Biglopedia | Appel | Intel | Google | Microsoft | Web

Motorola targets young men with its most testosterone-heavy TV commercial yet

Droid. Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It's not a princess. It's a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

Intel announced a technology partnership with Nokia that could potentially give the chip maker the breakthrough it has been looking for into the mobile market.

The companies said last night they would work together on a new class of mobile computing devices, but would not say when they would come to market or give details on the kind of wireless products they hoped to develop together.

Analysts saw the pact as strategically important for Intel in the long term because it gains the world's top cellphone maker as a potential client.

But given the lack of details, analysts said it could take one or two years for products to come to market, and it remained to be seen if they would find favour with consumers.

"Intel at least has its foot in the door. It's an important and strategic customer," said Gartner analyst Jon Erensen, who sees the partnership as a way for Intel to get into the market for advanced phones known as smartphones.

However, he added, "You're probably talking about something like 2011 before you get down to the power consumption and integration (levels) you'd need for that kind of device."

Analysts said the deal gives Intel a chance to take on leading cellphone chip makers Qualcomm Inc and Texas Instruments, a big Nokia supplier.

It could also mean stiffer competition for ARM Holdings , which supplies core cellphone processors to both Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, and whose customers rely in part on software from Wind River Systems.

Intel said earlier this month that it would buy Wind River, whose software speeds up and connects devices made by Samsung Electronics, Apple, Hewlett-Packard Co and Motorola.

Intel, whose microprocessors are found in eight out of 10 personal computers, already works with LG Electronics on mobile devices. The agreement with Finland's Nokia, the world's largest cellphone maker, is a bigger step.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini has said that the handheld, embedded and netbook markets would be as important for the company as the PC market in the near future.

Under the agreement, Intel will buy intellectual property from Nokia related to high-speed wireless technology. They also plan to collaborate on open-source mobile Linux software projects, which some analysts say will compete with Google's Android software in the netbook and mobile Internet device (MID) market.

Intel and Nokia said they aimed to define "a new mobile platform beyond today's smartphones, notebooks and netbooks" for hardware, software and mobile Internet services. They stressed the pact was about their technology collaboration and not about specific products.

INTEL (TICKER: INTC) and Nokia (NOK) announced a strategic alliance to develop Intel architecture-based mobile chips and open-source software. The goal appears to be creating open and standards-based technologies to explore new ideas and products in mobile computing and communications.

Collaborative efforts between the two companies will be centered around these three initiatives: definition of mobile chipset based on Intel architecture; development of open-source software infrastructure such as Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin; and Intel licensing of Nokia's HSPA/3G modem internet protocol ...

INTEL LEADS the CPU market, full stop. More than ever, perhaps. So, why change its perfectly good branding then? After all, Core 2 - and Core 3, and so on - does sound better than Pentium, Hexium or Sexium, and definitely far better than Itanium, all names sounding like some evil Big Pharma drugs.

Aside from a lot of extra marketing and sales work, resulting in marketeers keeping their jobs in these tight times, there doesn't seem to be any real reason to rehash the branding just because of the Nehalem arrival.

The new chips, rather than being called say Core 3, got the brand new Core i7 moniker, in a way reminding us of the old P7 codename. Now, the dual-channel mainstream Nehalems will be called Core i5, and the low-end integrated-graphics parts might bear the burden of the Core i3 brand. And, just like the current i7 with the brand new three-digit product numbers instead of the old four-digit ones, you'll have an interesting time comparing chip models.

So, when you do your holiday system shopping later this year, you could, for instance, choose between the old Core i7 965, the new Core i7 960 or the brand new Core i5 XXX (I didn't say '860'). While all three are internally basically the same CPUs and run at a 3.2GHz clock, the differences will be there. The first one is the old 2008-launch part with unlocked multiplier but C0 stepping. The second one is to be the new part late this year, with locked multiplier but newer, more efficent D or even E stepping. And, finally, the last part will have two memory channels and the LGA1156 versus LGA1366 socket, but faster Turbo mode and of course cheaper P55-based mainboards. Love the confusion?

Many publications commented on the new branding approach, with mixed reactions. There is no clear connection to the old Core 2 branding, and even the product numbering was completely rehashed. Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9770 and Core i7 Extreme 965 cover the same market segment and run at the same default clock and, in fact, aren't that far apart in performance. But there's no correlation at all in the naming. The old Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium 3 approach was, in this respect, more consistent.

Why not look at something like that, since Intel already went with this BMW-style numbering? The "7" series is the high end, the "5" series is the mainstream, and the "3" series is doing the basic work. An obligatory "X" could be added at the end of any Extreme part in the "7" and "5" series, to avoid having to use different basic numbers for otherwise same-clocked extreme and normal, that is, locked parts. A similar "L" could be added for the low power parts, and an "M" for the mobile parts. Plus, of course, a "G" for the graphics-enriched ones.

After all, at the Xeon front, that's the case already. The "W" parts are top bin workstation CPUs, the "X" parts are for high end servers, the "E" parts are the mainstream offerings, and the "L" parts are the low power workhorses for dense and green computing.

Then, there should be enough numbering in reserve to accommodate the 32nm 'Westmere' parts without changing the i7-i5-i3 sequence. Right now this scheme seems to be a bit tight for the i7 series as we'd only have the 980, 985, 990 and 995 numbers available before hitting the four digits, and that has to take care of the next 20 months at least. Aside from that, the possible i8-i6-i4 sequence could then be left for the Sandy Bridge and Haswell generations.

Talking about numbers, in Chinese, eight is a very lucky number, but four isn't. The last murdered Alpha CPU was codenamed EV8, but was supposed to be really called, umm, the 21464. So, maybe, let's skip any future 'i4' at the low end, eh?

Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, will sell processors to Nokia Oyj for mobile devices, marking the biggest breakthrough in Intel's expansion into the phone market.

The two will develop a new mobile device and chips, Intel and Nokia said today in a statement. Intel will also get mobile- phone radio technology from Nokia and the companies will develop versions of the Linux operating system for mobile devices.

What’s in a name? If you’re Intel, there’s plenty of brand equity in names like Atom, Centrino, Core and Pentium. But there’s also a fair share of confusion, too, among consumers and IT buyers.

And so, Intel is planning on revamping its portfolio of brand names, an effort that revolves around a good-better-best format. In a statement, the company said:

…we are focusing our strategy around a primary ‘hero’ client brand which is Intel Core. Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc). Over time those will go away in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors spanning multiple levels: Intel Core i3 processor, Intel Core i5 processor, and Intel Core i7 processors. Core i3 and Core i5 are new modifiers and join the previously announced Intel Core i7 to round out the family structure. It is important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits. For example, upcoming processors such as Lynnfield (desktop) will carry the Intel Core brand, but will be available as either Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 depending upon the feature set and capability. Clarksfield (mobile) will have the Intel Core i7 name.

So glad Intel has taken the complexity out of it. Actually, the company acknowledges that there will be multiple brands in the market next year, including the old names, as the company makes the transition.

Under the Core brand, the i3 represents the entry-level of the Core family, with Core i5 and Core i7 representing the mid-level and high-level products. Celeron will stick around for entry-level computing, Pentium for basic computing and Atom for devices such as netbooks and smartphones. For PCs, think of Celeron being good, Pentium being better and Core being best.

Even Centrino, which came to be synonymous with wireless computing, won’t completely go away. The company plans to transition the name to WiFi and WiMax products next year.

Intel showed what it considers the smallest PC motherboard in the world at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Shanghai. The motherboard, or main PC circuit board, will go into the company's next-generation "Moorestown" mobile Internet device (MID) platform due in the 2009-2010 time frame.

"Our engineers have been very hard at work on Moorestown," Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, said during an IDF keynote speech Wednesday. "The platform design teams have been hard at work in figuring out what is the smallest form factor that they can actually fit a complete PC motherboard into so they can deliver a great mobile Internet experience."

"What I'm holding in my hand is what is possibly the world's smallest PC motherboard," Chandrasekher said. The Moorestown motherboard houses the processor, chipset (including graphics), and memory, along with silicon for 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, he said. "This is the heart of the new machine."

Moorestown will be Intel's showcase system-on-a-chip, combining the CPU, graphics, and memory controller (and other silicon mentioned above) on a single die. It will likely be the main launching pad for Intel into the mobile phone market--what the chipmaker calls "MID phones." Moorestown may also be a major market for Intel's upcoming solid-state drives.