ECS is dressing up two new motherboards for a gala launch at Computex 2009. The A785GM-M and P55H-A were recently announced by the company to be heading for display and launch at the event, in its Computex booth invitation press-release. AlienBabelTech published exclusive pictures of the two.

To begin with, the A785GM-M is a micro-ATX motherboard based on the new AMD 785G chipset. The chipset features a Radeon HD 4200-class IGP. It is possibly based on the new RS880 core. The board supports AMD AM3 socket CPUs, and provides four DDR3 DIMM slots. Its display connectivity options include D-Sub, DVI, and HDMI. The rest of its connectivity includes FireWire, eSATA and one gigabit Ethernet interface.

The P55H-A on the other hand, is one of the company's first offerings that support the upcoming LGA-1156 socket processors. This is another of the motherboards we have seen so far, that lack display connectors, and hence, lack Intel Flexible Display Interface support, that connects integrated graphics processors on some CPUs to their output. It provides two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (electrically dual x8 when both populated). Four DDR3 DIMM slots support dual-channel DDR3 memory, 8 channel audio, gigabit Ethernet, and 6 SATA II ports make for the rest of it.

Intel Corporation today previewed a new Intel Xeon processor codenamed "Nehalem-EX." The processor will be at the heart of the next generation of intelligent and expandable high-end Intel server platforms, which will deliver a number of new technical advancements and boost enterprise computing performance.

In production later this year, the Nehalem-EX processor will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip supporting 16 threads and 24MB of cache. Its performance increase will be dramatic, posting the highest-ever jump from a previous generation processor.

NEC unveiled one of the slimmest netbooks to the hit the market, literally the size of a large scribbling-pad, and as slim as 15.8 mm. This 10-inch netbook tips the scales at 725 g, and offers a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Under its hood is an Intel Atom Z540 CPU, 1 GB of memory, and a 64 GB SSD. Its lone connectivity option is the gigabit Ethernet. Interestingly, it comes with Windows Vista Business Edition pre-loaded. It should hit the stores by July.

Intel's Core i5 series marks the consumer mainstream entry of the Nehalem architecture, in a bid to propagate quad-core processors, at the same time letting the market digest existing inventories of dual-core processors, and making sure its foundries are well-oiled to cater to the 32 nm process, Intel is giving its "Lynnfield" quad-core processor a quarter's head-start. Taiwanese industry observer DigiTimes notes that the platform' debut may have been delayed by a little over a month.

Originally slated for July, the industry debut of Lynnfield and its launch companion, Intel P55 chipset, have been pushed to early September. Stocks of the processors and compatible motherboards however, will be in time for the launch. The processors may be available to retailers about a week ahead, in late August itself, while compatible motherboards even earlier, in mid-August.

Intel plans to start the lineup with three models (yet to be named), clocked at 2.66 GHz, 2.80 GHz, and 2.93 GHz, and priced at US $194, $284, and $562 respectively (in 1000-unit tray quantities). Major motherboard vendors such as ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI have already displayed some of their first compatible motherboards. The P55 chipset itself is expected to be priced at $40.

Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, announced today it is shipping a bundle kit with the popular SSDNow M Series 80GB and 160GB solid-state drives. The SSDNow M Series are the Intel X-25M SATA SSDs. The bundle combines the solid-state drives (SSD) with the software tools necessary to clone the contents of one's hard-disk drive to the SSD, as well as installation hardware.

"This all-in-one kit is the perfect solution for enterprise companies, corporate end users and consumers to incorporate SSD technology into existing systems," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "The Kingston SSDNow M Series Bundle makes moving the operating system, applications and all other data from a hard-disk drive to a solid-state drive quick and easy whether for a notebook, desktop or workstation."

Having successfully established the Nehalem architecture-derived Core i7 series as the industry's fastest consumer processors available, and recently propagating the architecture to two-socket Xeon series for servers and high-end workstations, Intel is set to push up parallelism two-fold with the Nehalem-EX 8-core enterprise processor. The company will detail this new line of chips next week, although a commercial-launch can be expected only in late 2009 or early 2010.

The new chip will succeed the company's own Xeon E7000 "Dunnington" series 6-core processors, for having the highest available parallelism per socket. The 8 physical x86-64 processing cores will further feature HyperThreading technology, sending the logical-processor count to 16 threads per socket. Each processor packs 2.3 billion transistors. The processor will further be designed for systems with more than two sockets per board. Currently although server-builders sell 1U and 2U servers with more than two Nehalem quad-core processors, the system is designed by using two (or more) two-socket mainboards interconnected using Infiniband. The announcement will be made on May 26, in an address headed by Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of Server Platforms Marketing Group.

Intel was recently awarded a fine of over a billion Euros by the EU for anti-competitive malpractices in the EU. Speaking at Reuters Technology Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang accused Intel of anti-competitive pricing for the Intel Atom processor, although made it clear that NVIDIA won't be pressing charges any time soon.

According to NVIDIA, Intel sells an Atom processor typically for US $45 a piece, while in a bundle with Intel's own chipset consisting of an i945-class northbridge and ICH7-class southbridge for just $25, that's $25 for the processor and Intel chipset. This is driving away motherboard manufacturers from opting for Intel Atom paired with NVIDIA's single-package Ion chipset, which NVIDIA claims, (and reviews have shown,) to offer superior performance and features at almost half the board footprint. "That seems pretty unfair," Huang said. "We ought to be able to compete and serve that market."

Intel announced that its researchers have crossed an important milestone in the ongoing Tera-Scale project the company flagged-off last year. The company has just developed an ultra low voltage special-purpose video encoding accelerator. Built on the 65 nm CMOS, the device could accelerate video compression, and encoding at speeds in excess of 10-times that of what general-purpose execution manages while consuming as low as 220mV. The company however, did not go into specifics on products based on the technology.

Last week, Intel announced its Visual Computing Research Center at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. During its opening ceremony, details emerged about when Intel plans to commercially introduce Larrabee, the company's take on graphics processing using x86-based parallelism. The company categorically stated that one could expect Larrabee to be out only by early 2010.

"I would expect volume introduction of this product to be early next year," said Intel chief executive Paul Otellini. Until now, Larrabee was known to be introduced coarsely around the 2009-2010 time-frame. "We always said it would launch in the 2009/2010 timeframe," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer in an email to PC Magazine. "We are narrowing that timeframe. Larrabee is healthy and in our labs right now. There will be multiple versions of Larrabee over time. We are not releasing additional details at this time," he added. In the same event, Intel displayed a company slide with a die-shot of Larrabee, revealing what looked like the x86 processing elements. Sections of the media were abuzz with inferences drawn on the die-shot, some saying that it featured as many as 32 processing elements.

Intel's HyperThreading technology (HTT) was a nifty feature back in the Pentium 4 days, where the single-core processor could interact with the OS by providing two logical processors. The feature was known to enhance performance for applications that supported SMT. With the Core i7 and Atom series, HTT made a comeback, and software major Microsoft seems to be busy optimizing its newest OS, Windows 7, to make the make the most out of HTT, better than older versions of the OS could.

Speaking with InformationWeek, Microsoft's senior VP for Windows development Bill Veghte said "The work that we've done in Windows 7 in the scheduler and the core of the system to take full advantage of those [HyperThreading] capabilities, ultimately we think we can deliver a great and better experience for you." This could particularly come as good news for users with multi-threaded productivity applications, and newer 3D games. Intel's roadmaps show a rosy future for HTT, after entry-level Atom and enthusiast-level Core i7 featuring it, Intel has an entire lineup of CPUs under the Core i5 series that support HTT.

Acer's Aspire One is the world's leading brand of netbooks, and the company is building on the lineup with more, premium variants. The chassis of the Aspire One 571 resembles that of the D150 series. Under the hood are some interesting components: Intel Atom N280 clocked at 1.66 GHz, aided by Intel's homegrown chipset. The 10.5-inch screen provides a resolution of 1280x720 pixels (HD 720p), and the netbook boasts of HD video hardware acceleration thanks to the Quartics QV1721 multimedia coprocessor, that accelerates full-HD (1080p) video encoding/decoding. Removable storage is care of a V-Media disc-drive left of the touchpad. A V-Media disk is a Blu-Ray disc with a diameter of 32 mm enclosed in a plastic sheath (floppy-style). It provides 1 GB of storage, with a 2 GB version in the works. Its launch-date isn't known although with Computex around the corner, this netbook may have found its launch-vehicle.

Gigabyte added its entry to the league of Intel Atom-embedded mini-ITX motherboards, the GA-GC330UD. This motherboard features the typical combination of dual-core Atom 330 paired with Intel i945GC, with a pinch of the manufacturing technologies Gigabyte is known for. The Atom 330 dual-core is clocked at 1.60 GHz, and features 512 KB of cache. It remains passively cooled as against the northbridge which uses a fan-heatsink. A single DDR2 memory slot will accept up to 2 GB of DDR2 533/667 MHz memory, although 533 MHz is as far as the memory controller can support.

Storage is care of an IDE and two SATA connectors, supporting four storage devices in all. Basic 6-channel audio and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet make for the rest of the mix. Gigabyte used a 2 oz copper bi-layer PCB, and an all solid-state capacitor design that ups durability. Gigabyte looks to target the grass-root of the market, with this motherboard targeting businesses and internet kiosks.

Although Intel made the Core 2 Duo E8700 official as early as in January, the chip showed little or no signs of reaching retail. Even the most popular retailers in US and EU don't offer this chip, and continue to sell the Core 2 Duo E8600 at its target price range of US $250~$270. Chinese retailer PCPop started listing E8700, at a price that displaces E8600: 1750 Yuan (US $256). While the store doesn't list E8600 so we could tell to which extant it is displaced, its nearest neighbour E8500 is priced at 1210 Yuan ($177), showing that the displacement may affect the price of E8600 to a greater extent than it would to its lower models, as E8500 remains at its common price. The E8700 is clocked at 3.50 GHz, with an FSB speed of 1333 MHz, and a bus multiplier of 10.5x. Despite its high clock speed, the processor continues to come with a rated TDP of 65W.

The European Commission today found Intel guilty of abusing its dominant position in the global x86 microprocessor market, saying that "Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years. Such a serious and sustained violation of the EU's antitrust rules cannot be tolerated." The Commission also stated that "there is evidence that Intel had sought to conceal the conditions associated with its payments." The EC decision requires Intel to change its business practices immediately and fines Intel a record EUR 1.06 billion (US $1.45 billion).

"Today's ruling is an important step toward establishing a truly competitive market," said Dirk Meyer, AMD president and CEO. "AMD has consistently been a technology innovation leader and we are looking forward to the move from a world in which Intel ruled, to one which is ruled by customers."

Paul Otellini, Intel Corporation president and CEO today issued the following statement regarding the European Commission decision on Intel's business practices:

"Intel takes strong exception to this decision. We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace - characterized by constant innovation, improved product performance and lower prices. There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal."

Intel has everything going its way when it comes to mobile computing, and the processors it sells that power notebooks and netbooks across every segment of the market. Intel uses the common classification of portable computers (consumer segment), using sizes and form-factors to differentiate mainstream notebooks, performance notebooks, ultra-thin notebooks, "larger" sub-notebooks (netbooks), and common entry-level netbooks. To cater to each of these, Intel made things easier by coming up with platforms (sets of processor and chipset combinations), a market approach both Intel and AMD have been using recently.

Starting with mainstream, and performance notebooks (traditionally above 14-inches in size, above US $1200 in price), Intel has the Calpella platform, that marks the entry of Nehalem architecture to the mobile scene. This is slated for 3Q 2009. Intel will simultaneously lower the prices of its current Montevina platform, to let inventories digest. Major hardware manufacturers are preparing their "launch-vehicles" for the Calpella platform, which will make it in time for Q3 2009.

Following the news we covered the other day, the verdict is now in, and as expected Intel has been found guilty and fined €1.06 Billion ($1.45b/£948m) by the European Commission for anti-competitive practices. This fine smashes the €497 million fine issued to Microsoft by the EU in 2004 for abusing its dominant market position. Nine years on from when AMD first made a complaint that Intel had paid computer manufacturers not to use AMD chips in Europe the EU have ruled that Intel had given rebates to manufacturer's if they only used their chips, and had also found that a retailer had been paid to sell only Intel based systems.
"Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years," said Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, "Such a serious and sustained violation of the EU's antitrust rules cannot be tolerated."

Intel chose the occasion of the opening ceremony for the Intel Visual Computing Institute at the Saarland University in Germany, to conduct a brief presentation about the visual computing technologies the company is currently working on. The focal point was Larrabee, the codename for Intel's upcoming "many-cores" processor that will play a significant role in Intel's visual computing foray way beyond integrated graphics. The die-shot reveals in intricate network of what look like the much talked-about x86 processing elements that bring about computing parallelism in Larrabee. Another slide briefly describes where Intel sees performance demands heading, saying that its growth is near-exponential with growth in common dataset sizes.

Worldwide PC microprocessor shipments in the first calendar quarter of 2009 (1Q09) fell significantly for the second quarter in a row, according to new data from IDC. While the decline was slightly more than typically occurs between fourth quarter and first quarter, IDC believes that the market's decline is slowing.

In 1Q09, worldwide PC processor unit shipments declined -10.9% from 4Q08 to 1Q09, as compared to -17.0% from 3Q08 to 4Q08. Unit shipments declined -13.0% from 1Q08 to 1Q09.

Market revenue declined -11% from 4Q09 to 1Q09, as compared to -18.0% from 3Q08 to 4Q08. Revenue declined -25.1% from 1Q08 to 1Q09.

Intel Corporation is investing $12 million to create a new research center that will explore advanced graphics and visual computing technologies. Opening today, the Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The investment, to be made over 5 years, represents Intel's largest European university collaboration.

Visual computing is the analysis, enhancement and display of visual information to create life-like, real-time experiences and more natural ways for people to interact with computers and other devices. Applications include games, medical imaging and interactive 3-D data models used in areas such as scientific research and financial services. Intel's visual computing vision is to realize computer applications that look real, act real and feel real.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, today announced a new study that indicates the end of the market for the popular integrated graphics chipset, known as the IGP.

After fifteen years of stellar growth the IGP will cease to exist, replaced by embedded graphics in the processor. Integrated graphics are used in desktop and net top PCs, notebooks, and netbooks, and various embedded systems such as point of sale, set-top boxes, and signage systems.

The European Union trade regulatory body is expected to announce its verdict on the high-profile antitrust case against Intel on Wednesday. The company has been booked under charges relating to market malpractice, by influencing computer hardware manufacturers to postpone and/or cancel launches of their products that use CPUs made by its rival AMD. Intel allegedly abused its market position in the CPU industry, to cripple the growth of AMD in Europe, by offering special rebates to computer hardware manufacturers to restrict or eliminate the use of AMD processors. The company allegedly even influenced retailers by offering inducements to sell computers only with Intel processors installed.

The first violation by Intel is that it allegedly set set percentages of its own chips that it wanted PC makers to use, according to sources. Examples include NEC, which was told that only 20 percent of its products could use AMD processors. All Lenovo-made notebooks use Intel processors, while 95% of HP's product-line features Intel processors, sources said.

Water-cooling specialist Koolance released its first liquid-nitrogen evaporator. An LN2 evaporator, sometimes called "LN2 pot" is a metal flask that makes direct contact with a heat source, and conveys its heat to liquid nitrogen that the user pours into the flask. The heat instantly evaporates nitrogen, and some extremely low temperatures are brought about. Koolance CPU-LN2 measures 6cm x 20 cm x 6 cm (WxHxD) without the support bracket, and weighs in at 1.58 kg (around 3.5 lbs). It is built using nickel-plated copper, with acetal to shroud its upper portion. It supports the entire range of current CPU sockets, that include Intel sockets LGA-1366, LGA-775, LGA-771, s603/4, s478, and AMD sockets AM3/AM2+/AM2, s939/940, and s754. It is available at the company website for US $144.99.

Intel continues to use the Pentium brand name for its series of downscaled Core 2 series processors between the Core 2 Duo and Celeron lines. Japanese website ASCII.jp spotted a new model under the series, the E6300, originally slated for end of May. A retail box was spotted at a ground store. The most peculiar part of the name is its model number "E6300", which that has been used by one of the earliest Core 2 Duo models. The Pentium E6300 however, is the faster chip. While the Core 2 Duo E6300 is clocked at 1.86 GHz, with 2 MB of L2 cache and 1066 MHz FSB, the Pentium E6300 is clocked at 2.80 GHz with the same FSB speed and L2 cache size.

The Pentium E6300 achieves its 2.80 GHz speed with a bus multiplier of 10.5 (x 266 MHz). It is based on the 45 nm Wolfdale-2M core. The model follows the Pentium E5400 (2.70 GHz, 13.5 x 200 MHz) and falls into the E6000 series for having the 1066 MHz FSB. So in essence, it falls between the E5000 series' use of the Wolfdale-2M core, and the E7000 series' use of the 1066 MHz FSB. ASCII.jp notes its price to be at ￥8,880 (around US $90).

AMD kept up with the SIMD processing standards Intel set by licensing its popular CPU instruction sets such as MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3. The three were used as is by AMD, except for that AMD chose not to conform completely with Supplemental SSE3, SSE4 and its revisions (SSE4.1, SSE4.2). The company devised the SSE4A instruction set to feature with its K10 micro-architecture. SSE4A is a lighter version that features LZCNT (Leading Zero Count), POPCNT (bit population count), EXTRQ/INSERTQ and MOVNTSD/MOVNTSS (Scalar streaming store instructions). What's more, the company even decided back in 2007 that it would come up with SSE5, that then Intel sought to leave development with AMD.

In due course of time, Intel started development of AVX (Advanced Vector eXtensions) that enhances processing of FPU-intensive workloads. AMD gained interest in this technology, and is looking to make it compatible with the originally-conceived SSE5. The instructions that remain as part of the superset that doesn't include AVX is now referred to by AMD as XOP (eXtended OPerations). In addition to this, AMD will include FMA4 (Floating point vector Multiply-Accumulate). The new instruction sets make it to AMD's next-generation Bulldozer micro-architecture slated for 2011. Meanwhile, Intel's AVX makes it to the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture slated for 2010~11. AMD published the Programmer's Manual document on 128-Bit and 256-Bit XOP, FMA4 and CVT16 Instructions, which can be read here (PDF).