intel

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

Intel and Nokia said Wednesday that they're working closely together to get WiMax-enabled devices on the market in 2008 when Sprint Nextel plans to launch parts of its new WiMax network.

The companies announced at the WiMax World Tradeshow in Chicago that they'd work together to ensure interoperability between Intel's WiMax chips and Nokia's laptop devices. Intel will also work with Nokia Siemens Networks to ensure interoperability between Intel's chips and Nokia Siemens' networking gear.

Intel and Nokia are both strong proponents of WiMax, a wireless technology that provides faster speeds than cellular technology, but … Read more

John Mark notes something that most of us forget: one of the world's most active and most interesting open-source contributors is not normally thought of as a software company at all: Intel. Intel does a huge amount of foundational work in the open-source community, yet takes very little credit for it.

Why is Intel so humble when it comes to its open source work?… Read more

Novatium Solutions, which has come up with a thin-client computer for emerging markets, has landed an investment from New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The company has mostly installed its computers around Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. The systems work on the thin-client model. Most of the actual computing and the Internet connection goes through a central server. Users then tap into the server through desktop units.

With thin clients, updates and security patches are easier to manage, according to Rajesh Jain, one of Novatium's founders. Energy can also be conserved. In a novel twist, Novatium's clients use a … Read more

It's true: You can't run software developed for PCs on ARM-based smart phones. The company's all right with that.

"In (this) category, it's still fundamentally about low power and battery life, and our ecosystem understands that and knows how to optimize for that," said Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances for mobile computing for ARM, the chip designer that dominates the mobile phone industry. "The power footprint associated with those PC apps will really drain your battery."

Lines are being drawn for the next big battle in the computer industry, and ARM … Read more

For those who play PC games (and please count me in), the most expensive and necessary investment has always been the graphics card (also known as the GPU, graphics processing unit). High-end cards, from either ATI or nVidia, can cost $500 and up. That's not even factoring in the case, cooling system, power supply, etc., which also have to be equally high-end to support the increasingly large and power-hungry graphics cards. And there seems to be no end to all this. Or is there?

At IDF 2007, there was a demo running Quake 4. There wasn't much to … Read more