intel

In this week's list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, Advanced Micro Devices slipped another notch. On the June 2004 list, 34 systems used AMD chips, but that decreased to 30 with the next update in November 2004, then 25 with the most recent list.

That's not great, given that the company and its allies touted Opteron as superior to rivals such as Intel's Xeon in high-performance technical computing. For contrast, there were 254 Intel Xeon-based systems and 79 Intel Itanium-based systems on the Top500 list.

AMD indeed started its marketing push for the 64-bit x86 chip in … Read more

Dual-core processors are arriving in the mainstream, bringing new uncertainties about how to price software sold on the basis of how many processors it's running on. Now a Hewlett-Packard executive has chimed in with an opinion that agrees with that from Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices--a processor should be defined as that which fits into processor socket--but that suggests eventually sidestepping the issue altogether.

Oracle is on the other side of the dual-core debate, preferring instead to charge on the basis of processor cores. That's likely to make other company's software more competitive on … Read more

Although they're not imminent, Intel expects forthcoming versions of Microsoft's most profitable products, Office and Windows, to boost demand for business PCs, a senior Intel executive said Thursday.

"There are a number of very interesting business intelligence advancements within Office 12," said Abhi Talwalkar, one of two senior vice presidents of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, speaking at a conference with financial analysts. "We're gong to see that be a significant driver in terms of growth, as well as Longhorn, in the future."

Longhorn, the next version of Windows, is expected to require … Read more

Programmers from Intel, Hewlett-Packard and the Gelato Foundation have begun an effort to improve GCC, a programming tool used to produce Linux and countless other open-source source software projects, so that software runs faster on Intel's Itanium processors.

Compilers translate software written by humans into instructions a computer understands. More so than other processors, the design of Itanium puts responsibility for high performance on the compiler. So far, though, GCC hasn't been fine-tuned to produce good Itanium software, according to the foundation, which is devoted to improving Linux on Itanium for technical computing tasks.

At a recent meeting, … Read more

Microsoft plans to announce a significant operating system upgrade at its own Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in April: support for the 64-bit memory extensions in newer x86 processors.

The company already had committed to an April release after earlier delays. But Andy Lees, corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft's server and tools business, shed a little more detail on the release timing Tuesday during an event in San Francisco where Intel unveiled new 64-bit Xeon processors.

"We'll announce the availability of that at WinHEC," he said about the new 64-bit Windows edition.

In addition, Microsoft … Read more

It'll come down to the wire, but Advanced Micro Devices expects to meet its deadline to fully disclose details of its "Pacifica" technology to help processors run multiple operating systems simultaneously.

The chipmaker had said it planned to reveal details by the end of March. On Monday, a company representative said the announcement is expected Wednesday, March 30. Microsoft and EMC's VMware subsidiary, which each have software that dovetails with the processor "virtualization" technology, will lend their support to AMD's technology, AMD said. The chipmaker also is working with the competing open-source Xen software project. … Read more

Hewlett-Packard, the leader when it comes to selling more units and generating more revenue than competitors in the x86 server market, likely will introduce new four-processor models with Intel's latest 64-bit Xeon chips on Tuesday.

Pat Gelsinger, one of two senior vice presidents in charge of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, will join a gaggle of executives from IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft and Unisys at a for a Tuesday announcement in San Francisco. Intel and HP are mum about the details, but new Xeon servers are a strong likelihood.

For one thing, Dell announced new server models with the Xeons … Read more

An effort to extend Red Hat's Fedora version of Linux to computers using Intel's Itanium processors is getting under way. A lead programmer, Silicon Graphics employee Prarit Bhargava, has established a mailing list, and is trying to coax Red Hat to release an Itanium version of its "rawhide" prototype Linux.

Fedora is Red Hat's fast-changing version of Linux, intended to attract outside programming involvement and to mature new technology quickly. Fedora today supports x86 processors such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, and the forthcoming Fedora Core 4 will extend to IBM's Power processors … Read more