Intel Corporation recently announced its latest communications platform, previously code named "Crystal Forest," will help service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) encrypt and process data across the network more efficiently. The platform will also offer superior communications workload consolidation via a single architecture for greater cost efficiency.

The platform will particularly benefit TEMs that are developing low-end products (such as wireless access and branch routers), as well as high-end equipment (for example LTE core network elements and enterprise security appliances).

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for Q3'12.

The news was terrific for Nvidia and disappointing for everyone the other major players. From Q2 to Q3 Intel slipped in both desktop (7%) and notebook (8.6%). AMD dropped (2%) in the desktop, and (17%) in notebooks. Nvidia gained 28.3% in desktop from quarter to quarter and jumped almost 12% in the notebook segment.

The processor-motherboard combination as PC enthusiasts know it could end, with Intel LGA1150 processors under the "Haswell" micro-architecture, likely to becoming the last client processors to ship in the retail channel (processor-in-box). Future Intel client processors, codenamed "Broadwell" could ship only in BGA (ball-grid array) packages, with existing motherboard vendors selling their products with processors permanently soldered onto them. The information comes from Japanese PC Watch, which cites sources in the PC industry.

With a compacted socket-processor launch cycle that spans nearly 2 years under the company's "tick-tock" product strategy, the scope for processor updates in the client computing industry might be lower than what it was in the LGA775 days. Perhaps statistics at Intel don't show a sizable proportion of people upgrading processors on existing motherboards, or upgrading motherboards while retaining the processor, rather buying a combination of the two, not to mention the fact that pre-built PCs outsell DIY assembled ones in major markets. With the processor being "tied" to the motherboard, Intel gets room to compact the platform further, combining processor and core logic completely into a single package. It's likely that Intel could still leave processor interchangeability to its HEDT (high-end desktop) platform, which sees processors start at $300, and motherboards at $200.

Abee unveiled the Acubic NE01 and NE02 lines of replacement cases for Intel NUC. Made of brushed, anodized aluminum, the cases are available in a variety of glossy colors. The NE01, the first group of cases pictured below, measures 125 x 111 x 41 mm, featuring an edgy design. The NE02, on the other hand, measures 126 x 111 x 42 mm, featuring a slightly rounded and curvy design. Both cases weigh roughly 450 g. Designed strictly for the NUC form-factor, the two support Intel Desktop Boards D33217CK and D33217GKE only, are are compatible with their rear-panel bracket, and front USB port positions. Both cases support VESA mount, and can latch onto your flat-panel. Slated for Wednesday (28/11), the NE01 and NE02 are priced around US $99.

Intel's SSD 525 line of performance mSATA SSDs may be slated for 2013, but made an early debut with the company's NUC (next unit of computing) desktop. A 180 GB variant of the drive was put to test by VR-Zone, which is driven by LSI-SandForce SF-2281 processor, and features three Intel-made 20 nm MLC NAND flash chips (6-channels). The drive cracked Anvil Storage Utilities benchmark with 504 MB/s (compressible) and 463 MB/s (incompressible) sequential read speeds, 468 MB/s (compressible) and 240 MB/s (incompressible) sequential writes, and about 55,841 IOPS 4K random write (QD16) performance. The performance numbers make the drive appear nearly as fast as larger 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, and could be a boon for Ultrabook makers.

Creative Technology Ltd today announced it has entered into an agreement with Intel Corporation for Intel to license certain technology and patents from ZiiLABS Inc. Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative, and acquire certain engineering resources and assets related to its UK subsidiary ZiiLABS Limited (formerly known as 3DLABS Limited).

The US$50 million deal includes US$20 million to Creative for the licensing of certain technologies to Intel relating to ZiiLABS' high performance GPU technology. The second part of the deal is US$30 million to Creative for the transfer of certain engineering resources and assets in the UK subsidiary to Intel. The UK subsidiary is a design entity engaged in, primarily on behalf of ZiiLABS Inc. Ltd, the development of various silicon solutions, including the ZMS chips for Creative. The transfer of engineering resources and assets will be through the divestment of the UK subsidiary by Creative.

Intel Corporation today announced that the company's president and CEO, Paul Otellini, has decided to retire as an officer and director at the company's annual stockholders' meeting in May, starting an orderly leadership transition over the next six months. Otellini's decision to retire will bring to a close a remarkable career of nearly 40 years of continuous service to the company and its stockholders.

"Paul Otellini has been a very strong leader, only the fifth CEO in the company's great 45-year history, and one who has managed the company through challenging times and market transitions," said Andy Bryant, chairman of the board. "The board is grateful for his innumerable contributions to the company and his distinguished tenure as CEO over the last eight years."

As confirmed by some freshly-leaked slides, 2014 will see Intel bring some new guns to the fight with ARM, including Bay Trail-T, the successor of Clover Trail and the first Atom platform to take advantage of the 22 nm manufacturing process.

The star of Bay Trail-T is the Valleyview SoC which will feature four (out-of-order) Silvermont cores clocked at up to 2.1 GHz (delivering up to 60% higher performance than the Clover Trail chip), a two-channel LPDDR3 memory controller, an upgraded video decoder, support for resolutions up to 2560 x 1600 pixels, and a new GPU boasting DirectX 11 capabilities and offering up to a 3x performance boost over Clover Trail.

Devices based on Bay Trail-T are expected to have a standby battery life of 20 days and would last for 11 hours of continuous video playback, before needing to be charged.

Marking a new era in high-performance computing, Intel Corporation introduced the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, a culmination of years of the research and collaboration, to bring unprecedented performance for innovative breakthroughs in manufacturing, life sciences, energy and other areas.

The ability to quickly compute, simulate and make more informed decisions has propelled the growth of high performance computing (HPC) and analytics. This has been driven by global business and research priorities to more accurately predict weather patterns, create more efficient energy resources, and develop cures for diseases among many other pressing issues. With the breakthrough performance per watt and other new attributes of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, the industry will have even greater reliability in generating accurate answers, help proliferate high-performance computing beyond laboratories and universities and achieve maximum productivity.

Going into 2013, Intel's tough balancing act between keeping a low power/thermal envelope, and advancing performance, all while staying on the 22 nm silicon fab process, will be care of its Core "Haswell-ULT" processor. The chip will feature some radical changes to traditional Intel processor design, which will help it achieve its design goals. According to a deck of leaked slides scored by Expreview, Intel plans to use additional C-states that drop the processor's base clock, and redesign the processor package to accommodate the PCH silicon, reducing the board footprint.

To begin with, Haswell-ULT will be designed to support 24 MHz base clock speed, which running in "deep" energy-saving idle states. Modern processors with FSB replacement interconnect technologies such as QuickPath Interconnect and HyperTransport need a base clock to time other components on the processor, and for low-level communications, while a bulk of the data is transported by the primary interconnect. Intel found a way to turn off the 100 MHz base clock signal (which is also used to time the PCI-Express root complex and integrated graphics core), and replace it with a 24 MHz clock, when the processor is idling. As the processor returns to lower (more active) C-states, the 100 MHz base clock is reapplied. The 24 MHz base clock is activated by three new power states, C8, C9, and C10, introduced by Haswell-ULT. The third slide below details what happens to the various components in the new C-states.

In what could be the very first time two different machine architectures share a platform, future versions of Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors could be socket-compatible. Intel Itanium is based on the Itanium64 (IA64) machine architecture, while Xeon is x86-64 based. Intel plans to implement its common platform strategy with the next generation models of the two, that's "Kittson" Itanium, and "Haswell" Xeon.

This level of convergence could make it easier for companies to deploy select amounts of Itanium and Xeon processors in their data-centers, to suit specific tasks, and save money on buying common platforms for both. Itanium processors are typically preferred for in mission-critical environments, where there's close to zero margin for error (think military, medical, and space-exploration); while Xeon is good at handling heavy serial processing loads (think servers, database management, cloud). Introduction of the converged platform is expected in the 2013-2015 time range, using Xeon "Haswell" launch as a point of reference.

In an era of unprecedented growth in data usage, businesses require powerful computing solutions that can deliver scalable and resilient performance to run IT's most mission-critical applications. The new Intel Itanium processor 9500 series is more than twice as powerful as the previous generation, making it ideal for today's most demanding workloads, including business analytics, database, and large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Systems based on Intel's Itanium processors run in more than three-quarters of the World's Global 100 companies across industries such as aerospace, energy, life sciences and telecommunications. With the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series, these industries will benefit from a leap in performance and an increase in world-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities.

Intel has this week announced the discontinuance schedule for two more products, the 2.8 GHz Core i5-3450S desktop CPU and the 1.5 GHz Atom Z670 mobile chip. The i5-3450S will be available for orders until May 24th, 2013 and will ship until November 8th (for the tray version) or until supplies are depleted (boxed). As for the Z670, Intel will be taking orders for it up to May 31st, 2013 and will ship it while supplies last.

The Core i5-3450S was introduced in Q2 2012 while the Atom Z670 debuted last year (Q2).

As big data, high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-computing applications push the demand for real-time access of data into the zettabytes, Intel Corporation announced today its next-generation data center solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3700 Series, designed to remove storage bottlenecks and maximize multi-core CPU performance. The Intel SSD DC S3700 Series delivers fast, consistent performance and low latencies along with strong data protection and high endurance to help IT personnel support today's most demanding data center applications.

"Today's data explosion creates unique storage challenges for data center professionals," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. "High latencies and slow storage I/O can cripple data centers' ability to deliver exciting big data or cloud-computing applications with fast, low latency data access. Intel's next-generation Intel SSD DC S3700 Series breaks through SSD limitations for the data center on all fronts - fast, consistent performance, strong data protection and high endurance -- so IT professionals can deliver on their most demanding technology initiatives."

Market research firm TrendForce released NAND flash shipment figures for 3Q 2012. The global NAND flash market is valued at US $4.626 billion, a healthy 6.6% growth over the previous quarter. A TrendForce DRAMeXchange report provided a break-down of shipments of NAND flash by manufacturers. Leading the pack is Samsung, with 41.2% market-share, registering a 1.8% QoQ growth. Trailing behind is Toshiba, with 24.7% market share, and a significant 12.9% QoQ growth. In September, Toshiba cut prices and scaled up production, which may have contributed to the growth. Micron holds 14.4% of the market with 2.8% growth, SK Hynix 11.6% with 6.4% growth (the company began mass-production of SSD-grade NAND flash this quarter), and Intel with 7.6% of the market-share, growing at 19.7%. Bear in mind, these numbers represent NAND flash components used not only in SSDs, but also USB flash drives, memory cards, etc.

Intel's 2011-launched Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" HEDT platform is based on a 32 nm silicon that's common with Xeon E5 series processors. While the silicon physically packs eight CPU cores and 20 MB last-level cache (LLC, or L3 cache), client Core i7 processors are configured with only a maximum of six cores, and up to 15 MB L3 cache. According to a MyDrivers.com report, the maximum core count won't change with next-generation 22 nm Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 processors.

Ivy Bridge-E will be an upscale of Ivy Bridge. Similar to Sandy Bridge-E, the silicon will feature up to eight cores and 20 MB L3 cache. In its Core i7 avatar, however, the chip will be configured with no more than six cores, and no more than 15 MB L3 cache. The new chip will introduce IPC improvements, PCI-Express Gen 3.0 certified root complex (one which NVIDIA will approve of), higher CPU core clock speeds, and support for faster memory.

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications and a top player in ICs for home multimedia, today added the STDP43 series of products to its innovative DisplayPort portfolio. These Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) are the world's first high-speed active-protocol bi-directional media-routing devices that manage audio and video data from various sources and send this data to multiple displays. The devices support DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4, the latest versions of the two most common digital-display interface technologies used in computer and consumer electronics. The STDP43 SoCs are catalytic in the rapidly expanding markets for next-generation digital signage, universal docking stations and video hubs required by the new generation of notebooks and PCs based on the latest Intel and AMD CPUs that support the multi-stream features of DisplayPort 1.2.

Researchers at Intel have begun ground work on many-core processors that could drive ultra-mobile devices (such as tablets, smartphones, Ultrabooks, etc.,) in the near future. It design calls for no less than 48 processing cores on a piece of silicon, built on the "single-chip cloud computer" (SCC) design. The new technology could reach the markets anywhere between five to ten years from now, probably since current silicon fabrication technologies aren't advanced enough to put that much processing power into a chip that runs off a smartphone battery.

"If we're going to have this technology in five to 10 years, we could finally do things that take way too much processing power today," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy. "This could really open up our concept of what is a computer... The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer." With devices like Microsoft Surface, which transform from a tablet to a fully-functional desktop with a dock, or a notebook with the flip of a smart cover, the definition of what constitutes a personal computer is changing. In a few years, your mobile could transform into a computing device of any shape and size for consumers.

Intel's newest flagship desktop processor, the Core i7-3970X Extreme Edition, started selling. In Singapore, the chip is being sold at S$ 1,425 (US $1,167), including local taxes. Based on the 32 nm "Sandy Bridge-E" silicon, and built in the LGA2011 package, the i7-3970X is a six-core processor clocked at 3.50 GHz, with maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.00 GHz. The six-core chip is bolstered by HyperThreading, enabling 12 logical CPUs, 256 KB L2 cache per core, 15 MB shared L3 cache, and a quad-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller, supporting up to 128 GB of memory. Surprisingly, the chip's 200 MHz speed bump over the Core i7-3960X affected its TDP, which is rated at 150W, up from 130W of the i7-3960X.

Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, and Intel, a world leader in computing innovation, today announced the inclusion of Crucial server memory modules in the Intel Demo Depot Program. This service lends fully configured Intel Xeon-based servers to customers for evaluation and testing prior to final purchase. As a brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world, Crucial supplies the Intel Demo Depot Program with DDR3L registered DIMMs ranging from 8 GB to 16 GB densities, in speeds of 1600 MT/s and 1333 MT/s to support Intel's latest generation of servers.

The Intel Demo Depot Program consists of more than 200 servers and is available to interested customers throughout North America. Potential customers procure evaluation servers for 30-day periods to test equipment and proof-of-concept trials. Servers are also used by various technology manufacturers for demonstrations at tech-focused tradeshows and customer demos by Intel field account engineers.

Intel Capital portfolio company Crossing Automation announced today that it is being acquired by Brooks Automation (NASDAQ: BRKS) for $63 million. Intel Capital invested in Crossing in 2005 and provided financial support and strategic and operational planning guidance to the company, which manufactures fab and tool automation equipment for the semiconductor market, enabling Crossing to achieve significant revenue and operating income growth.

The deal follows on the heels of FormFactor's (NASDAQ: FORM) $117 million acquisition of Intel Capital portfolio company MicroProbe, which provides advanced wafer test solutions to global semiconductor manufacturers. These successful exits signal a revival of opportunities in the semiconductor investment sector where Intel Capital is well positioned to add value to these companies.

Intel Corporation announced today it is shipping its first solid-state drive (SSD) using industry leading 20-nanometer (nm) NAND flash memory process.

The new Intel Solid-State Drive 335 Series (Intel SSD 335 Series) uses the smallest, most efficient multi-level cell NAND flash on the market, allowing Intel to advance its 300 Series client/consumer SSDs to the next-generation technology. SSDs offer users an overall PC performance boost accelerating productivity applications and other computing activities, such as Web surfing, movie watching, video chatting and content creation.

Still reeling with over-production, swelling inventories, and spot-prices on free-fall, the DRAM industry had been banking on Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system launch to come to their salvation. Apparently, it didn't. As is customary with each new Windows launch, orders for DRAM components go up, as PC makers announce new products, and consumers purchase new RAM to upgrade their systems. Windows 8, which is essentially based on the same (albeit slightly tweaked) kernel as Windows 7, isn't really heavier on system resources. Let alone that, Windows 8 in itself is not expected to bring consumers to get a new PC, because Microsoft made it extremely simple and cheap to upgrade Windows 7 to 8. The industry's only real hope now is for hardware makers Intel, AMD, and ARM to introduce platforms that make use of DDR4 DRAM.

Intel slipped in a new processor model to lead the Atom series of low-power processors, the D2560. Introduction of the new chip follows discontinuation of the D2700, it is positioned above the D2550. Based on the "Saltwell" micro-architecture and built on the 32 nm "Cedarview" silicon, the Atom D2560 is a dual-core x86 processor clocked at 2.00 GHz. It features HyperThreading, which enables four logical CPUs for the operating system to deal with. The dual-core x86 component is armed with 1 MB of L2 cache. Its instruction set includes SSE2/SSE3/SSSE3. Among its uncore components are a single-channel DDR3-1066 MHz IMC, which supports up to 4 GB of memory, and integrated HD graphics clocked at 640 MHz. Its TDP is rated at 10W. The new chip should cost OEMs $47 a piece in 1000-unit tray quantities.

Intel announced today a new Intel Solid-State Drive (SSD) Toolbox version 3.1 that is Windows 8-compatible. Offered in 11 languages, the Intel SSD Toolbox helps users keep their Intel SSD in prime condition. Other new features include RAID 0 Trim support with RST 11.x drivers, Plug and Play Support and proactive user notifications. Download the updated toolbox at: www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox