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...
Intel announces Cloud SSO beta program
Intel today announced the availability of a cloud-based SSO (single sign-on) authentication and authorization service under a beta program that is expected to become a generally available offering later this spring.
Vikas Jain, Intel's director of product management in the software and services group, says the service has evolved out of a product called the ExpressWay CloudAccess 360 that was part of the McAfee cloud-security platform that Intel gained with its acquisition of McAfee a year ago. Read more...
Intel pondering becoming a chip foundry
Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers, the company said on Tuesday.
Intel has expanded its chip-to-order business by signing up additional customers to take advantage of its 22-nanometer process facilities, company spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. Intel's upcoming PC chips are already being made using the 22-nm process, and laptops and desktops with the chips are expected to become available in a few months.
Intel in the past has exclusively retained manufacturing facilities for its own chips, but late last year said it would make FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) for Achronix Semiconductor. Another FPGA product designer, Tabula, on Tuesday said it would have its products made on Intel's 22-nanometer process. Intel's Mulloy said the company has even more customers, but couldn't reveal their names. Read more...
Intel targets networking market with new chipset
Intel on Tuesday introduced the Crystal Forest chipset, which the company hopes will fill a networking gap as it tries to build an integrated technology stack for data centers.
The chipset has specific hardware and software-driven features that could speed up data processing on a network, said Steve Price, director of marketing for Intel's Communications Infrastructure Division. The chipset could aggregate network data quicker from servers inside data centers without compromising performance or security.
Intel is trying to make a mark in the network processor market with the new chipset, where it could compete with companies such as Cavium, AppliedMicro and Tilera. Intel previously offered ARM-based network processors as part of its communications unit, which it sold to Marvell for US$600 million in 2006. Read more...
Intel fights for its future with smartphone deals
With Intel finally breaking into the burgeoning smartphone market, analysts say the company is moving to defend its turf -- and possibly even its future stability -- against an encroaching competitor.
On Tuesday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini told an audience at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) here that the company has inked deals to provide its upcoming Atom chips to both Motorola and Lenovo for their smartphones. Intel has been virtually shut out of the lucrative smartphone arena, so this is a big step forward for the chipmaker.
It's also a major defensive move against ARM chips, which have dominated the smartphone chip market. And with more and more users depending on their smartphones for a lot of their computing needs, the PC market -- an Intel strong point -- has suffered as well. Read more...
Intel tries to keep netbooks alive with new Atom chips
Intel on Wednesday started shipping the latest Atom chips for netbooks, an important step to sustain growth of the low-cost PCs in the wake of the tablet onslaught.
The dual-core chips, part of the platform code-named Cedar Trail, bring better battery life and overall improved performance to netbooks, Intel said in a statement. Top PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus and Samsung will ship netbooks with Cedar Trail chips beginning in January starting at US$199.
Intel has doubled graphics performance on the chips while reducing power consumption by up to 20 percent compared to Atom predecessors introduced two years ago, the company said. The new chips will help netbooks provide up to 10 hours of battery life on one charge, Intel said. Read more...
Intel, Micron double density of NAND flash memory
Intel and Micron Tuesday announced that their joint NAND flash manufacturing venture will begin using a more dense circuitry that will allow a terabit of data, or 128 gigabytes, to fit on a fingertip.
The joint venture, IMFT (IM Flash Technologies), said today it has created the world's first 20nm (nanometer), 128Gbit MLC (multilevel-cell) NAND flash die.
The new 20nm chips have the highest capacity for their form factor of any in the market today and are targeted for use in tablets, smartphones, and other consumer electronic devices.
The die doubles the capacity of the venture's 25nm lithography process, which has been used to make the 64Gbit dies used in today's SSDs (solid-state drives), tablets, and smartphones. Read more...
Intel says Android 4.0 for smartphones, tablets ready
Intel on Friday said it has readied Android 4.0 for smartphones and tablets based on its upcoming Atom processor code-named Medfield, raising the possibility of Intel-inside handheld devices being released next year with the new OS.
The company had a version of Android 4.0 for Medfield up and running within a day of Google open sourcing the OS, and now packages for smartphones and tablets with Medfield drivers are available to device makers, said Alec Gefrides, head of the Google Program Office at Intel.
Intel is working with device makers to optimize and fine-tune the OS for specific platforms and products based on Medfield chips. While the OS is expected to be ready in time for the product releases, it will be up to the device makers to decide whether they want to implement the OS in smartphones or tablets. Read more...
Intel recasts Pentium chip for servers
Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers.
The dual-core processor operates at a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has 3MB of cache. Like many server chips, the Pentium 350 lacks features such as integrated graphics, which are on most of Intel's laptop and desktop processors.
The iconic Pentium line of processors has been around for more than a decade, but now is mostly targeted at budget laptops and desktops. Pentium was Intel's flagship PC processor line, a mantle now held by the Core chips. The company once offered Pentium III and Pentium II Xeon processors for servers. Read more...
Intel exec: Windows 8 will be on Ultrabooks next year
Ultrabooks -- Intel's label for thin laptops with an edgy design à la the MacBook Air -- with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 OS are due to reach market next year, and the OS could help propel demand for the devices, an Intel executive said this week.
More than 60 Ultrabook designs could become available next year and "11 or so designs" will be available by the end of this year, said Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel, in an interview following the company's third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Windows 8 could help drive up Ultrabook demand in the second half of next year during the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, Kilroy said.
In addition to Windows 8, Ultrabooks will have next-generation Core processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which will include performance and graphics improvements, Kilroy said. Some 4 of 10 laptops sold by the end of next year will be Ultrabooks, he said. "Judging by the excitement, that's a realistic goal," Kilroy said. Read more...
Intel moves away from digital TV business
Intel on Tuesday said it was winding down its TV business and reallocating the resources to develop "ultrabooks," smartphones and tablets.
Intel will move engineers who were developing TV chips to the group responsible for tablets, said Claudine Mangano, an Intel spokeswoman. It's also refocusing its efforts on IP-based content delivery networks, for which there are similarities between tablets and TVs, she sad.
"We believe these collective moves will help ensure that Intel has the best people focused on our top business priorities," Mangano said.
Sony's TV sets and Logitech's Revue set-top box, both running Google TV software, are the more famous products based on Intel's TV chips. Its CE4100 and CE4200 chips were adopted by companies including Comcast and Boxee. Intel has other TV efforts under way, including the Widget Channel, a platform designed to meld television and the Internet, which was announced in 2008 with Yahoo. Read more...