intel

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more

The broad mainstream future of Thunderbolt is in question, but there's no doubt it's already useful for people with heavy computing demands.

With hundreds of gigabytes of high-resolution digital photographs and a smaller but still bulky collection of video, I'm one of them.

To supply fast external storage for my Dell laptop, for a few years now I've relied on eSATA -- an external version of the SATA standard used to connect hard drives inside computer chassis. It's functional but prickly: the external drive must be powered on before the computer, sleep and wake can … Read more

Intel believes Thunderbolt will remake mobile computing by endowing laptops with a high-speed, versatile port.

To match Intel's mainstream ambitions for Thunderbolt, though, Intel will have to prove to hardware designers and to consumers that it's got compelling advantages over the alternatives. Today, those are chiefly USB (Universal Serial Bus) and HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface. Tomorrow, another challenger could arrive in the form of PCI Express Cable, and it's got a strong ally in PC giant Hewlett-Packard.

Getting new input-output technologies to catch on is particularly hard because I/O standards only succeed with support from both … Read more

To some, Thunderbolt is just a port on the side of a MacBook, a mere check-box on a feature list.

But to Intel, the high-speed communication technology is an ambitious attempt to do something that only happens every decade or so in the computing industry: rewrite the rules of how people plug stuff into their computers.

Thunderbolt arrived in 2011 with the potential to bring the flexibility of a tower computer to something as compact as an ultrabook. And it's got a bright future in premium and professional products, as events this week show.

First, Apple's new Retina display-equipped MacBook Pro … Read more

Intel will not join a chip-related alliance aimed at making it easier for software developers to take advantage of the compute power locked up in graphics silicon.

Advanced Micro Devices, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., and Texas Instruments announced the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation on Tuesday.

Here's how Lisa Su, an AMD senior vice president, described it in a phone interview with CNET.

"The point is, even if you put a really powerful CPU next to a really powerful GPU, if these [chips] don't interact and the applications don't know when it's better to … Read more

Amid much back-and-forth this week on the future of Apple's Mac Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini desktops, it seems worth recapping what we know for sure, as well as what we don't.

Fact: Apple updated the Mac Pro on Monday, albeit with a minor CPU tweak.

Shortly after the end of Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference keynote speech, Apple added its new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops to its online store. Above each laptop's picture, you will still find a little "new" icon, indicating the updated systems. Surprisingly, the Mac Pro also … Read more

Apple desktop fans were disappointed at today's World Wide Developer Conference, where, despite persistent rumors, Apple's iMac and Mac Pro lines went unmentioned during the keynote presentation.

When the Apple store came back online after the show, a "New" tag on the Mac Pro hinted at a stealth update. Glancing over the specs for the supposedly new system turned up only a clock speed bump to a few of the available Xeon processors.

Rather than the quad-core, 2.8GHz Intel Xeon W3530 chip, for example, now the $2,499 Mac Pro starts with a 3.2GHz … Read more

Intel reportedly wants to kick off a new interactive TV service this year, though media companies aren't yet sold on the idea, Reuters reports.

The new service would use a set-top box with embedded Intel technology and tap into facial recognition to figure out who's watching, according to the report, which cited "sources who have been negotiating with Intel." Reuters said such a feature could allow advertisers to better direct their ads to specific genders and age groups.

But Intel wants to unbundle and license specific networks and TV shows at a discount to what cable … Read more

Asus probably wins the smorgasbord award at Computex for showing off the widest range of tablets and hybrids.

Yet another in a collection of Android and Window 8-based designs is the Tablet 810, which runs Windows 8 on top of Intel's yet-to-be-officially announced 32-nanometer dual-core "Clover Trail" Atom chip.

"The Netbook is back, this time in the guise of a tablet computer with a keyboard dock," wrote CNET Asia.

That's not exactly a compliment as Netbooks of yore (circa 2009) were invariably slow. In short, they attempted the impossible: running resource-intensive Windows 7 on … Read more