance.

A spy-shot of the dual-core Intel Atom processor has surfaced. The picture reveals an important bit about the design of the processor. Dual-core Atom isn't about two processor cores integrated onto one die, but two dies sharing a package and front-side bus, much in the same way its distant ancestor, the Pentium D was built. This design allows modularity and helps Intel cut manufacturing costs. They don't have to build separate wafers of dual-core dice but rather use two single core dice and integrate them onto one package. The Atom 330 will be the first product based on this design. Early performance tests with arithmetic and memory bandwidth reveal a good level of scaling, close to 100% that of the N270, a single-core 1.6 GHz part:

Intel Corporation continues to expand its 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing chip portfolio with the launch of its first four halogen-free Intel Xeon processors, signaling another step in Intel's march toward minimizing the environmental footprint of its products. The chips reach new heights in performance and energy efficiency. Much of the energy efficiency these new processors provide comes from Intel's advanced 45nm manufacturing capability and its reinvented transistors that use a Hafnium-based high-k metal gate formula. In addition, all previously launched versions of the Intel Xeon 5200 and 5400 series will now be halogen-free.

Intentional or not, a huge set of company-confidential diagrams from Intel have surfaced from Japanese website PC Watch. The diagrams show Intel's roadmap until the beginning of 2010. While the authenticity of these diagrams are questionable, and there are bound to be inaccuracies, they provide a broad view of Intel's consumer PC processor plans. The first time shows a gradual transition between the current Core and upcoming Nehalem architectures. What's more, it shows how Intel may have segregated the desktop PC market, with six main product divisions from bottom to top being integrated board, value, essential, mainstream, performance and extreme. The value, mainstream and performance segments are further classified on price-bands.The contents of the diagram are pretty self explanatory in terms of what kind of products are slated for when and a little peak into what they are made of. Highlights of the diagram include:

On September 15th Intel plans to fabricate the Intel Xeon 7400 Dunnington series processor, the company's last Penryn generation processor to be released. Xeon 7400 will mark the end of a previous server era, and after it the new Nehalem Core i7 processor family will start to appear in the fourth quarter. The Xeon 7400 will be Intel's first 6-core server chip. It will be produced using 45nm high-k process technology and will boast 16MB of L3 cache. The Xeon 7400 Dunnington series is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design, like Nehalem. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon - referred to as die - inside of one chip package. Server vendors announcing Xeon 7400 powered products will include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and Unisys, according to Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger.

Intel launched three budget processors that include the Core 2 Quad Q8200, Core 2 Duo E5200 and Celeron D 450. The Q8200 quad-core chip comes with a clock-speed of 2.33 GHz. This processor is based on the newer 45 nm silicon fabrication process and comes with a total of 4 MB L2 cache. Owing to a front-side bus frequency of 1333 MHz, it comes with a FSB multiplier of 7x. This part is priced at US $224 in thousand-unit tray quantities.

The Core 2 Duo E5200 is clocked at 2.50 GHz, comes with 2 MB of L2 cache and 800 MHz FSB with a multiplier of 12.5x. It is priced at $84. This one is based on the 45nm process as well. The Celeron D 450 is clocked at 2.2 GHz with 800 MHz memory and features 512 KB of L2 cache. It is priced at $53 per piece. This however, is based on the older 65nm process.