ATOMS

The first phone based on Intel silicon keeps pace with rival devices using chips from longstanding mobile standard bearer ARM, a report said Wednesday.

"For Intel, answering the looming ARM threat is obviously hugely important for the future," said review site Anandtech.

"So how did Intel's first attempt fare? In short, reasonably well," the site's Brian Klug wrote.

For the first time, a commercial smartphone is packing Intel silicon, the Atom 'Medfield" Z2460. India-based Lava announced the Xolo X900 this week.

Benchmarks showed the X900 keeping up with market-leading Android phones like the … Read more

As expected, the first smartphone powered by an Intel processor launched this week: the Lava Xolo 900.

Intel and India-based Lava International today announced the general availability of the Xolo X900, built around the Intel Atom Z2460 processor. The phone will be available for purchase in the India market on April 23 at a street price of approximately 22,000 rupees, or about $420.

Lava also announced a partnership with Croma, a national Indian chain of megastores, which will sell the X900.

In addition to the 1.6GHz Atom processor with a 400MHz graphics chip clock, the phone features full … Read more

Intel is offering more specifics on the features of future Windows 8 tablet at a conference in Beijing. It's a laudable goal, but can Intel make it happen this year?

Underneath the glass will be beat an Atom Z2760 "Clover Trail" chip: dual-core capable with "burst mode" (for quick bursts of performance when needed) and Hyperthreading -- the latter allows a dual-core chip to behave in quad-core-like fashion in some cases. … Read more

Intel announced its first Atom chip for microservers at a major company confab in Beijing today.

The new Atom, codenamed Centerton, is a system-on-a-chip, which makes it even more power efficient than less-integrated older Atom chips.

Centerton's power envelope -- what the industry sometimes calls TDP or thermal design power -- is six watts. While not as low as the power envelope for Intel's smartphone Atom, six watts is still a lot more power efficient than Intel's more mainstream chips. Those have power envelopes of 15 watts or higher. To date, Atom has been aimed at small … Read more

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE -- I recently watched footage of the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in 1945. A black and white mushroom cloud built up in slow motion. Chills and prickles crawled up my spine.

Visiting Trinity Site One week later, I visit ground zero, where a device called "The Gadget" was strapped into a 100-foot-tall steel tower and set off. Two more nuclear explosions took place over Japan after that successful test, harbingers of the end of World War II.

This all happened a long time before I was born, but I feel a strange sadness as I stand here on a hazy spring day in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, a desert basin full of scrub and pronghorn antelope. That name translates to "day's journey of the dead." … Read more

Physicists have engineered a significantly more stable laser, an advance which could lead to better atomic clocks for equipment, such as GPS satellites, and physics experiments.

Researchers at the JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, have built a prototype of a superradiant laser using 1 million rubidium atoms. Their work was described in a paper published in Nature yesterday.

Using a different structure than traditional lasers, the researchers believe they can build a laser which is 100 to 1,000 times more stable. These lasers could be used in … Read more

There is a new player in town--a new audio player, that is. The AtomicPlayer from Quux Software is a simple tool that lets you play your favorite audio files, as well as access numerous online radio stations. This free player will never be considered flashy by any means. The publishers have removed emphasis on what they consider to be irrelevant features (i.e., skins, visualizations, etc). What they do offer is a small, no-nonsense audio player interface that is intended as an alternative choice for individuals who just want to listen to music.

The AtomicPlayer may seem to be a … Read more

When Intel announced its newest chip for phones it also pre-announced, in part, the chip that will power future Windows 8 tablets from companies like Hewlett-Packard.

This week Intel disclosed details of the Z2580 Atom chip for phones. All in all pretty impressive: it's Intel's first dual-core chip for phones, uses Hyper Threading (which can allow a dual-core chip to act like a quad-core in some cases), runs up to 1.8GHz in burst mode, and, importantly, packs Imagination's speedy PowerVR SGX 544MP2 graphics processing unit.

That phone chip is what Intel calls "Clover Trail L.&… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Intel has unveiled a number of new partnerships and chips as the company, which is dominant in the PC business, attempts to find the same success with mobile devices.

Intel said today it is working with ZTE, Lava International, and Orange on handsets, and with Visa on a multiyear partnership to build a mobile-payment service together. It also unveiled a trio of new Atom chips to fill out its mobile-centric product portfolio.

"We're not a stranger to the mobile market," CEO Paul Otellini said during a press conference at the Mobile World Congress trade show. He … Read more