Although Intel has not yet officially announced its high-end X48 chipset, some first-tier motherboard makers started shipping boards in small volumes a few days ago, DigiTime reports. The report claims that both ASUSTeK Computer and GIGABYTE Technology have already started shipping their motherboards, and wide product availability is expected for this week. Manufacturers like MSI and DFI will follow soon.

Blastflow, a subsidiary of British boutique PC manufacturer Vadim Computers, just announced its latest product, the Blastflow Tidal Skulltrail SB Block: If you are worried about the heat produced by your sparkling new Skulltrail PC system, this copper cooler for the Southbridge and SLI bridges might be the solution. The new Tidal Skulltrail SB Block is manufactured using a combination of polished copper and transparent acrylic top, which provides enough cooling power for the two NVIDIA nForce 100 chips and the single ESB2 Southbridge. The watercooler weighs about 314 grams and uses standard 1/4" bsp thread connections. Pricing of the Tidal Skulltrail SB Block has not been announced.

Intel announced plans to enter the SSD market this year with vigour, eliminating the competition in the eyes of makers like Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk. At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products is about to get a big boost in the second quarter of this year when Intel will start offering 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, according to Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. "What I can tell you is ours is much better than that," Winslow said. "We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA [SATA 3 Gb/s] offering," he also pointed. Unfortunately, with this all details revealed end. The full story can be found here.

The first quad-core mobile part, the Core 2 Extreme QX9300 for Montevina Platform will come along in Q3 for $1038. Intel has also added two new Celeron processors for the Montevina Value Platform: Celeron 585 and 575 based on the older 65nm Merom core. Lastly, the Atom N270 (1.66GHz/533FSB) for Basic Notebook Platform will arrive in Q2 for S$44.

A leaked PDF from Sun Microsystems' website (which has now been removed) suggests that Intel could have something quite impressive up its sleeve with its upcoming Nehalem processor. The processor was already rumoured to feature three channels of DDR3 memory per core compared to two channels of DDR2 per core on AMD's Barcelona and upcoming Shanghai CPUs, and it seems that could give the Nehalem quite a performance boost. Extrapolated figures from ZDNet based on data in the slide are shown in the graph below, and as you can see, the Nehalem on average scores twice as highly as a 2.3GHz Barcelona and almost 40% better than a 2.8GHz Shanghai in SPEC CPU tests. As always with benchmarks on unreleased hardware it's important to remember that the data may not be accurate and synthetic benchmarks don't always reflect real-world performance, but if these are at all reliable then Intel's next generation of processors could be a huge leap forward.

Following delays due to issues with the processor system bus on Intel's Yorkfield processors, it looks like the 45nm quad-core chips may finally go on sale sometime during the next few days. Industry sources are claiming that the processors have now gone into mass production, meaning the 45nm Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550 should be available from next week. The Q9550 and Q9450 will run at 2.83GHz and 2.66GHz respectively, with a 1333MHz bus and 12MB of L2 cache. The Q9300 will run at 2.5GHz with an L2 cache of 6MB. Intel's official prices for the Q9550, Q9450 and Q9300 are $530, $316 and $266 respectively. The 45nm manufacturing process should allow the chips to run cooler and potentially allow more headroom for overclocking.

The Intel Atom processor will be the name for a new family of low-power processors designed specifically for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and a new class of simple and affordable Internet-centric computers arriving later this year. Together, these new market segments represent a significant new opportunity to grow the overall market for Intel silicon, using the Intel Atom processor as the foundation. The company also announced the Intel Centrino Atom processor technology brand for MID platforms, consisting of multiple chips that enable the best Internet experience in a pocketable device.

Intel is planning on serving a heaping pile of pain to AMD's revenue/stock figures again in a few months, by developing a six-core juggernaut. While AMD is still tweaking on a way to merely get four cores to work in tandem, Intel is hard at work shoving two more cores on one die. This six-core monstrosity will be succeeded by the even beefier Nehalem micro-architecture, which could have up to eight cores on one die. Most of the Dunnington project is still top-secret, but some say that Intel already has most of the hard work done.

Intel has already put together a die, the size of a postage stamp, with three dual-core 45nm Penryn chips on it sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Allegedly, we'll see the Dunnington in either Q2 or Q3, this year

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Oh snap, another world record in the intense world of benchmarking. MemoryExtreme Team ITALY recently nabbed the 3DMark crown in both 3DMark05 and 3DMark06. System specs and screenshots are below. Enjoy.

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 @ 5800MHz
• ASUS P5E3 WS
• 2 x 1024 Cellshock DDR3 1800
• 2 x Radeon HD 2900XT 1250MHz/1880MHz
• Ultra X3 1600W power supply
• CPU pot MM rev3
• GPU pot Tek 9 3.0
• 80 liters of liquid nitrogen

For those who crave more performance than what four processing cores and a single graphics card can deliver today, Intel Corporation has introduced the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Formerly codenamed "Skulltrail," this is one of the first enthusiast desktop platforms to support two Intel quad core processors for a total of eight processing engines and a choice of multi-card graphics solutions from either ATI or NVIDIA.

Intel is planning to rename its brand name for the upcoming notebook Montevina platform to Centrino 2 in order to clear up confusion for consumers, according to DigiTimes. Intel has used the brand name Centrino for four generations of its notebook platforms including Carmel, Sonoma, Napa and Santa Rosa. Although the technology and specifications have continued to improve, the unchanging brand name has left consumers unable to identify the differences, which has also lowered recognition in the market. The new marketing strategy should give consumers the feeling of a tangible upgrade and will hopefully spur demand for new laptops. Intel is set to launch the Centrino 2 platform in June this year at Computex Taipei 2008 along with six 45nm notebook CPUs, all with a 1066MHz FSB.

American Technology Research analyst Doug Friedman believes NVIDIA could acquire Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) despite AMD's x86 license from Intel being non-transferable. Friedman believes that AMD and Intel's long term roadmaps are a threat to NVIDIA and cites mounting pressure from AMD's stock holders as a reason for its vulnerability to a buyout from NVIDIA. AMD's recent troubles with its quad core processors and ATI's recent weakness in the high end graphics market have only exacerbated this pressure. Friedman sees AMD and Intel's plans for integration of CPUs and GPUs as a threat to NVIDIA and believes NVIDIA anticipates this future competition as well. Combining this information with rumors that Intel is attempting to develop discrete graphics adapters of their own leaves NVIDIA in a possibly weakened position. However, AMD's extensive cross-licensing of x86 and other technologies with Intel would not be NVIDIA's only obstacle. They would also face possible anti-trust investigation from United States and European Union law enforcement agencies.

The San Jose Mercury News web site is reporting that at next week's Game Developers Conference a number of companies, including those that are normally fierce rivals, will be announcing a new effort to promote PC gaming. According to the article, which uses unnamed sources, the group will be called the PC Gaming Alliance and will involve a joint effort between companies like Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD as well as a number of computer companies. The story states that the PC Gaming Alliance "will keep the PC competitive with game consoles to attract key game developers" and adds that it "will coordinate and expand those efforts to improve the experience of playing games on computers." The original story is found here, while the time when we'll see if this is all true is February 18-22, 2008 in San Francisco, or the date when GDC starts.

Intel Corp. has shrunk another processor that will be incorporated into new ultrathin laptops, possibly creating competition for the processor it developed for the MacBook Air ultrathin laptop. Lenovo Group Ltd. and Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. will include Intel's low-voltage Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV chip in laptops that are expected to hit the market soon. Like the Core 2 Duo processor specially developed for Apple Inc.'s MacBook Air notebook, Intel shrunk the new processor to make it 60% smaller than standard-size processors in its Merom family, according to Connie Brown, an Intel spokeswoman. The chip is manufactured using the 65-nanometer process, like other Merom processors. Though the size is the same, the SL7100 LV chip consumes less power and operates at a slower speed than the Macbook Air chip. It will operate at 1.2GHz, with 4MB of cache. It uses 12 watts of power, according to specs provided by Intel. The Core 2 Duo processor for MacBook Air uses 20 watts of power and operates at 1.6 to 1.8GHz. The new processor was developed independently of the MacBook Air processor, Brown said. "These [SL7100 LV processors] are similar but not identical to the Apple processor," Brown said. The MacBook Air processor was specially developed to meet Apple's needs and is also available to other PC makers, Brown said. The new SL100 LV will most likely be adopted in Lenovo's new X300 ultra portable PC.

At this point, it seems as though Intel has just about everything in the world going right for them. They're getting a lot of money, their CPUs are in just about every computer, and they have had the best products on the market for the past several months. However, AMD and the European Union don't feel like Intel got this success in a legitimate manner. And so, the European Union sent law enforcement agents to do surprise raids. The raids being sent out are searching for one thing in particular: hard evidence that Intel pressured retail stores to avoid AMD-based products. These charges are added on to similar monopoly charges already put upon Intel by the European Union.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Intel Research demonstrated a "first" in wireless communication, jointly developed with Nokia R&D and Nokia Siemens Networks R&D. The researchers showed a wifi/wimax heterogeneous seamless hand-over based on 802.21. This makes it possible to run a video conferencing application, for example, on a mobile internet device and seamlessly roam between WiFi and WiMAX networks, with no viewing disruption. And better yet, no user interaction necessary to go find a new available wireless network and connect. View the demo at the Intel booth, or virtually here in a blog from Intel researcher Christian Maciocco.

In a hilarious and somewhat cruel twist of fate, market research has proven that AMD sells more when Intel really lays down the advertising. Stephen DiFranco, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at AMD, had this to say in regards to Intel's advertising.

I wish they would advertise more. I beg them publicly, please advertise more. Create more demand. Some weeks in the United States there are more AMD desktops and notebooks sold than Intel.

Granted, DiFranco later admitted that most consumers hardly know the difference between AMD and Intel. However, going from a 5% retail market share to a 50% retail market share without spending any money on advertising is pretty hard to explain any other way.

A lawsuit filed today by the University of Wisconsin claims that the processor infringes on patented technology developed by one of its professors, back in 1998. Gurindar Sohi, Computer Science department chair, presented some of his developments relating to instruction level parallelism to Intel and offered to license them, but got nowhere, yet the same tech is in the Core 2 Duo, according to the lawsuit. Intel says its been talking to the Badgers for over a year now, and that it has not evaluated the complaint, which it might want to do in short order, since the University of Wisconsin is asking for the court to halt shipments of the Core 2 Duo in addition to monetary damages and legal fees.

Intel Corporation and STMicroelectronics reached a key industry milestone today as they began shipping prototype samples of a future product using a new, innovative memory technology called Phase Change Memory (PCM). The prototypes are the first functional silicon to be delivered to customers for evaluation, bringing the technology one step closer to adoption.

All hardcore gamers and hardware experts will be very pleased to know that ASUS is working on a Intel 5400 + Intel ESB2E powered workstation motherboard. The Z7S-WS, just like Intel's Skulltrail platform which is all over the news today, adopts two LGA 771 processors, FB-DIMM DDR2 memory (6x slots for up to 24GB memory), and has 2x PCI-e x16 and 1x PCI-e x8 slots. According to the source of the news we should expect the Z7S-WS to come in March for USD $627.

During the International Solid State Circuits Conference this week, Intel is set to unveil a range of new technologies, including the low-power Silverthorne and a new two-billion transistor, quad-core Itanium microprocessor codenamed Tukwila. The first version of Tukwila is expected to arrive in the second half of this year, and will replace Intel's previous dual-core sever chip, the 9100 series codenamed Montvale. The Montvale was based on Intel's 90nm process, while the Tukwila is based on a 45nm process. The Tukwila processor is expected to have 30MB of cache, along with Reliability, Availability, Serviceability (RAS) features including a circuit design that has been hardened to resist soft errors - which reduces the probability of a system crash. Like its predecessor, the new Tukwila Itanium processor will be aimed at the enterprise and server space. Intel's successor from the Tukwila, the "Poulson" is expected sometime between 2010 and 2011.

A little bit early if you ask me, but FUGGER from XtremeSystems has posted his new overclocking buddies: Intel D5400XS, 2x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPUs @ 5586MHz (FSB: 399x14) and a duo of custom LN2 containers. Watch this thread for more results later today.

Intel has sent out a notice to inform its partners that the X48 chipset delivery will be delayed to sometime in March. No motherboard manufacturers will get chipsets before March and that includes the first tier brands like ASUS and GIGABYTE. Intel did not give any official reason for the delay.

Intel has spilled a few more details about Silverthorne, its upcoming 45nm processor for UMPCs (Ultra-Mobile PC) and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Silverthorne was developed from the ground up for low-power devices, and Intel said today that the chip will consume no more than 2W of power and support HyperThreading (HT) technology. This means that although the Silverthorne is a single-core chip, it will appear to the host device as a two-core chip. It's unlikely to deliver the same performance boost that adding a second true core does, but it will deliver a significant speed improvement over the single-core parts that have been used in UMPCs to date. Intel didn't say how fast Silverthorne will run, but it did claim the design will scale to deliver 2GHz clock speeds with a 1W power consumption "some time in the future". Silverthorne will be paired with the 'Paulsbo' integrated chipset to form 'Menlow', Intel's next-gen UMPC platform. They're all expected to come to market in the April/May timeframe.

4Gamer, prior to the soon to be announced formally Intel Skulltrail platform, has posted some first look benchmark results. You may consider this as full review perhaps the first full review of Intel Skulltrail, since the system was fully assembled and running with the Intel D5400XS Extreme Desktop Board, 2x Core 2 Extreme QX9775 (3.20GHz, 2x6MB L2 cache) processors, 2x 2GB Micron PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM FB-DIMM, and pair of ELSA GLADIAC 988 GTX 768MB (GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB) in SLI configuration. The Google translated review can be accessed here. Enjoy the system and don't try to calculate the overall price (each CPU is expected to cost USD $1,399).