The Four-eyed Journal » Intel

Hopefully, Intel won’t shove McAfee AV down our throats - Intel just bought McAfee for $7.68 billion

jhay — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:43:04 +0000

The screencap says it all. For $7.68 billion McAfee is now a subsidiary of Intel under its Software and Services Group.

So in the near future, Intel chips would be optimized to run with McAfee’s security software products and vice versa. Would these mean that other anti-virus softwares would now have performance issues with Intel chips? Hopefully Intel won’t go down that evil path. Otherwise, they could face another anti-trust suit in the US and in Europe.

I’ve been using Intel chips all my computing life, even though AMD’s are cheaper and have performed better in some shakedowns. On the other hand, I’ve never used McAfee’s anti-virus software. It’s expensive, takes a lot of system resources and there are a lot of free alternatives which can perform better.

Though analysts are saying that this is really in line with Intel’s desires to break into the mobile devices market, offer a chip that is not just powerful, but has built-in security features as well. But that’s still some distance into the future. For now, let’s wait see what the other AV vendors and tech gurus would have do or say about this.

Intel’s Light Peak – faster communication between devices

jhay — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:30:42 +0000

What used to be enjoyed exclusively by big telecommunications companies in their data centers, fiber optic communication between devices and between the chips embedded within would soon be available to the mass market this year thanks to Intel’s Light Peak technology.

It’s a codename for Intel’s new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other. According to Intel, Light Peak delivers high bandwidth starting at 10Gb/s with the potential ability to scale to 100Gb/s over the next decade. It means that At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds. At that speeds, they should have called it “light speed” or something.

This optical technology was designed to overcome two fundamental problems of existing electrical cable technology: 1) the maximum speed you can transfer data over an electrical cable and 2), the maximum distance electrical cables can reach before it becomes too long that electro-magnetic interference and other issues kick in and disrupt the communication.

See the demo video below:

Awesome wasn’t it? At the speeds Intel says Light Peak can reach, even the new U.S.B. 3.0 specification now in development which has a theoretical maximum data rate of up to 5 gigabits a second pales in comparison.

Another advantage Light Peak or optical cable technology has it that it allows for much smaller and thinner devices since fat or wide and cumbersome copper cables could now be done away with inside our computers and other electronic devices. It could even be used in setting up faster home or office networks.

Once Light Peak becomes more commercially available, expect devices and computers to take on new forms and have better performances. It’s all just exciting!

Intel reduces Core 2 Quad and other Processor Prices

jhay — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:42:10 +0000

It’s not all gloom and doom in this tough economic times. Good things still can happen, relatively.

Among them, and this would bring joy to gamers and other geeks, is Intel’s price reduction in almost all of its processors and eWeek.com has a good rundown of the good news.

Intel reduced the price of its Core 2 Quad Q9650 processors (3GHz) by 40 percent, which reduces the price from $530 to $316. In addition, the company cut the price of the Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz) 16 percent from $316 to $266; the Q9440 (2.66GHz) 20 percent from $266 to $213; the Q8300 (2.24GHz) 18 percent from $224 to $183; and the Q8200 (2.33GHz) 16 percent from $193 to $163. Intel also added several processors to the lineup, including the Core 2 Quad Q9550s (2.83GHz) for $369, the Q9440s (2.66GHz) for $320 and the Q8200s (2.83GHz) for $245.

Other desktop price cuts included the Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (2.8GHz), which Intel reduced 15 percent from $133 to $113. Intel also added a Core 2 Duo E7500 processor (2.93GHz) to the lineup for a price of $133.

In addition, Intel cut the prices on some of its older processors for desktops. Intel cut the prices on both its dual-core Pentium E5300 (2.6GHz) and E2200 (2.4GHz) by 14 percent. The E5300 now costs $74, and the E2200 costs $64. The company also cut the Pentium E5200 (2.5GHz) processor 24 percent from $84 to $64 and added a dual-core Pentium E5400 processor (2.8GHz) at a cost of $84.

The price of the dual-core Intel Celeron E1400 processor (2GHz) was slashed 19 percent from $53 to $43.

This is Intel’s response to their not-so-stellar fourth-quarter financial reports in which the company has felt the impact of the US economic crisis which resulted in reduced demand for desktop PCs and servers.

The good news is, those who have been wanting to upgrade their processors would most probably do so now that Intel has made price cuts to its processors.

I myself have been planning to upgrade my desktop to a Core 2 Duo chip for months now. Unfortunately though, other priorities are at my focus at the moment and I really don’t need a processor upgrade at this time.

Those who could spare the cash would probably go the opposite route and get their choice of processor as soon as local dealers follow suit and adjust their Intel processor prices to reflect this new price cut by Intel.

So, who would take this opportunity to get a new Intel chip?

eWeek’s note: All the prices included in the Jan. 18 price cuts are based on shipments of 1,000 processor units.

Intel’s solid-state drives could boost Asus eeePC

jhay — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:53:54 +0000

News from PC World that the world’s biggest chip maker, Intel is readying its solid-state storage drives and will be embedding the said chips on its upcoming platforms for ultra-mobile PCs.

The Z-P140 PATA solid-state storage drives (SSDs) will be provided as an optional module to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to embed on motherboards made for the Menlow platform. The platform, designed for ultramobile PCs, also includes the Silverthorne processor and Poulsbo chipset. Menlow-based devices will ship in the first half of 2008, product line manager Don Larson said Friday at an event in San Francisco.

The tiny SSD chip, which weighs only 0.6 grams, will be available in capacities of 2G bytes and 4G bytes. The on-board storage capacity will be expandable up to 16G bytes with four SSDs connected to a standard PATA (parallel advanced technology attachment) interface that links the drives, Larson said. SSDs consume less power than hard drives because they have no moving parts, so they are ideal for mobile devices, Larson said.

One particular ultra-mobile PC that would greatly benefit from this move by Intel is the Asus eeePC, of which I am currently being tempted to get one this Christmas. At present, I hear and read complaints about the eeePCs limited solid-state storage drive, 8GB being the standard spec. Intel’s new chips could very well change all this, and the consumers would benefit the most.

If this could boost the storage capacity of ultramobile PCs, this could also expand the storage capacities of mobile phones. Heck, Nokia just relased new phones from its N-Series that has memory capacities of 8GB so seeing an Intel SSSD chip in one wouldn’t be much of a surprise.

I wonder though, if solid-state storage drives would replace the traditional hard disks in desktops? Imagine that….

Intel ships Quad-Core CPU

jhay — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:18:36 +0000

Woke up this morning to this tech-review from PC Magazine: Intel’s Quad-Core CPU (codenamed Kentsfield) Arrives…and Delivers. First, it knocked all the sleepiness from my head wishful thoughts started racing inside my mind. “I wish I could get that cool Quad-Core chip from Intel” and so on. Then again, it’s a thousand-dollar chip and that fact alone made me wonder is it really for a consumer (who could barely afford such a price tag as of now) like me who’s not that an extreme of a gamer?

As pointed out in the review by PC Magazine, it’s not. Even if we ordinary netizens could manage to cough up a thousand dollars for that new chip, we’d notice very little improvements in our everyday computing simply because we’re not really using that much chip-power with our Firefox 2′s, blogging habits, casual photo editing, listening to music we got from the net (legally or otherwise) and that’s similar to buying a whole publishing house when all you’re going to do is to write letters. Maybe things will make sense when you upgrade to Vista, or do some high-end computing.

Second, that’s a single chip with “four cores” built inside. Cool or what? Core aficionados and architects however has raised their eyebrows saying that what Intel has done with this Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor was they simply put together two dual-core dies in one single module. Not really “quad-core” as some critics have said. Does it matter? For high-end gamers and users with extreme computing needs, it does. For the great majority of us, it really does not.

Third, if you’re into over clocking systems to extract every ounce of juice from it, you’d be happy to know that the QX6700 is very overclockable. Tests have been made which has pushed a QX6700-powered system to perform at 3.55GHz and it came out on top. Then again what would you need it for?

Lastly, there is a good future for the “Quad-core” chip of Intel. Prices would drop and more applications built to utilize its features would come out in the years to come. It would soon be the standard just as the Dual-cores of today are standards. A true “quad-core” chip may even come out by that time but for now, I think it’s pretty safe and wise to hold on to our present dual-cores and stuff.