Intel claims Haswell will offer 50% more battery life in laptops
Intel's upcoming family of Core processors, code-named Haswell, will offer 50% more battery life in laptops than did their "Ivy Bridge" predecessors, Intel said on Thursday.
Haswell chips were designed with laptops and tablets in mind, and the main focus was on lowering power consumption, said Rani Borkar, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a media briefing.
The longer battery life won't come with a cost to performance, according to Borkar. And in idle or standby mode the chips will do even better, extending battery life by up to 20 times, she said.
The improvements are vital for Intel and its PC-making partners. PC sales are in one of their worst slumps ever, with users snapping up tablets and smartphones instead for mobile computing. Any improvements Intel can offer will help keep the PC market alive. Read more...
Intel releases ‘Beacon Mountain’ Android-on-Atom dev tool
Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.
Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.”
The software's in version 0.5 and runs on Windows 7 or 8. A Mac version is promised and doesn't look far off: one of the demos in the Intel video about the software below runs on a Mac (and doesn't look like it is in a virtual machine). Read more...
On eve of departure, Otellini looks back on four decades with Intel
Just a month away from retirement, Intel CEO Paul Otellini has reflected on his four decades with the company during his last quarterly earnings call with analysts and reporters.
Otellini is not going out on a high note, with Intel reporting a sharp drop in profits Tuesday thanks mainly to the slumping PC market. But despite finding little success in the smartphone and tablet markets, Otellini said Intel creates opportunities for itself by staying ahead of the fast-moving tech industry, and that this will drive the company forward in the future.
"Even as I prepare to pass the baton to a new generation, I know Intel's story is not completely written," Otellini said.
Intel's future is not entirely clear, but the company is putting more focus on mobile products and manufacturing technology, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. Read more...
Intel profit dives 25 percent amid PC market slump
Intel reported a drop in profits and revenue for the first quarter, as the biggest PC market slump in recent memory weighed on its business. Intel reported a profit of $2.05 billion for the quarter ended March 30, down 25 percent from a year earlier. Revenue was $12.6 billion, Intel said, a drop of 2.5 percent.
About two-thirds of Intel's revenue comes from its PC client group, which makes chips for laptops and desktops. Revenue from that division was down 6 percent year on year, to $8.0 billion.
Intel's Data Center Group, which sells server chips and other enterprise hardware, fared better. Quarterly revenue from that division was up 7.5 percent year-over-year, to $2.6 billion. Read more...
Intel sets up joint lab with China’s Baidu for mobile apps
Intel is hoping to get more Chinese developers to back its products by forming a new joint innovation lab with the nation's largest search engine, Baidu.
The lab is part of an agreement the two companies signed on Thursday that will focus on developing software for China's mobile Internet market. Developers in the country will have access to Intel-powered products, including PCs, tablets, and mobile devices, to test and port software for Baidu and Intel platforms.
"If you are a developer, you will now have more choices of platform and more opportunities in business," said Christos Georgiopoulos, Intel general manager for developer relations. Read more...
Intel releases Hadoop distribution primed for its own chips
Intel has released its own Hadoop distribution in a move intended to accelerate adoption of the big data platform while ensuring more of those workloads run on Intel's own Xeon processors.
The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop includes core pieces of the data analysis platform that Intel is releasing as open-source software, as well as deployment and tuning tools that Intel developed itself and which are not open source.
Organizations will be more willing to expand their investments in Hadoop if they know there's a consistent distribution backed by a big, stable vendor like Intel, said Boyd Davis, general manager of Intel's data center software division, at a launch event in San Francisco Tuesday. Read more...
Intel seeks tablet breakthrough with Clover Trail, Windows 8
After months of heralding its Clover Trail processor for Windows 8 tablets, Intel on Thursday unveiled the chip that it believes is its ticket to success in the ARM-dominated market.
Tablets with Clover Trail, aka the Atom Z2760 chip, will become available around the end of October when Microsoft ships Windows 8, Intel officials said. The chip will facilitate long battery life for Windows 8 tablets and full HD video.
While Intel dominates the PC market, it faces a tough road in the mobile battle with ARM, whose processors ship in most smartphones and tablets including Apple's iPad. Intel has high hopes for Windows 8, and has worked with Microsoft to take advantage of OS features to provide fast performance and long battery life in tablets. Read more...
Intel porting Android 4.1 to work on Atom tablets, smartphones
Intel is porting the Android 4.1 operating system, also called Jelly Bean, to work on smartphones and tablets using low-power Atom processors, the company said this week.
The company did not provide a time frame for when the Android 4.1 port would be complete, or when the OS would be deployed in products.
"Intel continues to work closely with Google to enable future versions of Android, including Jelly Bean, on our family of low power Atom processors," said Suzy Greenberg, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
Smartphones running on Intel chips are currently being rolled out with Android 2.3, code-named Gingerbread, and are due to get Android 4.0, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, as an update, though a time-frame has not been provided. Read more...
ARM chases Intel on 3D transistors with TSMC deal
ARM is catching up with Intel on 3D transistors, announcing a new partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to manufacture 64-bit chips that are faster and more power-efficient than current chips in which transistors are organized horizontally.
The agreement calls for TSMC to implement the 3D transistors in chips based on ARM's ARMv8 64-bit architecture in the 20-nanometer manufacturing process and beyond. ARM licenses processor designs to fabless companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, which get the chips made by contract manufacturers like TSMC.
Currently, transistors are generally organized horizontally, but a new manufacturing technology enables them to be stacked vertically. The technology, which is referred to as FinFET, has been researched for more than a decade and is considered an important way to fit more transistors onboard as chips get smaller. Read more...
Unisys upgrades Libra mainframes with Xeon E5s
Intel has just upgraded its server processors with a slew of Xeon E5s this spring, and that means it is time for mainframe maker Unisys to start gussying up the Xeon-based variants in its ClearPath family.
Unisys has two different families of mainframes in the ClearPath line. From its Burroughs heritage comes the Libra family with their Master Control Program (MCP) operating system, and from the Sperry-Univac side comes the Dorado family with their OS 2200 operating system.
At the high-end and upper midrange of the Unisys product line are custom CMOS processors designed by Unisys and manufactured by IBM Microelectronics that have the high single-threaded performance on batch jobs that mainframe customers need.
In the midrange, there are smaller CMOS-based mainframes that bear the Dorado or Libra labels as well as a mix of machines that have ports of the MCP and OS 2200 operating systems and special virtualization and emulation sauce that lets CMOS binaries run atop x86 processors. The entry Libra and Dorado products are all based on Xeon machinery. Read more...
Lenovo packs ‘thinnest’ ThinkPad ultrabook with 4G LTE
Lenovo on Tuesday announced a range of new ThinkPads with Intel's latest third-generation Core processors, including a ThinkPad ultrabook that the company claims is the "thinnest ultrabook in the world."
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook has a 14-in. screen, weighs under 1.8 kilograms (3.9 pounds) and is 18.8-mm (.74 inches) thick. It will have the latest Intel ultrabook processors, code-named Ivy Bridge, which are expected to be officially announced next month.
Lenovo also updated the popular ThinkPad T-series and X-series lineups, making them faster while adding more battery life to the models. The company also has new connectivity and multimedia capabilities that could be helpful for business users. The laptops will be available on June 5. Read more...
Intel acquires HPC interconnect assets from Cray
Intel has agreed to buy specific high-performance-computing interconnect assets from server company Cray, the chip maker said on Tuesday.
Intel gets access to Cray's "interconnect personnel and intellectual property" with the agreement, Intel said in a statement. The technology and expertise will help Intel build its high-performance-computing portfolio as it looks to scale performance on servers, Intel said.
Intel will pay $140 million for Cray's assets, Cray said in a statement. As part of the deal, 74 Cray employees will join Intel. Read more...
Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips raise the bar for rivals
With the arrival of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors, the chip maker has just given its competition a new bar to shoot for.
On Monday, Intel took the wraps off its first third-generation Core processors, which have been known by their code-name, Ivy Bridge. The new chips bring Intel into the realm of 22-nanometer processing, a big step down from the 32-nm build process, which rival Advanced Micro Devices is still working with.
That means these are the first 22nm logic chips, marking a technology milestone. On top of that, the chips are faster and more power-efficient than their Core predecessors. Read more...
Intel targeting Ivy Bridge processors at Windows 8 tablets
Intel's upcoming Core i-series processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture are being pitched at Ultrabooks, but the company is now extending the chips to high-performance tablets with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
Intel hopes the new Ivy Bridge chips will make it to tablets, according to a slide from this week's Intel Developer Forum trade show in Beijing. The slide shows one tablet with gaming controllers attached on both sides and another tablet with a keyboard attached to it.
The tablets will provide "leading performance," Intel said on the slide. The tablets could have processors with up to four CPU cores, low-power memory, and other power-saving features to extend battery life, according to the slide. Read more...
Intel ready to take on tablet chips
Intel is ready to start cranking out chips for tablets, but is the chip maker moving fast enough to boost its presence in the mobile market?
Intel COO Brian Krzanich told Reuters this week that the company has quickly reworked its fabrication facilities to prep for building tablet chips.
"We will start to see more and more of our capacity and our output go to things that are mobile, like phones and tablets and other devices," Krzanich told Reuters.
While industry analysts say it's a good move for Intel to move into the tablet market, it's going to be more important for the chip maker to gain ground in the burgeoning smartphone market. Read more...