Intel

The transistor turns 60

Correction, 10:45 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated Fred Terman's title at Stanford University. He was provost.

Sixty years ago, on December 16, scientists at Bell Labs--William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain--built the world's first transistor and nothing has been the same since. We'll be covering the anniversary in subsequent articles, but here's a smattering of some of the implications, in somewhat chronological order, of the event:

1. The dawn of electronics. Vacuum tubes consumed lots of power and were fragile. ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, weighed 28 tons, consumed … Read more

One Laptop Per Child: An idea whose time has come, just not for Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte had the best of intentions. Unfortunately, when those intentions clash with the profit motives of private vendors, private industry has become quite aggressive, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The One Laptop Per Child project has sold nowhere near its stated goal of 150 million laptops shipped by the end of 2008.

As is often the case, the person with the idea is not necessarily the right person to capitalize on it:

Mr. Negroponte's ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.… Read more

AMD vs. Intel vs. buying a gaming PC this holiday season

You may have seen news today that AMD announced its new Spider platform this morning, consisting of two quad core Phenom CPUs, a new 700-series of motherboard chipsets, and its already announced Radeon HD 3000-series of graphics cards. At 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz for the Phenom 9500 and 9600, respectively, AMD's new chips will need to rely on price, rather than performance, to entice buyers to choose those chips, or systems based on them, over Intel's 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600. Pricing will shake out as the various retailers get their inventories and can gauge demand, … Read more

PC gaming executives: Everything's fine

The state of the PC gaming industry is fine. Just ask any executive whose business depends on PC gaming.

Representatives from Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Crytek held a combination political rally/pep talk for the PC gaming industry Friday at Nvidia's GeForce LAN 4 event in Alameda, Calif. The audience--several hundred rabid PC gamers with plans to spend the entire weekend playing Crysis--cheered the panelists as they reassured attendees that all was well in the PC gaming world.

The runaway success of gaming consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3 … Read more

For future of enterprise computing, watch consumers

The enterprise computing industry seems like it's turning into one big utility company.

It's a good thing the accountants didn't have to sit through the keynote speeches during the first two days of Oracle OpenWorld, because no one would be allowed to attend next year. Hector Ruiz of Advanced Micro Devices showed video clips of Star Wars and the World Series. Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard discussed whether or not he thought Oracle's Larry Ellison could beat him at tennis. At least Intel's Paul Otellini tailored his Tuesday morning address to the actual attendees of the … Read more

New PCs available with Intel's new quad-core chips

Our review of Intel's new Core 2 Extreme quad-core chip went up last week, and our findings, along with the general consensus around the Web, were that the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is the new king of the CPU hill. Today you'll find these new chips available from various system vendors in their high-end gaming rigs, although it's interesting to see who has the chips and who doesn't. Here's a rundown of the big names:

The haves: Alienware's Area-51 ALX CF Falcon Northwest's Mach V Maingear's F131 SLI Velocity Micro's Gamer'… Read more

The secret history of the sub-$1,000 computer

Once upon a time there were no iPods, iPhones, Xboxes, Blackberrys, or Tivos. Really, I'm not kidding. There were PCs, though. And they were really expensive. But we didn't have anything else to spend our money on, so that was OK. We paid $2,000 for our PCs and liked it.

Back in those days, there were three microprocessor companies--Intel, AMD, and a little Texas (it's an oxymoron, I know) company named Cyrix. If you don't recognize the name, that's because Intel had such a lock on PC makers back then that Cyrix's processors were sold primarily through the third-party reseller channel.

It's a popular misconception that Cyrix "cloned" Intel's processors. Cyrix's processors were actually all original designs. In fact, Cyrix's manufacturing partners--initially Texas Instruments, later IBM and ST Microelectronics--licensed Cyrix's designs for their own branded processors. … Read more

Intel ready for 2008 with Penryn

The planned launch of Intel's Penryn processors on Monday is the first blow in a one-two punch that might stagger AMD heading into 2008.

Just a few months after the launch of AMD's quad-core Barcelona chips, Intel is hitting back with Penryn, now known as the Xeon 5400 family of processors. A total of 15 server chips are set to launch Monday as well as a new Core 2 Extreme desktop processor, with Penryn chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year.

Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core architecture … Read more

The Gizmo Report: an Eee PC in the house

I recently mentioned my plan to get the new Eee PC laptop from Asus in spite of a price hike just before the product was introduced. The Eee PC is basically a low-cost subnotebook intended for developing markets, like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO, which I've also written about here--but unlike the OLPC, the Eee PC will be regularly available in commercial channels.

Well, earlier this week, I found the gizmo for sale over on Newegg.com and placed my order. A mere $458.45 later, including California sales tax and two-day shipping, it was … Read more

Intel invests $10 million in security company

Intel Capital announced Thursday a $10 million investment in security company Iovation, which targets online fraud and abuse based on the identification and "reputation" of Net-enabled devices.

Device reputation tracks whether a particular machine has a history of negative online behavior attached to it.

Intel, which led the $15 million round, is increasingly tapping into the security market. And the chip giant is not alone. Other hardware vendors from networking giant Cisco Systems, which already has a large footprint in the security market, to storage titan EMC, which acquired RSA in a $2.1 billion deal last year, … Read more