intel

Toshiba launched Tuesday a new line of notebooks powered by chips from Advanced Micro Devices, marking the first time in seven years the computer maker has ended its exclusive arrangement with rival chip maker Intel.

The Toshiba Satellite A215 series will feature several versions of AMD's dual-core processors, such as AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology Gold Edition TL64 and the Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL56 version.

Toshiba cited consumer and retailer demand as the reason for striking the deal with AMD. Two years ago, Toshiba and a number of other Japanese computer makers found themselves … Read more

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," apparently still has legs as a business strategy.

Intel has been trying for years to get PCs with its chips inside living rooms, trying to offset the slowing growth of the PC market by creating a new way to use PCs. That hasn't worked, as Media Center PCs and their Viiv successors have sold fairly well but few consumers are actually using them in place of their digital cable or satellite boxes at the center of their entertainment systems.

So Intel announced Monday that it will incorporate the OpenCable … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Sophisticated motion sensors are part of an Intel project to help couch potatoes monitor their physical activity from the, um, couch.

Beverly Harrison, a senior research scientist at Intel, did a lot of jogging in place Wednesday at Research@Intel Day, the company's science fair of ongoing projects inside its labs. She was demonstrating how someday sensors could be used inside mobile devices to measure the frequency and intensity of a person's daily physical activity as part of a weight-loss program or to help someone rehabilitate an injury.

Sure, gyms these days have all kinds … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--There's always one guy who seems a little too good at mowing down players in a Quake 3 session. Intel thinks future PC gamers might be interested in technology that helps level the playing field.

The company showed off a research project into "anti-cheat technology" during its Research@Intel Day at Intel headquarters. The idea is that Intel and the PC gaming industry would build technology into gaming rigs that could detect when common cheats--such as "aimbots" that handle targeting while the player just holds down the trigger--are used in an online … Read more

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