Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.
The chipmaker acquired Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under than 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.
“Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It’s put parallelism in more and more machines,” James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, said in a phone interview Friday, explaining why Intel bought the two firms.
“If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it’s fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism–at least not to the full extent,” Reinders said.
A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores–so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.
“The operating system does stuff for applications in parallel,” Reinders said, referring to operating systems such as Windows. “But considering that we can produce more and more cores every year, to truly get the benefit of what the future holds, applications need to change. And most applications haven’t changed,” he said.

Read more @ Cnet

Intel Corp.’s next big shift in chip design is receiving strong early reviews from Web sites that test computer hardware.

The first desktop PCs using a chip family called Intel Core i7 — code-named Nehalem — were found to handle some computing chores 30% to 40% faster than other comparable Intel chips, according to test results published by Web sites that include ExtremeTech, LegitReviews and AnandTech.

Performance gains were particularly impressive for tasks such as video encoding and rendering three-dimensional images, the reviewers said.

Machines based on Core i7 chips were not much faster for some games and other standard software, the Web sites reported. The machines also consume more power than some existing Intel chips, indicating that the first model won’t be suitable for portable computers.

"We know it’s going to be the de facto chip for high-end desktops," predicted Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest, a company that manufactures PCs for gamers and other performance enthusiasts. "Already we’ve had huge interest."

Systems based on the new chips are not expected to go on sale until Nov. 17. But Intel provided sample chips to reviewers, who published their findings Monday. The sites also published pricing for the chips, which ranges from $284 for a model that operates at 2.66 gigahertz to $999 for an "Extreme Edition" model for gamers that operates at 3.2 gigahertz.

Read more @ The Wall Street Journal

Intel is claiming that the new Nehalem processor due out in November will be its greenest to date. The company said that the systems it has built into its platforms and the technology used have been revolutionary, so much so that Gordon Moore, co-founder of the company, called its 45 nm transistors the company’s greatest advancement ever.

The high-k metal gate technology in the systems uses the element Hafnium to manage the problems of building transistors on such a small scale. The company says the new design gives major improvements in both energy efficiency and speed. Intel is making “performance and power and now highly connected,” Intel architect Ronak Singhal told vnunet.com.

“I don’t know how many hours we’ve spent arguing about power over features. If a feature added performance but used more power; it’s been a very different mindset for Nehalem.”

Intel is claiming that its Core line of processors has allowed for $2bn in savings since release.
First introduced two years ago, the Core chips were touted by Intel in part for their low power consumption in the face of ever-climbing energy rates.
A company report estimates that since their release, the Core desktop, notebook and server chips have allowed for some 20 Terawatts less energy being used by the processors over the previous line.

Intel then divided this by an average energy cost of $0.10 per kilowatt hour to claim a $2bn energy savings from the chips.

"All the while we’ve been delivering these performance improvements, we have also been able to reduce the energy used by our microprocessors," wrote Lorie Wigle, general manager of Intel’s eco-technology program office.

Energy savings have become a major selling point for all major chipmakers in recent years.
Both Intel and chief rival AMD have touted faster and more efficient processors of late, fuelled by smaller manufacturing processes and the use of more efficient materials.

View source: vnunet

Intel has started shipping its 1.8in and 2.5in 80GB solid-state drives. The chip giant also reiterated its plan to release 160GB versions by the end of the year.
The X18-M and X25-M drives use multi-level cell (MLC) technology, generally held to be slower than drives based on single-level cell designs. Intel promised it will intro SLC SSDs within the next three months, aiming them - and no doubt pricing them - at servers.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Intel gives users the tools to squeeze extra performance from their systems by overclocking the processor, but don’t expect the warranty to cover you if things go wrong. Overclocking capabilities are a main feature of Intel’s 4 series chipset, said Eric Mentzer, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the Graphics Development Group, in an interview at the Computex exhibition in Taipei
"We spend a lot of time working with our motherboard partners to figure out all the hidden bits inside, helping them figure out how to bring the best out of these platforms," Mentzer said.That same ability is available to users, but it hasn’t always been. Intel used to lock down its chips to prevent overclocking, but the company’s mindset has changed. Overclockers are now viewed as an important market segment, rather than troublemakers.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Three of Intel’s chipsets, the G31, G33 and 945GC, are seeing an increase in price following the earthquake in Sichuan, China last week, according to sources at motherboard makers. Although Intel’s packaging and testing plant in Sichuan was unaffected by the quake, the local transport infrastructure has been severely impacted. The three chipsets occupy approximately 45% of Intel’s desktop chipset shipments which has lead to rapid shortages.
The 945GC is seeing an increase from around US$15 in thousand-unit tray quantities to US$18-19, while the G31 will see its price boost from US$23 to US$25-27 and the G33 from US$28 to US$31.

View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Intel announced that “Atom” 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. 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.
The Intel Atom processor is based on an entirely new microarchitecture designed specifically for small devices and low power, while maintaining the Intel Core 2 Duo instruction set compatibility, stated Intel. The design also includes support for multiple threads for better performance and increased system responsiveness. The processor chip measures less than 25 square millimeters, making it Intel’s smallest and lowest power processor yet. Up to 11 Intel Atom processor dice – the tiny slivers of silicon packed with 47 million transistors each – would fit in an area the size of an American penny.

View: The full story @ DigTimes