intel

One tidbit mentioned during Intel's blowout third quarter was the promotion of long-time Chief Financial Officer Andy Bryant to something called "chief administrative officer."

Bryant has been the CFO at Intel for 13 years and will step up to his new title effective immediately, so that Stacy Smith can become CFO in a move planned for some time, said Tom Beermann, an Intel spokesman. The move frees Bryant up from the day-to-day responsibilities of running Intel's finances, which is actually a quite-complicated exercise of making sure Intel's factories are running at optimum capacity in order … Read more

Update: I added a bit more detail, news of the CFO switcheroo, and a self-congratulatory but illuminating quotation from Intel's CEO.

Intel on Tuesday stomped all over estimates of its quarterly financial performance--not only Wall Street's but its own.

Three months ago, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker in September predicted revenue of $9 billion to $9.6 billion for the third quarter of 2007. Then, in September, it raised it to a range of $9.4 billion to $9.8 billion.

The real number: $10.1 billion, a 15 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter. And net … Read more

It's the proverbial win-win situation.

Earlier this week, Intel said it wanted more time to respond to the European Commission's allegations that it abused its market dominant position and sent an extension request to the Commission's antitrust regulators. It turns out, the Commission needs more time too.

A hearing officer for the Commission was due to make a decision on Intel's extension request Thursday, but instead found he too needs more time and will now make a decision by October 19, said Jonathan Todd, a Commission spokesman.

As a result, Intel has been granted a provisional … Read more

From time to time, I'll post a brief summary of some interesting items I come across during the day that I don't have time to call out in more detail. If you see anything interesting out there, drop me a line at tom dot krazit at cnet dot com. Take that, you e-mail harvesters.

LEGAL DEPARTMENT: There's some news about a couple of items that will soon await new Apple General Counsel Daniel Cooperman. Information Week notes that the company has been sued over the iPhone--again--this time by a man claiming that Apple is breaking … Read more

Enterprise Strategy Group's resident expert on all things server virtualization, Mark Bowker, tells me that there were 15,000 people at VMworld a few weeks ago. Not a surprise, the industry is gaga over server virtualization as more users look to turn physical servers into consolidated virtual partitions.

The irony here is that while the server virtualization chatter focuses on VMware, Xen, Citrix, and Microsoft, the venerable IBM zSeries (i.e. mainframe) will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this virtualization frenzy.

The reason for this is fairly simple. Server virtualization is all about rationalizing IT assets … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--If you're not exactly sure what you want in a mobile computer, don't worry: the folks who are building them aren't entirely sure themselves.

The consensus among five panelists gathered here at the ARM Developers Conference was that this is a very interesting and confusing time to be thinking about the future of mobile computing, because the playing field is so wide open and because consumers haven't decided exactly what they want.

"It's sort of like Darwin," said Tony Milbourn, director of mobile devices at Motorola. "We don't … Read more

Two weeks after Intel signaled its future low-power intentions, ARM has unveiled its latest mobile chip design for smart phones and consumer devices that will arrive around 2010.

The Cortex A9 is an extension of the Cortex family of applications processor cores that ARM unveiled two years ago with the Cortex A8. It combines the multiprocessor support of older ARM cores with the Cortex design, ARM's highest-performance implementation to date. Several ARM partners, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Nvidia and NEC Electronics also announced plans to use the Cortex A9 in future chips for smart phones and consumer … Read more

It appears that Intel still has some work to do in getting its act together on PC graphics.

New drivers for the company's 965GM chipset, found in many notebooks and midrange desktops, still don't deliver the uniform performance increases promised earlier this year, according to testing by CNET Labs. My colleague Julie Rivera benchmarked three games on a PC with both the older drivers and the newer ones, and concluded that while some improvements could be detected, the new drivers don't do nearly enough to improve performance across multiple games.

Integrated graphics are the budget-friendly way of … Read more

Back in mid-August, Intel's Nick Knupffer made a promise to casual 3D gamers by suggesting that a new driver update would give systems that use the Intel G965 integrated graphics chipset a much-needed performance boost. I was highly skeptical of this claim, but wanted to put Intel's claims to the test.

To test Intel's claims, I chose an Acer TravelMate 4720-6727 laptop, which uses a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 CPU, 1GB of RAM, an integrated 965GM Express graphic chipset with 384MB memory allocated, and running Windows XP Professional SP2. While this hardware combination is not the … Read more