Nomura Equity Research, an investment broker, recons that factors other than, and more significant than hard disk drive (HDD) shortage caused due to the recent Thailand floods affecting HDD manufacturing, are behind Intel's reduced Q4 forecast. Earlier this week, Intel shaved off close to a billion dollars from its Q4 Revenue Guidance, leveling the blame on HDD shortages, as HDD is a near-indispensable component in manufacture and assembly of a vast majority of PCs. Nomura Equity Research thinks "weak sell-through" is that other factor.

Nomura Equity Research said "HDD shortages are a concern, but we think weak sell-through is also contributing to the $1 billion shortfall." It continues, "We see softness in China, continued demand for ARM-based more power-efficient devices, and low volumes for ultrabooks." Intel is clearly feeling the heat with depleting demand for Wintels, as entire PC form-factors are challenged by leaner, fitter computing devices such as tablets, netbooks, and smartphones driven by ARM processors are growing in demand.

Intel's Desktop Board division didn't miss out on the Sandy Bridge-E LGA2011 platform launch, after all, it's ceremonial for Intel to launch a new generation of processors with its own branded motherboards that are fully compatible with them. While Intel had two models of LGA2011 motherboards in the pipeline, the DX79SI and DX79TO, only the former was launched in November, which made it to most platform reviewers. The DX79SI was launched at a price point of US $289 - $299 MSRP, though some retailers easily set that price above $300. The new DX79TO is designed to be a down-scaled version of the DX79SI, targeting a price range of $203 - $208, according to ARK. Naturally then, the price that's 30% lower than that of the DX79SI invites some aggressive feature-cutting.

To begin with, the DX79TO could have a slightly slimmer CPU VRM. Thankfully, it doesn't cheap out much on VRM heatsinks, with the same exact ones found on the DX79SI. The heatsink cooling the VRM area south of the socket is not linked to the PCH heatsink with a heat-pipe, like on the DX79SI. The PCH heatsink itself looks slightly slimmer, though it's not a major area of concern. The CPU socket is still wired to as many as eight DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 64 GB of quad-channel DDR3 memory.

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) today announced the upcoming Intel 7 Series Chipset and Intel C216 Chipset Family host silicon has achieved SuperSpeed USB certification by the USB-IF. The certified solution includes four SuperSpeed USB ports integrated into the chipset, enabling manufacturers to conveniently incorporate SuperSpeed USB into their systems.

"This is a tremendous milestone for the industry," said Jeff Ravencraft, USB-IF President & COO. "With USB-IF certification of Intel's integrated USB host silicon, host manufacturers will be able to bring SuperSpeed USB to the masses. Intel's commitment to SuperSpeed USB will continue to provide peripheral device manufacturers a compelling incentive to develop a growing number of diverse SuperSpeed USB products."

Microprocessor maker Intel has revealed that its Q4 revenue will be lower than previously expected, mostly due to the hard drive supply problems brought on by the floods in Thailand. Intel says that the HDD shortages are forcing PC makers to reduce CPU inventories, and this, of course, is affecting its sales. The chip company expects the hard drive shortages to continue into Q1 but is hopeful that things will get back on track in the first half of 2012.

The updated Q4 guidance talks about a revenue of $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million. This is down from the $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million predicted in October.

Today Samsung Electronics unveiled the Series 5 Ultra, a 'high-performance' ultrabook which will debut in South Korea at the end of this month and will probably (hopefully) reach other markets in early 2012.

This new mobile solution makes use of an aluminum chassis, comes in 13.3-inch and 14-inch versions (the 13-inch model is 14.9 mm thick, the 14-inch is 20.9 mm), and features a yet unnamed Intel processor, up to 8GB of RAM, a 500GB/1TB hard drive or a 128GB solid state drive, and 8GB of ExpressCache memory which ensures lower boot and access times (Samsung claims that its machine can come out of sleep mode in under 2 seconds). The 14-inch unit boasts a Radeon HD 7550M discrete graphics card and an optical drive while the 13.3-inch model has to settle for an integrated Intel GPU and no ODD.

The Series 5 Ultra also has WiFi, a webcam, two USB 3.0 ports, and both D-Sub and HDMI outputs. Pricing in Korea is said to range from about US $1,121 to US $1,339.

As previously reported, Intel's first wave of Sandy Bridge-E processors have VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) disabled due to an errata in the C1 stepping. That issue couldn't be resolved in time for the launch but it's getting fixed with the C2 stepping which is set to start rolling out to customers on January 20th, 2012 (samples have already been delivered).

The CPUs moving to the C2 stepping are the hexa-core Core i7-3960X (3.3 GHz) and Core i7-3930K (3.2 GHz). Beside the fixed VT-d, the C2 chips will feature new S-spec and MM numbers so a BIOS update for current motherboards will likely be required.

An increasing number of people within the industry have access to Intel Ivy Bridge engineering samples. Some of them are generous enough to share performance details with the public. One such kind soul posted 3DMark, Fritz Chess, and Cinebench test results. An Intel Core i7-3770 sample was the test candidate, this chip has all components and features available to Ivy Bridge LGA1155 enabled, including HyperThreading, a faster uncore, and the full 8 MB L3 cache. The chip was put through 3DMark 06 (to test its CPU and iGPU performance), Cinebench 11.5 (both single-thread and multi-threaded), and Fritz Chess Benchmark (again, both single and multiple threads).More screenshots follow.

Since Ivy Bridge is still a few months away from release, Intel has decided to keep itself busy by sealing the fate of a bunch of older processors including the Core i7-930, i7-950, i7-960, i7-980 and i7-990X which are part of the LGA1366 platform, and the LGA1156-compatible Pentium G6950, G6960 and Core i3-540, i5-650, i5-660, i5-670, i5-680, i7-860 and i7-870.

These 45nm and 32nm CPUs are set to be available for further orders until June 29, 2012, and will continue to ship either until supplies are depleted (for the boxed versions) or until December 7th, 2012 (for the tray SKUs). As always, it's onwards and upwards.

Flash buddies Intel and Micron have today announced a significant breakthrough in terms of NAND density, the first 128 Gb (16 GB) MLC NAND memory chip. Manufactured on 20 nm process technology, this 128 Gb chip complies with the ONFI 3.0 specification (enabling speeds of up to 333 megatransfers per second) and can be used for new, high-capacity solid state drives, as well as for next-generation tablets, smartphones and other portable devices.

According to Intel and Micron, this milestone was made possible by the use of a new, innovative cell structure that 'breaks the scaling constraints of the standard NAND floating gate cell by integrating the first Hi-K/metal gate stack on NAND production.'

Lenovo announced today the ThinkPad X130e laptop, specially ruggedized for education and with the features needed to help students in grades K-12 and their schools get the most out of their PC technology. Equipped with the advanced technology expected for an educational laptop, the ThinkPad X130e comes with choices of the latest Intel or AMD processors and fast, integrated graphics as well as wireless connectivity and multimedia tools for today's digital learning. Designed to be handled by kids, the ThinkPad X130e has a reinforced and extra durable top cover, keyboard and hinges. Schools will also like its performance, reliability and customizable options including asset tags, BIOS modifications, custom imaging and a broad selection of custom colors.

Nordic Hardware has scored an exclusive interview with Pat Bliemer, Managing Director of Intel Northern Europe to discuss the technology following on from the 22 nm one used in the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors. Unfortunately, Bliemer was light on the technical details of this technology and didn't say when it would see the light of day, except to say that it will make fuller use of the Tri-Gate tech being used in the Ivy Bridge processors and that test circuits are running.

We need to keep going and you can trust me that in our labs we actually have the next generation after 22nm running, so we need to keep going.[...]I cannot really disclose more about that other than that in a laboratory-environment, absolutely we do have the path, our engineers do have the path to actually go and produce 14nm products. There are many variables that you can play with of course it is not the right name for it and the engineers would not like it when I say play, that you can influence to actually go and stay to that model. And I think the breakthrough we had now with the 3D metal gates, just the design of the gate will actually allow for much more efficient thermals and power.

Back in July, we looked even further ahead and reported that Intel aims to have 10 nm-based processors by 2018 and that the 14 nm tech is due for release around 2014. Watch this space.

Although Intel has its SSD 510 series to target the high-end client market segment, it's available in very few capacities, and is facing tough competition from "SandForce-Driven" SSDs (SSDs that use SandForce-made controllers). In 2012, Intel will give its SSD lineup a large-scale revamp, which includes the gradual replacement of SSD 510 series with new SSD 520 "Cherryville" series. Targeting the same high-end client segment, SSD 520 will be available in a wider variety of capacities that includes 60 GB, 120 GB, 180 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB.

We are now getting to learn through a fresh report by TheSSDReview, the idea behind SSD 520: that Intel wants to use SandForce SSD processors. The new drives feature transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s reads, 520 MB/s writes, 70,000 IOPS 4K random write throughput, and overprovisioned capacities consistent with most SandForce-driven SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs in the market. SSD 520 should hence provide the best of both worlds: the trust Intel brand brings to the table with a possible secret-sauce firmware; and the high-performance of SandForce controllers. Intel's SSD 510 uses a Marvell-made controller, many of its previous generation SSDs have used its in-house SSD controllers. TheSSDReview reports that the launch of these drives is imminent.

AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:

This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm².

AMD's new Bulldozer "FX" series of processors may be very lacklustre performers in reviewer's benchmarks and have garnered considerable scorn in enthusiast circles, but they're a very good performer for AMD's bottom line. Incredibly, they are selling out as soon as shops get them in stock - and they are not even priced very competitively against Intel's offerings, so perhaps the "It's an 8 core CPU!!" marketing is working well on the uninformed "enthusiast" after all? Mind you, what enthusiast, however uninformed, wouldn't know exactly how these products perform? Every tech website and computer magazine has covered these chips by now. The mind boggles.

Earlier this week, a report tabled the model numbers of Intel's 2012 Core processor family based on the "Ivy Bridge" silicon. Its processor model number scheme consisted of Core i5/i7 3000 series, targeting various market price points. Many of these model numbers are confirmed on the latest roadmap slide detailing the Core processor family for 2012. We are also getting to see what the nomenclature of next-generation Core i3 processors could look like.

The slide shows that Ivy Bridge processors will start selling in Q2 2012, which is consistent with reports of an April 2012 launch. Intel will begin with Core i3-32xx (xx = TBD), i5-3450, i5-3550, i5-3570K, i7-3770, and i7-3770K. Around this time, there will be a market transition among cheaper Core i3 parts. In Q3 2012, i5-3470 and i5-3570 will displace i5-3450 and i5-3550; while a faster Core i7-37x0K processor will displace the i7-3770K. The market transition among some Core i3 parts will continue in Q3. Q4 2012 will largely resemble Q3, except that the lower-end Core i3 lineup will have fully transitioned to Ivy Bridge. There will be no changes in the LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E HEDT lineup, except that an affordable quad-core part will be added in Q1 2012. For quick reference, we re-posted the table from the older report.

Previous preliminary reports have suggested that the forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs will have single threaded performance on par with the existing Sandy Bridge CPUs and will mainly deliver improvements to power consumption and integrated graphics - nothing for PC enthusiasts to get excited about. However, in leaked documents sent to partners, Intel have now revealed official performance figures for IB and they look rather good. They've produced a raft of benchmarks, which reveal improvements such as 56% in ArcSoft Media Expresso, 25% in Excel 2010 and a 199% gain in the 3D Mark Vantage GPU benchmark. Unfortunately, they haven't released any benchmarks based on high performance 3D games, but it's probably safe to say that they will be similarly improved. Now, on to the benchmarks, which compare their new 3.4 GHz i7-3770 (4 cores + HT) with the current 3.4 GHz i7-2600, also with 4 cores + HT:

It looks like the Bulldozer disaster might have been too much of a setback for AMD to recover from. After 30 years of competing with Intel in the x86 processor market, AMD is about to give up, even with the 2009 1.25bn antitrust settlement they extracted from them. Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman said, "We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore." He was vague on the exact strategy that AMD intends to pursue from now on, though. However, the company is widely expected to make a concerted effort to break into the smartphones and tablets market. The big problem with this strategy unfortunately, is that this arena is currently dominated by many other competitors. On top of that, their arch enemy Intel is also trying to muscle in on this space, hence AMD could find themselves back at square one, or likely even further back. AMD's graphics cards are doing well at the moment though and are quite competitive, so it looks like their expensive purchase of ATI back in 2006, might yet save the company from extinction. If they become primarily a graphics card company, they will inevitably end up a lot smaller than they are now though and that's a lot of lost jobs and personal hardship, along with a monopoly x86 market remaining and all of its negative effects on the market.

The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:

If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.

What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector here. The release notes follow.

Russian website Overclockers.ru claims to have a complete picture of what Intel's upcoming 22 nm Core "Ivy Bridge" desktop (2012 Core Processor Family) looks like. The site compiled model names, extensions, clock speeds, Turbo Boost speeds, L3 cache sizes, and TDP ratings of as many as 18 models, most of which are quad-core.

The table reflects that most clock speeds are similar to today's Sandy Bridge LGA1155 processor models, some have Turbo Boost speeds as high as 3.90 GHz. Since Ivy Bridge silicon is an optical shrink of Sandy Bridge LGA1155, from 32 nm to 22 nm, and since Intel is using a more energy-efficient transistor design, there are significant improvements in TDP ratings.

Intel's Ivy Bridge line of processors are not due for release until spring 2012, but it looks like Chinese website Coolaler has scored a sneak peak at the performance level of Intel's 22 nm Ivy Bridge platform by testing an engineering sample of a quad core CPU. The screenshot shows CPU-Z & Task Manager (no HyperThreading) readouts, while the AIDA64 Cache & Memory benchmark has been run. The CPU used is a 2 GHz sample as shown by the photo, which CPU-Z reports as running at its 2.4 GHz turbo boost speed (20% overclock) on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard. Rough and ready verdict: about the same speed as the current Sandy Bridge, but with a significantly enhanced northbridge and graphics core. The AIDA64 scores are actually slightly lower than the current SB scores, but this is likely because the CPU is running unsupported and unoptimized due to a mobo BIOS that's not made for it and a benchmark that cannot measure its true performance. Note the memory speeds, which were run fast at 2134 MHz 6-9-6-24 CR2, further indicating lack of optimization, since these timings suggest somewhat better performance than what was measured.

In-Win Development Inc, a leading innovator in high-quality, contemporary PC hardware and multiple winner of the internationally renowned Red-Dot Design Award, has today launched its new performance PC chassis, the BUC 101.

Its strength of design is echoed across both its boldly shaped exterior, high quality SECC steel construction and a hard-wearing black interior. With a striking expression and fantastic feature-set that includes support for multiple 300mm (11.8") graphics cards, it will perfectly suit any gamer.

Intel started shipping the new Pentium 350, a model designed specifically for low-cost servers, micro-servers, and home servers; a segment Intel originally planned to address with some of its Atom dual-core chips. The Pentium 350 is an offshoot from entry-level desktop and notebook platforms the Pentium brand is currently in charge of, it is designed with durability and energy-efficiency required by servers in mind.

Available in the LGA1155 package, Pentium 350 is a dual-core processor based on the 32 nm Sandy Bridge dual-core silicon. It is clocked at 1.20 GHz, and features 3 MB of shared L3 cache apart from 256 KB L2 cache per core. Thanks to its low clock speed, the chip's TDP is rated at just 15W, making it ideal for home and small business servers. It will naturally benefit from the high IPC of Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip features Intel64 instruction set, its integrated memory controller supports up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1066/DDR3-1333 MHz memory.

Lenovo, today announced the IdeaCentre Q180 - a consumer desktop PC no larger than a paperback book, yet powerful enough to turn a digital TV into a multimedia hub for enjoying music, videos, games, web browsing and more.

"With the IdeaCentre Q180, we upped our game in the compact PC category," said Nick Reynolds, executive director, Product Group Marketing, Lenovo. "Featuring the latest HD Graphics and Blu-ray 3D playback, the Q180 enables consumers to change the way they enjoy multimedia and the Web in their living room at an affordable price point."

NVIDIA today announced that, for the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.

Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan. With sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts, Tsubame 2.0 delivers 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy. It is 3.4-times more energy efficient than the next-closest x86 CPU-only petaflop system, the Cielo Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.

The only way mainstream portable wintels are going the survive the onslaught of smaller, increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing devices (such as ARM-driven tablets and smartphones), is by slimming down radically, and making themselves available to the mainstream. No, we're not talking about cheapo netbooks, but ultrabooks (ultra-slim notebooks), that provide mainstream notebook-like performance in a much more compact package. Intel will give this form-factor a big push next year with an Ivy Bridge architecture-based processor platform designed keeping it in mind, and technologies centric to it.

To begin with, slimmer form-factors could eat into wired connectivity, hence, Intel will push its Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s interconnect to the fore. But wired connectivity is the least of ultrabook's limitations. Battery life, data storage, and additional computing power will need to be accessible yet optional to it, and hence docking stations will be hot in the market, yet again. Intel will pitch for Thunderbolt to be a standard component of docking port clusters.