Intel has confirmed that it is facing production problems with its still unreleased Intel Atom chips, prompted by demands that exceed initial expectations. "We are working closely with our customers to meet their needs," said Intel spokesman Bill Calder. "We're just seeing better-than-anticipated demand." he added. The 45nm single core Intel Atom processor is based on an entirely new design, built for low power and designed specifically for ultra low-cost portable devices such as laptops. The official launch of the Atom chips is scheduled for release in June 2008. Mini-laptops powered by them will be available shortly after. More than 10 PC makers have already placed orders with Intel for Atom chips. However, initial reports suggest that Intel will be able to meet only 40% of these orders and expect the short supply of Atom chips to continue until the third quarter of 2008. Most affected by the shortage are companies like: Acer, Dell, MSI and GIGABYTE.

Cray Inc. and Intel Corporation announced today they signed a multi-year agreement to advance high-performance computing (HPC) on Intel microprocessors while delivering broad new Intel and Cray technologies in future Cray server systems. The collaboration of these two industry leaders will result in HPC systems that will help solve some of the world's most complex scientific, engineering and humanitarian challenges.

After yesterday's price reductions, Intel is now releasing a new 45nm dual-core processor. Previously reported in some Intel price charts, Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 is a 1333MHz FSB CPU with 6MB of L2 cache, a 65W TDP and stock frequency of 2.83GHz. The CPU has already made its way into stores with a price of $163 in 1000-unit tray quantities.

Intel slashed today the prices of its 65nm Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad Q6600/Q6700 Kentsfield processors. The tray price of the Q6600, which has been the universal quad-core in Intel's line-up for more than a year, was dropped 16% from $266 to $224. More important than the Q6600 drop, Q6700 which had a tray price of $530 now costs $266 - almost 50% cheaper.
Other price reductions include the 65nm, 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E6850 (-31% to $183), which now matches the price of the 45nm E8400 (3.0GHz) as well as the Pentium E2200 (-12% to $74), the E2180 (-14% to $64), the Celeron 560 (-20% to $107), the Celeron 550 (-20% to $86), the Celeron 440 (-17% to $44) and the Celeron 430 (-23% to $34).

Another day, another world record broken. K|ngp|n, well known for his LN2 cooling projects and many previous world records, has become the first man to pass the 6GHz barrier with dual Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors (3.2GHz) and Intel Skulltrail enthusiast gaming platform. Who would of guessed that 8 cores can run at this insane speed? Here are two new wPrime world records as well, 32MB @ 3.450s and 1024M @ 1m 52s respectively. More results here.

In a brief conversation Helen Ling, an ASUS representative from the company's UK office, told TechRadar that Intel Atom based Eee PC systems are also going to debut soon. When asked about the arrival of Intel Atom inside the Eee PC she said that the new machine will arrive by the "end of June in [the] UK, I would have thought." Later in the session Ling also added: "I think it should be after Computex". Atom will debut during the 28th Taipei International Information Technology Show (Computex 2008) which will run from June 3 to June 7, 2008. Current ASUS Eee PC 900 low-cost laptops are still powered by a Celeron M processor.

Intel Corporation today announced record first-quarter revenue of $9.7 billion, operating income of $2.1 billion, net income of $1.4 billion and earnings per share (EPS) of 25 cents.

EMCORE Corporation announced a definitive agreement with Intel Corporation to acquire the enterprise and storage assets of Intel's Optical Platform Division as well as the Intel Connects Cables business. EMCORE will issue 3.7 million shares of restricted stock for the acquisition, with certain adjustments based on EMCORE's stock price twelve months after the closing of the transaction. The assets include intellectual property, inventory, fixed assets and technology relating to optical transceivers for enterprise and storage customers, as well as optical cable interconnects for high-performance computing clusters. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year.

Just like many other manufacturers, Dell now announced plans to take a piece of the sub-$500 low-cost notebook market, by releasing its first low-cost 8.9-inch mini-laptop made by Compal Electronics. Compal will initially ship 200,000-300,000 notebook computers to Dell each month, a Compal official said, confirming the existense of such a product. Compal Electronics, the world's second-largest contract manufacturer of notebook computers by revenue after Quanta Computer Inc., aims to ship 1 million to 2 million low-cost notebook computers to Dell in 2008, the official added. Specifications of the new Dell mini-laptop are unknown, but first batches are expected to ship in early June, the same time when Intel's new Atom processors are set to become available.

Epic Games, the award-winning developer of multimillion-selling games and the world's leading game engine, Unreal Engine 3, today announced plans to follow up the original "$1 Million Make Something Unreal Contest" with an all new competition to include esteemed sponsor, Intel Corporation. Winnings exceed $1 million in value, and consist of one coveted Unreal Engine 3 license as a grand prize and other cash awards and prizes, including Intel Software Development Products and Velocity Micro PCs based on the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform with two Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors. The 2008 "$1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest" will be judged in four preliminary phases and a grand final. Judging will begin in June 2008 and will conclude, with the grand final prizes being awarded, in fall 2009.

I promissed more details on Intel Nehalem yesterday, and now it is time to keep my word. During the first day of Spring IDF 2008, the guys over at HEXUS.net have pictured the first working sample of a quad-core Intel Nehalem processor operating at 3.2GHz (revision A1). The 1366-pin, 731M-transistor 45nm native quad-core model, utilizes 256KB of L2 cache for each core, as well as 8MB of L3 cache. The CPU also integrates triple-channel DDR3-1333MHz memory controller and SSE4 instructions. Like the new 533MHz Silverthorne-based Atom processors, Nehalem will also incorporate Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) which is also known as Hyper-Threading (HT). Each physical core in a single Nehalem processor is paired up with its own virtual core. As a result, the quad-core processor will be detected to have eight cores (on the picture). Predictions say that this new architecture will offer around 30% better performance, on a clock-for-clock basis, when compared to Core 2, in a heavily-multithreaded environment - HPC and low-end servers, mainly. Current Intel roadmaps list the Nehalem launch date for Q4 2008, with a simulteanous rollout across servers and desktops.

Intel Corporation today introduced five new Intel Atom processors and Intel Centrino Atom processor technology for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and embedded computing solutions. The technology package includes the Intel Atom processor (formerly codenamed "Silverthorne") plus a single-chip with integrated graphics called the Intel System Controller Hub that enables PC-like capabilities, an uncompromised Internet experience and long battery life in smaller devices that can fit in your pocket. Manufacturers around the world are planning to ship Intel-based MIDs beginning this summer.

Intel to Ready DirectX 10 IGP Driver By the End of April

Intel is planning to announce a DirectX 10 driver for its IGP chipsets around the end of April, DigiTimes reports. The company's G35 chipset was originally planned to launch last year with native DirectX 10 support, however due to driver issues products eventually went to market without support. The driver will be labeled as version 15.9 and will support the G35 chipset as well as the upcoming G45/GM45 IGP chipsets and notebook GM965/GL960 chipsets. The only Intel product that was reported to support DirectX 10, but will be missing in this driver will be the desktop G965 chipset.

Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Shanghai, China, officially opens its doors from April 2nd to April 3rd. Topics set to be covered at IDF Shanghai include Netbook, Nettop, Bloomfield (Nehalem), solid-state drives, QuickAssist (accelerators), system-on-chip (Tolapai), and USB 3.0. The pictures below are from one of these topics, the new quad-core Nehalem CPU, or more specificly its core. Intel's future Nehalem will bring a totally new system architecture and a next-gen platform architecture. It will come in new socket, and will be the first processor to have up to 8 cores and integrated DDR3 memory controller. Expect more details tomorrow.

Intel Corporation today announced that the company has finalized and closed its transaction with STMicroelectronics and Francisco Partners to create a new independent semiconductor company Numonyx B.V. that will design, develop and manufacture NOR and NAND flash memory products. As part of the transaction, Intel has transferred the assets associated with its NOR flash memory business and certain assets related to the company's phase change memory initiatives to Numonyx in exchange for 45.1 percent ownership in Numonyx. ST Microelectronics acquired a 48.6 percent ownership interest in Numonyx. Francisco Partners acquired a 6.3 percent ownership interest in exchange for a cash investment of $150 million.

Intel is delaying the launch schedule of its P45 chipset from originally in May to mid-June, DigiTimes is reporting. The delay of the chipset is due to problems over compatibility between the chipset's PCI Express x16 port and graphics cards. Intel has notified its board partners that the problem should be solved two to four weeks behind the original launch schedule, with mass availability expected soon after that. Intel will now announce the P45 chipset during Computex 2008, however, actual motherboard shipments will not begin until mid-June.

Chip maker Intel has just added the DX48BT2 motherboard to its website. Manufactured by Intel, the DX48BT2 Desktop Board offers the new X48 Express chipset with support for all Intel 45nmm Socket 775 processors operating up to 1600MHz FSB. It also has official support for DDR3 memory up to 1600MHz with XMP Extreme Memory Profiles. The board offers two PCI-e 2.0 16x and one PCI Express 1.0a x16 graphics slots. An 8-channel (7.1) Dolby Home Theater Audio codec and Gigabit LAN module are also presented.

Intel Corporation has further increased its energy-efficient performance lead today with the introduction of two low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) processors for servers and workstations that run at 50 watts, or just 12.5 watts per core and frequencies as high as 2.50GHz. The Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor L5400 Series takes advantage of Intel's unique 45nm manufacturing capabilities and reinvented transistor formula that combine to boost performance and reduce power consumption in data centers.

These are the first close-up spy shots of Intel's next gen notebook Eco PC. Specs can be found in one of the pictures. All pictures of the Eco PCs are uploaded here.

Intel Smackover Motherboard Up Close and Personal

As Intel's next-gen 45nm Hi-k Nehalem CPU architecture codenamed Bloomfield is being planned for the fourth quarter of this year, it's time to see some pictures of the motherboard that will become home for these new processors. The board pictured below is an early reference sample codenamed "Smackover" (see picture 1). Smackover will be released in Q4 together with the Nehalem server parts and it will be a triple-channel DDR3 high-end workstation/gaming platform. The motherboard has single 1366-pin CPU socket, four DDR3-1333 slots, three of which being colored blue to signal the triple-channel support and two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, likely bringing CrossFire to Intel's platform. The only heatsink installed is the one covering the ICH10 southbridge while the Tylersburg NB is left "naked". The board has no IDE or floppy connectors, but only six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.

In order to defend its entry-level notebook market, Intel is planning to launch two 65nm Merom-based processors for its Centrino 2 platform (Montevina), according to DigiTimes. The CPUs will include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US $107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, and Celeron 575 at 2GHz with price of US $86. Both will support 667MHz FSB with 1MB L2 cache and have a TDP of 31W. In related news, Intel has also set the price for its Atom N270 notebook CPU (Diamondville) which forms part of the company's Basic Mobile Platform at US$44.

Intel Corporation and Microsoft Corp. are partnering with academia to create two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC), aimed at accelerating developments in mainstream parallel computing, for consumers and businesses in desktop and mobile computing. The new research centers will be located at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Microsoft and Intel have committed a combined $20 million to the Berkeley and UIUC research centers over the next five years. An additional $8 million will come from UIUC, and UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million in funds from a state-supported program to match industry grants. Research will focus on advancing parallel programming applications, architecture and operating systems software.

It looks like Intel has decided to adopt the same approach as AMD with the cache structure on its upcoming Nehalem processors, opting to go for small per-core L1 and L2 caches, with a large shared L3 cache. The new architecture will feature 64KB L1 cache per-core working in the same way as current Core 2 CPUs, but instead of a shared L2 cache each core will have 256KB of its own. All of the cores will then have access to a shared L3 cache of up to 8MB. AMD's Phenom CPUs work in a very similar manner, such as the 9600, which has 256KB L2 cache per-core and a shared 2MB L3 cache. The exclusive L2 caches give each core a pool of fast-access memory, while the shared cache acts as a buffer to trap data and instructions other cores may have requested, allowing another core to access it more quickly than using the main memory.

Intel Corporation today discussed upcoming leading edge microprocessors and technologies. Intel's 45nm high-k metal gate leading manufacturing technology is enabling the industry to move to multicore processors in all market segments, and Intel discussed future products with four, six, eight and many computing cores coming to the market.

Intel outlined plans to launch its first quad-core CPU for notebooks, the Core 2 Extreme QX9300, in the third quarter of this year with pricing set to US $1038 in thousand-unit tray quantities. While not expected to become standard in performance laptops, the new CPU will have some enviable characteristics. It will be manufactured using the company's advanced 45nm process, and have a core frequency of 2.53GHz (1066MHz FSB). Using a socket P package, the chip will include 12MB L2 cache and maximum TDP of 45W.