intel

Intel has released an early version of drivers for its G965 integrated graphics chipset, and is on schedule for an August release of the final version.

The G965, released last year, was supposed to be a huge leap forward in integrated graphics performance for the company. But to this point it's been unable to write drivers that would unlock the performance built into that chipset.

The drivers spotted by The Inquirer are actually something called "pre-beta," which is not a formal beta, according to Intel (not alpha?). Pre-beta drivers aren't recommended for novices, and tech-savvy folks … Read more

Researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has set what appears to be a new record for the longest communication link with Wi-Fi.

Pietrosemoli, president of the Escuela Latinoamerica de Redes (which means networking school of Latin America) established a Wi-Fi link between two computers located in El Aguila and Platillon Mountain, Venezuela. That's a distance of 382 kilometers, or 238 miles. He used technology from Intel, which is concocting its own long-range Wi-Fi equipment, and some off-the-shelf parts. Pietrosemoli gets about 3 megabits per second in each direction on his long-range connections.

Most Wi-Fi signals only go only a few meters before … Read more

At this point, making jokes about Intel's Itanium server processor is an old act, so we'll just pass along the small nuggets of new information Intel chose to reveal Thursday.

Intel's Itanium road map has a new code name: Kittson. That's all Intel chose to reveal about the processor that will take Itanium into the next decade. Kittson will follow Poulson, which follows Tukwila in 2008, which follows Montvale later this year.

Poulson will be interesting because Intel is making a number of changes to the instructions that provide the marching orders for the chip. Of … Read more

Ever since Intel showed off its 80-core prototype processor, people have asked "Why 80 cores?"

There's actually nothing magic about the number, according to Jerry Bautista, co-director of the Tera-scale Computing Research Program at Intel, and others. Intel wanted to make a chip that could perform 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. And 80 cores did the trick. The chip does not contain x86 processing cores, the kind of cores inside Intel's PC chips, but cores optimized for floating-point (or decimal) math.

Other sources at the company pointed out that 80 cores … Read more

It's taken 27 years to reach 1 billion PCs in use, and market researchers say it will take only five to reach the next billion.

Forrester Research is set to release a report Monday titled, "Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast to 2015," saying that many of those next billion will be used by first-time PC users in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India and China. At least 775 million new PCs will be in use in those countries by 2015, according to Forrester.

Not only is access to computers beneficial to those users, it also will represent a … Read more

Apple announced Tuesday that it has updated its high-end MacBook Pro laptops with faster processors, better graphics, and more memory.

The laptops are still available in three models: two 15.4-inch versions that retail for $1,999 and $2,499 and a larger 17-inch edition that costs $2,799. But with Tuesday's update, the lower-end 15-inch model is now equipped with 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors (previously, it had a 2.16GHz chip); the higher-end 15-incher and the 17-incher now come with 2.4GHz processors, up from 2.33GHz. These new processors are indeed Intel's latest Centrino (… Read more

Hugo Chávez, the combative leader of Venezuela, wants to come out with his own PC that he would then distribute to citizens in the region, according to sources in the PC industry who have been contacted by Venezuelan officials.

The PCs would be part of Chávez's strategy of winning friends in the region through gifts paid for through Venezuela's oil industry. Cuba, Bolivia and other nations have all been recipients of gifts from Chávez. The PCs would likely cost little or could even be given away. Venezuela has been contacting companies in … Read more

Buying a PC is always confusing, and chip companies aren't doing as good a job with some important customers as they might like, according to a new survey from In-Stat.

Even early adopters of technology are having trouble associating the right brand with the right company, said Ian Lao, an analyst with In-Stat and author of the report. Some brands, like Via's Eden, are only recognized by half of early adopters, he said. (I'd actually say that's pretty good for a company as tiny as Via).

The most well-recognized brand is still Intel's Pentium brand, … Read more

Sunday night's 60 Minutes, usually a show at the tail end of the technology bell curve, weighed in on a surprisingly relevant topic--Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative. If you've been following the MIT professor's story, you'll know he set out several years ago to develop a cheap laptop for children in third-world countries, featuring a low-power AMD chip, flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive, and even built-in Wi-Fi and a Webcam.

Closer to $175 than the originally projected $100, the systems are being rolled out in small test markets. We actually … Read more