Find Your Loved Ones with Intel’s Technology

Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It’s clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.

The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search. Read More »

Intel Six-Pack

It’s called Dunnington and it’s Intel’s latest Six-Core (count-em…) microprocessor chip. Now why on earth anyone would want a six-core chip remains to be seen, dial-core chips have hardly set the computing world alight. It’s all very well having multiple cores, but without the fancy software to take advantage of the extra power you might as well not bother. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a market for such devices way above the heads of us mere mortals, at the top end of the market, in graphics processing in particular and Dunnington will there to help at the back end of this year, and with around 1.9 billion transistors buzzing away inside, it’s bound to do whatever it does really quickly!

X58, Intel’s First Nehalem Chipset

Intel’s upcoming generation of processors, called the Nehalem, will be introduced later this year, and all the signals point to a Q4 release. As previously stated by the chip manufacturer during this spring’s Intel Developer Forum, the first Nehalem units to hit the market will be built on the 45-nanometer process technology (Bloomfield silicon) and will sport four processing cores.

It is widely known that the 4-core behemoth will come with an integrated DDR3-1333 memory controller, SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) technology and 8 MB of L2 cache. The SMT implementation will allow each of the CPU cores to simultaneously process two threads, just like the previous HyperThreading technology introduced back in the Pentium 4 era. Read More »

Top Ten Notebooks You Couldn’t Do Without

Mobile computing has conquered both the high-end and the mainstream markets and analysts claim that the number of sold notebooks will outpace desktop systems by 2010. Mobile gaming is still a niche market, dominated by bulky notebooks with significant price tags, but most of the general-purpose laptops deliver optimal performance at a reasonable price tag.

The first entry in the mainstream notebook line-up is the Acer Aspire 5920 model, that comes rigged with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 chip running at 1.6 GHz. The system also packs 2 GB of DDR2 memory and runs Windows Vista Home Premium. The 15.4-inch LCD display sports anti-glare technology that boosts the video output and offers a comfortable computer experience. The system sells for about $910 via the company’s retail outlets. Read More »

Gateway ships retail PCs with 64-bit Windows Vista

You knew it was coming. Gateway, to our knowledge, has become the first large PC vendor to ship most of its retail PCs with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium. The refreshed product line also brings back an Intel quad-core processor, which had been dumped by the company in the previous product cycle.

When we wrote about Gateway’s spring retail PCs back in January of this year, it was quite obvious that, at least for that product cycle, Gateway had thrown out Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core processor in favor of an AMD Phenom X4 chip. Back then, company representatives assured us that an Intel quad-core would return soon. It took some time (four months), but an Intel chip is back, but only for the pricey “FX” version. Read More »

Don’t Watch This Space

Microsoft, Google. HP, Philips, Samsung and Intel are amongst the big names behind the White Space Coalition, which is looking at ways to provide high-speed wireless Internet access using the gaps between TV channels. The gaps, which are designed to stop channels clashing with one another, are essentially wasted space, but until recently it was thought that any attempt to use them would result in interference and broadcasters are naturally against the idea. Read More »

Intel to Release 3.33GHz Dual Core, Axes Pentium D

Intel is ready to go beyond its chips’ current limit of 3.2 GHz with its new Core 2 Duo E8600 processor. The new CPU will be based on a 45-nanometer dual core Wolfdale architecture and seems to work at 3.33 GHz (the stock core clock speed).

The Wolfdale processor will come with 6MB of L2 cache and will feature a thermal design power of 65 watts, which is quite impressive, given its 3.33GHz core frequency. Moreover, its low thermal envelope will allow enthusiasts to overclock it without problems in order to squeeze some 300-500 MHz using air-based cooling solutions.

The Core 2 Duo E8600 will give Intel some maneuver space, as AMD is gearing up for launching its dual- and tri-cores during the second quarter of the year. The B4 silicon revision is promising excellent AMD overclockers.

However, Intel is still keeping its 45-nanometer CPU stash hidden from the eyes of its customers. Although the company has been shipping its 45-nanometer Core 2 Extreme 9650 for some time, there will be little 45-nanometer-based parts to emerge during this quarter. Read More »

Nvidia Due to Implement on-the-fly GPU Switching

Nvidia have announced that the MCP78S chipset will give the user the possibility to switch between GPU cores. The new chipset incorporates a GeForce 8-class DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 graphics engine, but also has the capability of controlling a PCI Express 2.0 graphics card connected via the chipset’s 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

This is not a title of novelty, since this feature is widely supported by most of the integrated chipsets, but the chipset also supports HybridSLI, giving the user complete control over the two GPUs. Should the system need hardcore graphic performance, the user may enable the graphics card, while on average computing the system graphics is hosted on the lower-power integrated GPU. This feature really comes in handy since, unlike the previous versions, GPU switching does not need a computer reboot. Read More »

Google Android Bandwagon Rolling

Even though we have yet to see a working example let alone a prototype or even a mock-up, the announcement by Google on Monday of the Open Handset Alliance, which is behind the much-anticipated Android or ‘gPhone’, has sent a shiver of excitement through the industry. Thus far 34 companies have agreed to join the partnership to develop the phone, and there’s a speculation that one of them, Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is especially keen to be on board as it would give them access to the very promising sounding Android software. Read More »

USB 3.0 on 2008

Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there’s typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. Read More »