Our buddies at iFixIt have torn down the Logitech Revue Google TV box and found what amounts to be a mini computer powered by an Intel Atom CE4150 1.2 GHz processor. Oddly enough, for a device with no storage space, it contains 5GB of NAND flash. → Read More
Does it strike you as a little bit late to start talks on smart TVs? Me too, but to be fair, this isn’t Chunghwa and Intel’s first time to the rodeo. Reports have the tech giants getting together for a friendly chat later in the month. I’m sure “what’s best for the consumer?” will be #1 on their agenda. → Read More
Back in June of last year, a report in The Washington Post stated that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun a probe looking into the hiring practices of some of tech’s biggest companies. The probe was at its early stages at that point, but they were specifically looking into if any companies had agreements in place not to recruit one another’s workers. In August of last year, we reported that two of those companies, Apple and Google, did have such an agreement in place — and we even obtained an email that seemed to confirm it. Neither Google nor Apple responded to our request for a comment on the issue. Of course, they couldn’t sidestep the DoJ so easily. And today, the government is announcing a settlement on the issue.
Specifically, the DoJ is saying it is settling with six companies — Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar — ensuring that they will not enter into no solicitation agreements for employees going forward. In the complaint and settlement proposal they’re filing today, the DoJ is saying their findings indicate that there were agreements in place between a mixture of these companies over the years that prevented poaching. Here’s how they outlined it: → Read More
From Hardware.info If you bought a janky Compaq at Best Buy recently you may have been offered a $50 “upgrade” card that allows you to download software that will unlock threads and cache on the Pentium G6951 inside your PC. That’s right: they are selling an upgrade that is actually a key to unlock performance that your PC already has. Internet firestorm in 3…2…1… The chip in question has 1MB of cache and is fairly underpowered in the first place. As Engadget notes, the process of locking portions of a chip is fairly common but it usually happens because that area is defective on manufacture. This, however, is something completely different: you are paying an extra half a c-note to use the full power of your processor unhindered by what amounts to DRM. → Read More
For years, makers of computer processors have worked to shrink the size of their components. The smaller your circuits and gates, after all, the more you can fit on a wafer, and the more work a processor can do per unit of area. Intel has traditionally done a die shrink every other year, and reorganized their chips on the “off” years. Interestingly, I wrote two years ago about how engineers considered the switch from 22nm to 16nm to be “insurmountable.” Guess they surmounted it! → Read More
Intel is showing off its Light Peak interface at IDF (naturally) and there are a few new morsels of info about this promising next-generation connectivity technology. One thing to note is that they’ve delayed the real roll-out until some time in 2011; their original target was late 2010, but you know how it is. → Read More
Back in January, we started to hear noise about an Intel AppStore, and people in general scoffed. Another app store? That’s the last thing we need! Well, Intel is moving forward with theirs, and it’s got some serious firepower backing it up. → Read More
The Intel Developer Forum is starting off, and the keynote by CEO Paul Otellini and others has just finished up. If you’re interested in what PC hardware is going to be moving towards over the next year, head over to Hot Hardware’s coverage of the festivities. Spoiler alert: nothing really revolutionary. Lots of media optimization with on-die GPU and dedicated hardware, so viewing and encoding video should be quicker, and with luck your system could operate as a dual-GPU system with one of those new fancy-pants multi-GPU drivers. Also, today I learned: Intel forms the guts of the Logitech Revue for Google TV. → Read More
Intel has just bought computer and software security company McAfee according to a release issued this morning. The all cash deal is worth $7.68 billion, or $48 per share. See the release below.
According the statement issued by Intel, McAfee will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, reporting into Intel’s Software and Services Group. Intel says the “acquisition enables a combination of security software and hardware from one company to ultimately better protect consumers, corporations and governments as billions of devices – and the server and cloud networks that manage them – go online.” → Read More
Intel has just announced that it will acquire Texas Instruments’ cable modem product line. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, were not disclosed.
Unsurprisingly, Intel says the acquisition will help further its foray into providing chips to the cable and consumer electronics industries. Intel wants to be able to provide products that provide on foundation for consumer elextronics devices such as set top boxes, digital TVs, and blu-ray disc players. The unit’s advanced system-on-chip (SoC) products will be based on Intel’s Atom processors. → Read More
I knew I would be touching a raw nerve with my last two posts, on patents. But I was really surprised at the divergence of opinion. Entrepreneurs overwhelmingly supported my stance that software patents hamper innovation and need to be abolished, but friends in Microsoft, IBM, and Google were outraged at my recommendation. The big companies’ executives argued that abolishing patents would hurt their ability to innovate and thus hamper the nation’s economic growth. (They believe that companies like theirs create the majority of jobs and innovations, and they claim that without patents they cannot defend their innovations.) I am not convinced that software patents give Google any advantage over Microsoft and Yahoo, or make IBM’s databases any better than Oracle’s. But I do know one thing for sure: it isn’t the big companies that create the jobs or the revolutionary technology innovations: it is startups. So if we need to pick sides, I vote for the startups.
Let’s start with the question of who creates the jobs. This is one of the issues that I recently took Intel co-founder Andy Grove to task for, in BusinessWeek. Grove wrote a profound essay lamenting the loss of American manufacturing jobs. I share his concerns about jobs. But Andy’s protectionist recommendations for restoring America’s competitiveness were largely based on his flawed premise that companies like Intel create all the jobs—not the startups. I also discussed the tradeoff between bailing out companies like General Motors, AIG, and Citibank and nurturing startups in this BusinessWeek piece. This question is more important than it may seem. → Read More
Apple’s earnings and revenue growth in mobile have been awe-inspiring to witness. From zero presence three years ago, Apple is now the most profitable cell phone maker in the world.
Apple’s success in this compressed period has helped it become an enormous buyer of components. In fact iSuppli projects that next year Apple will become the second-largest semiconductor buyer worldwide and may edge out HP in 2012 to become the world’s largest.
Though this scale presents Apple with enormous bargaining power, it also begs the question: Should Apple own its own wireless chip development? → Read More
When we last left the intrepid research scientists at Intel, they had managed to hit 40Gbps throughput using something called the Avalanche Photodetector. It’s been two years since that report (yeah, this has been in development for a while), and the gang at Intel have not been idle, let me tell you. They’ve managed to improve the field of photonics to achieve throughput of 50 Gbps! While not as much of an advance as one might like to see in two years, this is still a respectable achievement. → Read More
http://adland.tv/sites/default/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player.swf Intel has released its financial report for Q2 2010, and things are lookin’ good. I know finances aren’t really the focus of CG, so let’s stick to the interesting bits: Atom sales are up 16% to $413 million (they’re appearing in more than just netbooks) $2.9 billion in net income, i.e. profit (they’re doing gooood) R&D spending was $3.25 billion (that’s a lot of R&D) So they’re doing pretty awesome. Not that I’d expect anything else; we’re entering a recovery period, and people who have been putting off buying PCs for the last few years are opening up their wallets to buy all these bargain- and mid-priced PCs powered by Atoms and old Cores. Man, it took forever to find that “Bunny People” ad → Read More
The Intel Celeron nameplate has been in use since 1998, but Digitimes is reporting that it’s to be phased out next year. That would leave Intel’s consumer lineup with just various forms of Pentium and Atom chips. Currently there are several Celeron chips available right now, but it’s not like Intel doesn’t have other low-cost options to chose from. What’s really happening here is Intel is eliminating some shopping confusion and killing a brand that’s always been marketed as a cheap alternative to the Pentium. It’s smart. → Read More
It took a lot of time, but Toshiba is now ready to bring the Classmate tablet PC it created together with Intel to the Japanese market. Rebranded as “CM1″ [press release in English], the goal is to go after the nation’s educational sector. Both companies involved also announced they will launch initiatives to “foster ICT environments in schools” in order to boost IT literacy among Japanese schoolkids. → Read More
This is great. If it actually works, it’s like the Surfaceless Surface crossed with… I don’t know, Cooking Mama. Intel Labs’ Tabletop Computing is about natural interactions with real objects, on regular surfaces. Of course, I doubt your kitchen is naturally dark enough to support a projected interface like this one, but they’ll figure something out. Sure, it’s Jetsons stuff and we probably won’t see anything like it for some time, but remember this day, friends, remember this day when in 2025 you’re virtually mixing ingredients in the iBlender App for iKitchen. Intel and this lady did it first. [via HardOCP] → Read More
This is pretty funny. You’ve probably seen some of the propaganda over the last year or so about how GPUs are orders of magnitude faster than CPUs at certain tasks, due to their parallel processing engine. Intel got tired of hearing about it, I guess, and decided to debunk the myth. They set out to disprove the notion that a GPU can be 100 times faster than a CPU. They kind of did it, but I think this is what is termed a Pyrrhic victory. → Read More
Editor’s note: Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.
On the heels of the latest Android phone, the Sprint HTC EVO, and as we approach iPhone 4, it seems like mobile devices and platforms are innovating at about five times the pace of personal computers.
Rapid advancement in mobile is often attributed to the natural disruption by which emerging industries innovate quickly, while established markets like PCs follow a slower, more sustained trajectory. But there are deeper fundamentals driving the breathtaking pace of smartphone advancement. → Read More
Intel Capital is investing $10 million in TRA (which stands for ‘True ROI Accountability for Media’), a media planning, measurement and analytics software company. Funding for the investment comes from the $200 million Intel Capital Invest in America Technology Fund.
Intel’s capital injection is part of an $18.2 million Series C round, which includes participation from existing investors Arbitron and WPP. → Read More
