Intel launched three budget processors that include the Core 2 Quad Q8200, Core 2 Duo E5200 and Celeron D 450. The Q8200 quad-core chip comes with a clock-speed of 2.33 GHz. This processor is based on the newer 45 nm silicon fabrication process and comes with a total of 4 MB L2 cache. Owing to a front-side bus frequency of 1333 MHz, it comes with a FSB multiplier of 7x. This part is priced at US $224 in thousand-unit tray quantities.

The Core 2 Duo E5200 is clocked at 2.50 GHz, comes with 2 MB of L2 cache and 800 MHz FSB with a multiplier of 12.5x. It is priced at $84. This one is based on the 45nm process as well. The Celeron D 450 is clocked at 2.2 GHz with 800 MHz memory and features 512 KB of L2 cache. It is priced at $53 per piece. This however, is based on the older 65nm process.

A new world record has been set today (technically yesterday). Shark OC Team Italy has published the undeniable evidence that their DFI DK P45-T2RS PLUS motherboard and Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 processor are the fastest computer combo to calculate Super PI 1M in just 6.875 seconds. This world record was achieved using the E8600 CPU clocked at the incredible 6562MHz (FSB 656MHz x 10 multi) with 1.968 volts! not the best imaginable core voltage for a 45nm processor. If you are interested at what today's technology is capable of doing, please head over the original thread at XtremeSystems.com.

Congrats team Italy!

Apparently NVIDIA has decided to give all Intel owners a big present by introducing the native support of its SLI technology for Intel Nehalem. This information was published first at The Tech Report by Scott Wasson, and comes directly from the final editors meeting of NVISION. According to Tom Peterson, director of Technical Marketing for MCP products at NVIDIA, the company will authorize native SLI support on Intel X58 motherboards without the need of its nForce 200 chip - under certain circumstances. Those circumstances actually include a certification process of every Intel X58 motherboard at NVIDIA's Santa Clara certification lab. Once in the lab, the boards must pass basic testing for functionality, slot placement, and other criterions. After that the makers of these boards must select from a menu of licensing options available to them. Afterward to be certified boards will also be required to display an "SLI Certified" logo on their boxes and other marketing materials. Once the above steps are completed without a problem, NVIDIA will provide the board maker with an approval "cookie" key that it must embed in the system BIOS. The combination of this approval key and an Intel X58 chipset will then unlock SLI support in NVIDIA's ForceWare driver software. The whole process of certification is reported to be cheaper than the cost of the nForce 200 chip alone, which is around US $30. That's the interesting part you need to know, now we wait. The full story is posted here.

Without doubt, Nehalem is what the computing world is raving about. Intel's next generation PC processors will arrive at stores sometime September thru October. Intel has put in a nice set of incentives to woo the enthusiast community, perhaps some of whom are sitting tight on US $3000 worth of CPUs in the form of dual QX9775 installations. Incentives include the Turbo Mode dynamic speed adjustment feature, projecting the processors as powerhouse chips that also have the potential for extreme computing or overclocking. NordicHardware captured such an installation which features a Core i7 Bloomfield processor seated on a ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard with a liquid-nitrogen copper pot installed (a cooling device which consists of a copper cavity in contact with the CPU, in which liquid nitrogen is poured for rapid cooling). It's noted that the CPU temperatures plummeted to -120° C (or -184° F). It was noted that the Core i7 held on pretty well at those deep-space temperatures. There however, are no stability tests to back those observations as yet. Enjoy the pictures for now.For more pictures, visit this page.

Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors (codenamed Nehalem) will use the new X58 chipset and the ICH10-R Soutbhridge. DRR3 memory can be installed in six slots running DDR3-800, 1066 and 1333.

The board we took photos of is a protoype that's why you can see manual soldering and cabling on it.

With laptops, if mobility is what you seek for, and the convenience of working on the battery for longer, you would usually buy several spare batteries and keep one or two of them charged inside the laptop messenger bag. Imagine not having to hit the mains for 24 hours on a laptop, that's right, 24 hours. HP is making this possible with the Centrino 2 based EliteBook 6930p put on show at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) event. This laptop comes in two primary configurations, based on the Intel integrated graphics, or ones using discrete ATI graphics which understandably, come with lower battery life.

HP made this possible by providing you 6 hours of rated battery life on the stock battery, and expanded its life with the optional HP Ultra-Capacity battery takes its life up to 24 hours, a boon for people on long-flights, scientists on field work or even outdoor photographers, or even not having to charge up for days before it goes low and requires a charge. The machine put up at IDF for a MobileMark evaluation used Intel's upcoming Sold-State drives that draw a mere 0.15 W at load.

Without much pomp, Intel expanded its laptop processor lineup with new variants of the Core 2 Duo, the S-Series. These chips use the same small package Intel used in making processors for the Apple MacBook Air and similar compact deployments of the Core 2 Duo. These chips run run at clock speeds between 1.20 and 2.40 GHz. Nomenclature includes a "SP" and "SL" prefixes to a model number of 9400 for the top model and 9300 for the lower one. There's a "SU" prefix for low-cost variants with 3 MB L2 caches and 800 MHz FSB speeds.

The S-series chips and platform core-logic are about 60% smaller than their conventional counterparts, Intel confirms that their transit to the 45 nm silicon fabrication process has made it possible to reduce the package size and also reduce their energy footprint. Lenovo, it seems has already started using the SU 9300 or 9400 parts in its Thinkpad X301 slim form-factor laptops that are aimed to compete with Apple's MackBook air updates. The first picture shows (left to right) the processor, northbridge and southbridge. An extract from the product page shows its models.

Intel Corporation's chief technology officer took a fascinating look at how technology will bring man and machine much closer together by 2050.

Justin Rattner, during his keynote today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, predicted big changes are ahead in social interactions, robotics and improvements in computer's ability to sense the real world. He said Intel's research labs are already looking at human-machine interfaces and examining future implications to computing with some promising changes coming much sooner than expected.

"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. "There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."

The first platform image of a reference motherboard based on the 1160-pin land grid array (LGA-1160) and its initial corresponding core-logic Ibex Peak has emerged, it was pictured at the Intel Developer Forum. The pictures show a company reference board with the LGA-1160 socket. A quick glance over the board shows its most significant feature, the core-logic (chipset) is now consolidated into a single chip instead of the traditional northbridge + southbridge design. The board features four DDR3 slots, the processors that make it this platform, namely Lynnfield and Havendale would sport dual-channel memory controllers. This board merely demonstrates the platform, it cannot be taken as Intel's final design at this point. Next to the DDR3 slots can be seen a SO-DIMM slot, that goes on to show that the very same platform could drive Nehalem's mobile platform.

Ryan "Opie" Shrout, live blogger for PC Perspective took these snaps of slides pertaining to the next generation Atom processor that were on display at IDF.

According to the first slide, the next generation of Atom CPU, codenamed Moorestown planned for 2009 ~ '10 could reduce the idle power draw by greater than 10 times that of its predecessor. Intel also seems to be working on getting rid of the core-logic (chipset) the current implementations of the Atom processor are based on, the i945, which not many in the computing world seem to have appreciated owing to its power-draw. The second slide talks about a newer Langwell processor and Lincroft chipset which have been presented in a size comparison. If that plan materializes, expect a x86 PC module to be smaller in size than your credit card, fit for deployment into much smaller portable devices.

We are barely months into having Centrino 2 laptops at the store, following delays of six weeks with its launch owing to last minute glitches with its integrated graphics (IGP), and Intel has already demonstrated a Nehalem-based mobile computing platform at the ongoing Intel Developer Forum (IDF). This mobile computing platform for now can be loosely called a prelude to the successor of Centrino 2, it is codenamed Calpella.

The platform will be using dual-core and quad-core CPUs codenamed Auburndale and Clarksfield respectively. Intel set-up a Clarksfield validation platform with the mobile Nehalem in situ. The size of the active cooler explains a lot, and that's a quad-core chip we're talking about. It wouldn't be too far sighted telling that by this time, next year high-end laptops will be equipped with an 8-thread-capable Nehalem mobile CPU.

We promised to bring you some more details on Intel's future SSD family when IDF kicks off, and now that time has come. In San Francisco Intel demoed X18-M, the 80GB SSD model we talked about on Saturday here. X18 is the mainstream SSD from Intel based on the second generation SATA 3GB/s interface. The heart of X18 is made out of ten 8GB NAND flash chips, five on each side of the PCB. Intel promises read and write speeds of up to 240MB/s and 70-170MB/s respectively for this drive. Again no details on the price and the release date were disclosed. Please note that on the second picture, the controller chip of X18 is actually removed to prevent the drive from making its way into competitors' hands.

After Intel's Nehalem platform is no secret anymore, it's time to start looking at the motherboards that will support the new Socket 1366 buddies. One of them is ASUSTeK's upcoming P6T Deluxe mainboard based on Intel's yet-to-be-released X58 Express, the first chipset to power the Socket 1366 Core i7 Nehalem processors. As part of the whole platform, the P6T Deluxe has a total of six DDR3 slots intended for triple-channel mode and three PCI-Express x16 slots with support for dual and triple video card configurations. It's too early to say which one, ATI's CrossFire, NVIDIA's SLI or both combos. Expect further information when the time comes. Meanwhile if you want to take a closer look at the motherboard please click here.

During the ongoing Intel Developer Forum (IDF) event, Intel has announced its first 6-core processor codenamed Dunnington. It will be branded as the Xeon X7460 and is expected to become available in servers beginning next month. Intel claims that systems using this chip already broke performance records, including an 8-socket 48-core IBM System x3950 M2 server, which became the first platform to break the 1 million tpmC barrier on the TPC-C benchmark.

Intel has also shed some light on the upcoming fleet of processors based on the Nehalem architecture. The first wave would only include quad-core, HyperThreading-enabled processors based on the Bloomfield core, also said is that they are planning to manufacture a second server derivative designed for the expandable server market (Nehalem-EX). Later, desktop processors based on the Havendale (dual-core) and Lynnfield (quad-core) processors, while the notebook/mobile platform will be offered the dual-core Auburndale and Lynnfield quad-core parts.

IBM and its chip development partners announced today that they've developed the first functional 22nm silicon fabricated SRAM cell. This puts them ahead of Intel, which had announced its technological entry into the 32 nm domain in September, 2007. SRAM is usually the first semiconductor device a chip-maker tests a new fabrication-process on, before working on microprocessors. These devices were developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). They were built in the conventional 6-transistor design and on a 300 mm wafer. This level of miniaturization made the SRAM cell shrink to a mere 0.1 sq. μm, compare this to the SRAM cells that go into making caches on the 45 nm Intel processors, 0.346 sq. μm.

With the entry of the Core i7 Bloomfield series processors this September thru October, the computing world will witness the entry of a new motherboard processor socket, the 1366-pin Land Grid Array (LGA-1366). FrostyTech demystified the new socket in respect to the way coolers are to be designed to be compatible with it, which will have implications on a vast segment of DIY consumers since LGA-1366 is meant to be a high-performance flagship computing platform. There are two key factors at play:

• The layout and cooler-retention mechanism of the socket
• The area of contact between the cooler and the processor's integrated heatspreader (IHS).

It's been a few weeks since Intel launched its latest chipset with integrated graphics, the Intel G45. Among other things, Intel claimed this chipset accelerated HD video formats such as Blu-ray, where the integrated graphics logic is supposed to off-load the CPU of processing the video. Such as it is, Intel's integrated graphics processors (IGP) have been hugely reliant on the CPU for its functions.

Aaron Brezenski, a product engineer for Intel at its Chandler, Arizona US facility. In his recent blog entry (read here), he writes about the G45 not exactly achieving what it set out for, in other words, it was "still imperfect". He mentions about AMD hosting a demo booth where it was publicly demonstrated that a G45 based notebook made by HP failed to accelerate Blu-ray playback, the processor tipped 100% load throughout the playback which isn't what G45 is intended to bring about.

Trying to keep up with the competition in the eyes of Micron and its recently introduced RealSSD drives, Intel declared readiness to debut new SSDs too during IDF next week. With the SSD market heating up, Intel's new storage agents will offer bumped read/write speeds and double the SSD storage capacity we're used to see. The drives will be available in 1.8" and 2.5" format factors and offer a bandwidth of 240 MB/s read and 70-170 MB/s write. Capacities will range from 32GB and 64GB to the rather unusual 80GB and 160GB. No pricing information is available, but big toys always come with a price so don't expect them to be cheap.

Intel Corporation announced a collaborative animation project to produce a computer-generated animated short film for theatrical release. The Mass Animation Project, presented by Intel, will be open to established and aspiring animators.

Intel is sponsoring the development and promotion of a Facebook Page where animators will be able access a collaboration application built on the Facebook Platform, and will work together to create the animated short film. Starting this fall, artists around the world will be able to contribute by animating small pieces of a 5-minute, professional-quality animated short film. The start date will be announced soon.

"This is a great opportunity to bring together computer graphics with the creativity of both Hollywood and the Facebook community," said Michael Hoefflinger, general manager of Intel's Partner Marketing Group. "The power of Intel high-performance processor technology makes it possible for content creators to design, animate and innovate. Intel processor performance and Facebook communication and sharing tools enable large numbers of people around the globe to collaborate on a single creative endeavor."

Part of the series of published slides by French website CanardPlus on slides part of the IDF event shows a picture of Quake 4 run with ray-tracing enabled on Intel's upcoming GPU codenamed Larrabee. The slide shows the advantages of ray-tracing, being accurate shadows, reflections, and the image looking more natural that what conventional shaders can achieve in bringing about.

French website CanardPlus published slides from Intel covering its future plans and product evolution model called the "tick tock" model in which an architecture is released every time frame and improvised following it, where the fabrication process is shrunk and some features added. Les nouveaux CPU suivront donc le schéma de développement « The new CPU release will follow the pattern of development "Tick-Tock", ie a new architecture every two years (Tock), followed by a die shrink (Tick) to increase the fine print.

Five months into using 'Centrino Atom' to name its ULPC platform, Intel decided to drop the name. The first release of Centrino Atom codenamed Menlow consisted of the Intel Atom processor, a single-package core-logic (chipset), and was meant to serve as a unified branding much like the rest of the Centrino brand.

A company spokesperson for the company, Nick Jacobs has been quoted saying "Basically, we are simplifying and coalescing our efforts around 'Atom' as the single brand for Internet devices,".

It was believed that use of 'Centrino' was confusing and in a way even diluted the brand since Centrino Atom served into UMPC / ULPC netbooks. Part of the reason also was that netbooks that made it to the marked brandished Centrino Atom while using a chipset outside its specifications, in many cases a two-chip i945 + ICH7.

Intel Corporation today announced the availability of the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB. The xHCI draft specification provides a standardized method for USB 3.0 host controllers to communicate with the USB 3.0 software stack.


Interoperability among devices from multiple manufacturers is important for consumer adoption of SuperSpeed USB products. The Intel xHCI draft specification revision 0.9 supports compatibility among various implementations of USB devices and will make it easier to develop software support for the industry.

Following the release of two variants of dual and quad core processors (CPU) this Monday last (covered here), A new set of CPUs are lined up for release by the end of this month. Here's a quick round-up of things to come according to industrial sources:


Product Additions

• A cost-effective Core 2 Quad, model Q8200 with 4 MB of total L2 cache, 2.33 GHz of clock speed, price of US$224 in thousand-unit tray quantities
• A value segment Pentium Dual Core E5200, 2.50 GHz priced at $84
• Another value segment 65nm Conroe-L-based Celeron 450 CPU at 2.20GHz and price-tag of $53

Ibex Peak is the name of the system core logic platform that runs the LGA 1160 socket processors that are expected to release later next year. It is peculiar as to being a single-chip design, where the northbridge (NB) + southbridge (SB) design that Intel has been having for all these years paves way for a single chip that handles both their functions. This level of integration is possible with a huge chunk of machinery for the memory controller being transferred to the CPU, with the chipset left to perform all functions of the ICH and also hold a PCI-Express switch. This design methodology has been adopted by NVIDIA almost five years ago with some of the nForce chipsets for the AMD platform coming in single chip designs for the very same reason. Only in cases where large PCI-E switches were used, the chipset was split up into SPP and MCP (NB and SB), such as the nForce 590 SLI, with the SPP and MCP holding smaller PCI-E switches each to total the x16, x16 lane count.

Back to 2008 and Ibex Peak, apart from the Calpella mobile platform where mobile variants of these chips are used, three new desktop/enterprise platforms emerge: