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The chip giant settled with AMD. But another rival is making noise about anticompetitive behavior.

After bumping along as low as $7 a share at the beginning of the year his stock is up near $14. Several months ago Apple (AAPL) began using his graphics chipset – a group of circuits designed to work together – across nearly its entire line of Macs, giving him a very high-profile endorsement. And in the white-hot netbook segment, his Ion processors have won raves for turning underpowered laptops into HD video machines.

Problem is, both of these acclaimed Nvidia (NVDA) products might be dead in the water.
Why? Huang blames chip giant Intel (INTC). Nvidia’s graphics chipsets, which Steve Jobs liked enough to buy by the boatload, aren’t allowed to work with Intel’s latest offering, code-named “Nehalem” – and in the computer world no Intel compatibility means no mainstream future.

Nvidia’s Ion chip is designed to work alongside the chip giant’s Atom processor, but lately it’s been priced out of the market by – you guessed it – Intel.

Feeling AMD's pain
All of this has piqued the interest of the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into whether Intel has improperly used its power in the computer chip market to choke rivals. For those who are handicapping the chances that the FTC will bring charges, Nvidia’s gripes have recently taken on new importance: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which had been Intel’s main critic, recently settled its antitrust complaints with Intel for a tidy sum of $1.25 billion. That leaves Nvidia to bang the anti-Intel drum.

“I’m sympathetic to what AMD had to go through over the years,” Huang says.
Intel says it’s a tough but fair competitor, and that Nvidia has caused its own problems. To wit: The two companies signed a limited patent-sharing deal five years ago, and Intel says that if Nvidia had read the fine print, it would have noticed that designs like the current Nehalem chips weren’t covered in the agreement. And the Ion dispute? Well, Intel says it just lowered prices on its Atom chipsets to stay competitive. What’s wrong with that?

Nvidia tells a different story. Executives there say they’re a victim of the same kinds of tactics that got Intel into antitrust trouble in Europe and Asia. Nvidia believes it should be authorized to make Nehalem-compatible chipsets under the 2004 agreement; it claims Intel is just getting litigious to stop a competitive threat. And with Ion, Nvidia accuses Intel of unfair pricing that locks it out of the market. Intel says Nvidia just doesn’t understand the incentives it offers customers.

(The two companies are battling in court over the chipset agreement. Intel has asked a Delaware court to clarify whether Nvidia has the right to build Nehalem chipsets, and Nvidia has countersued for breach of contract.)

The courts will ultimately decide who’s right – that is, unless Intel decides to ink a settlement with Nvidia, too. Even then, that probably won’t be the end of Intel’s legal headaches. Maybe that’s the trouble with being a giant. There’s always some kid with a slingshotgunning for you.

General Overview:

The Q6600 Is a fantastic new chip by Intel. It provides the end user with an extremely powerful, cheap and multi-purpose chip. At one point this chip would cost you £500 alone. Now they have cut the price down to roughly £170 making it the perfect choice for enthusiasts and gamers alike. The Q6600 has four cores each running at 2.4Ghz with 8mb L2 cache which means it can do four times the work in the same amount of time compared to a single 2.4Ghz core. The Q6600 runs on a 1066Mhz FSB (FSB is the "Front Side Bus" this tells the processor how fast to run when combined with the processor's multiplier which is different depending on which CPU you buy. Increasing the FSB will increase the speed of the processor, known as "Overclocking", there is a section

in this review on overclocking for those who are interested.)

Overclocking:
Overclocking is the art of making your PC parts run faster than they are rated by the manufacturer. For overclocking the CPU this is usually done through the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) which can be accessed by pressing a key that is stated on screen when you first turn on your computer. It is recommended for those who are looking into overclocking to thoroughly read some guides on the internet, or you may end up frying your chip completely. (and overclocking voids warranties so you won't get a refund either.) However if you are careful and know what you are doing you can increase the performance of your pc much more than it normally operates at. The Q6600 is based on the Core 2 archetecture (aka Conroe) which is much more effective than the old Pentium 4 netburst archetecture. Due to the better efficiency you can reach extreme overclocks on the Q6600, as much as 50% overclock on air (Usually stable at around 3.2Ghz with B3 stepping or 3.4Ghz with G0 stepping. See "Steppings" for more information) and around 100% on water (You can reach speeds faster than 4Ghz with watercooling! That's 16Ghz of power in total over all four cores!)

Installation:

The installation of the Q6600 or any Socket 775 CPU (See the "Socket Type" heading for more detail on what a socket is) is fairly simple. All you need to do is lift the small lever on the side of the base that the chip sits on which will release the clamps that hold the CPu in place, then place the cpu onto the slot(Socket 775 CPU's have no pins on the bottom, they are all on the motherboard now so it's quite hard to actually bend the pins, unlike on old processors where they could easily get bent and you'd either have to carefully bend them back perfectly or buy a whole new processor.) making sure the processor is the right way round, to find which way the processor goes there is a small black tab in one corner that shows you which way it goes. All you have to do after that is place the heatsink on top of the processor (Don't forget to add thermal paste if there isn't any already on the bottom of the heatsink, it usually looks like a gray paste. Your CPU may overheat if you don't have thermal paste) and twist the four locks into place to hold the heatsink onto the motherboard. After that you're all set to go and fire up all four cores!

Steppings:
The Q6600 comes in two different steppings. Steppings are the different revisions of the chip's archetecture to further imrpove efficiency. Now about the two different steppings: the B3 stepping and the G0 stepping. What's the difference you ask? The B3 stepping has a TDP (Thermal Design Power, or how much power the CPU uses in watts) of 105w. The G0 stepping has a TDP of 95w which means lower temperatures, and obviously lower power consumption. This also means that the processor can be more easily overclocked.

Socket Type:

As explained before the Q6600 and many other chips are Socket 775 or less commonly known as Socket T. There are quite a few different sockets such as socket 478, socket AM2/AM2+ (for AMD chips.) Considering the Q6600 is Socket 775 we will focus on what that involves for now. Socket 775 is different from other sockets due to the fact it has a "Land Grid Array". What that means is the processor no longer has pins, all of the pins are spring loaded on the motherboard to make it much harder to accidently bend the pins and require a whole replacement of the CPU. (All older processors have the pins located directly on the chip.) The "775" refers to how many pins the socket has to make contact between the motherboard and the CPU. Due to Socket 775 having more pins that most other sockets it provides better power distribution to the processor, which means your system is more stable especially when overclocking.

Performance:
When using multithreaded applications (Applications that can use more than one core at the same time) the Q6600 provides extremely fast calculations, but even if the program is not multithreaded it still provides extremely fast speeds. Even better performance than those of faster pentium 4 chips due to superior archetechture which maximizes the efficiency of transferring and calculating data. The Q6600 is the perfect chip for gamers and enthusiasts alike due to it's speed, large cache, four cores and great overclocking potential. Games will run at full speed with no hitches, feel like encoding that DVD you like so much so you can watch it on your PC? No problem. The Q6600 will do that faster than almost all other CPU's. The Q6600 really is one of the best performing chips you can get.

Conclusion:

In conclusion the Q6600 has to be the best chip you could possibly buy. It's cheap, fast and provides more potential than first meets the eye for those who wish to unlock it's true power. A must have for anybody who wants the most out of their PC.

According to a report published by c’t magazine, Intel is now aiming to launch Larrabee in a variety of flavors in 2010 and has scrapped the previous late 2009 plan. Intel’s Joseph Schultz made this comment during the opening of a visual computing research center in Saarbruecken, Germany. Spokesman Nick Knupffer confirmed the narrowed-down date, but declined to provide further comments.
Schultz also told c’t that it will be a “big challenge” to compete with Nvidia’s and AMD’s products and especially highlighted the power-efficiency achieved by AMD’s Radeon graphics cards.

Intel is very careful providing any information about its x86-based Larrabee. What we know, however, is that the device will be based on second-generation Pentium processor technology with the P54C core. The first Pentium core (P5, 800 nm, 60 and 66 MHz) was in development since 1989 and was introduced in 1993. The P54C was launched in 1994 with speeds up to 120 MHz, while the succeeding 350 nm P54CS reached 200 MHz. The 55C core (280 nm up to 233 MHz) followed in 1995 and was replaced with the Pentium II in 1997.

Larrabee is expected to come in multiple flavors with at least 8 cores at the low-end have at least 32 cores on the high-end. At a clock speed of 2 GHz, the 32-core version could be topping a theoretical maximum performance of 2 TFlops.

Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s largest chip foundries, just announced a marketing collaboration involving Intel’s Atom processor. Atom is Intel’s effort to downsize its processor chips to fit into the realm of emerging smart devices below the Personal Computer space. TSMC will work closely with Intel to port some of the Atom processors to its own process and design flows. TSMC will also have the ability to do engineering on the chip to build customized versions for the large number of existing TSMC customers. However, Intel will have ownership of the final device and the customer, as Intel will be selling the custom designed chips that TSMC designs and builds in its foundry.

As PC sales wane, and their chip revenues along with them, Intel looks to additional sources for revenues. Consumer products represent a massive potential market, though at clearly lower margins and price points. But, Intel’s cost of operations makes it a supplier at too high a price to go after the cut-throat and highly price sensitive consumer market. And Intel is not set up for customized, System On Chip (SOC) solutions the market demands. Enter a partner that can bring all of this capability to Intel – TSMC.

This is a direct attack by Intel on competing processors, especially the ARM processor, which is trying to move upstream from the smart phone and embedded gadgets market it currently dominates, while Intel is trying to move downstream with Atom into this overlapping space. The battleground in the middle will be aggressive and likely bloody, with huge potential returns. And while Intel’s attack is primarily on ARM, it also has profound effect on other players – AMD, Qualcomm (Snapdragon), Nvidia, TI, and even Marvel to whom Intel sold off its own ARM-based processor (XScale).

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 Chairman Craig Barrett will step down from his post in May, ending a 35-year stint at the world's No. 1 chipmaker, the company announced Friday.

Barrett, who joined Intel in 1974, also served as the chief executive of the company from 1998 through 2005.

"Intel became the world's largest and most successful semiconductor company in 1992 and has maintained that position ever since," said Barrett. "I'm extremely proud to have helped achieve that accomplishment."

Barrett said he was confident that Intel has the right management in place to continue its leadership in the chip making industry.

Jane Shaw, a board member since 1993, will replace Barrett as non-executive chairman in May.

Earlier this week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that last quarter's profit tumbled 90% to $234 million, and reportedly told employees that he couldn't rule out the possibility that Intel might actually lose money in the current quarter. It would be the first time that's happened in more than 20 years.

The company also announced Wednesday that it will be cutting production at two U.S. silicon wafer facilities and closing three facilities in Asia, affecting between 5,000 and 6,000 workers.

Shares of Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) rose 3% in mid-afternoon trading, but the company's stock has lost more than 40% since August.

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.

Intel, whose microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers, has struggled for about a decade to get a foothold in the market for mobile-phone chips. The company has a unit that sells a scaled-down version of its personal-computer processor. The chip, called Atom, is designed for mobile devices that access the Web and handle basic computing functions.

"Even if they get just a piece of Nokia's business, it's a big deal," said Will Strauss, a Cave Creek, Arizona-based analyst for research firm Forward Concepts. "Nokia is still the biggest cell-phone maker in the world."

In 2006, Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini scrapped his predecessor's $5 billion investment in chips for mobile devices, after the company was late to the market and failed to win enough customers.

Restarted Effort

Now Otellini is again pushing to get Intel's chips into phones, a bid to lessen the company's reliance on computers, which account for more than 90 percent of sales. A total of 1.21 billion mobile phones were sold globally last year, according to ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York.

Intel rose 3 cents to $15.71 at 11:18 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock had gained 7 percent this year before today. Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, fell 10 cents to 10.19 euros in Helsinki trading.

Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said in February that the company needed to land one of the top five mobile-phone makers if it wanted to build a significant business.

Intel is challenging Texas Instruments Inc., the largest maker of chips used to run programs in mobile phones. San Diego- based Qualcomm Inc., meanwhile, supplies the majority of communications chips for phones. Both companies have said that Intel would struggle to break their dominance because its products use too much power.

Intel announced in February it had landed LG Electronics Inc., the world's third-largest phone maker, as a customer. LG will use an Intel processor to make a mobile Internet device, a cross between a mobile phone and a computer.

Intel's attempts to create a mobile business have foundered in the past, even when they've had announcements of interest from customers, said Jim McGregor, an analyst at Scottsdale, Arizona-based research firm In-Stat.

"They've been dreaming of getting a significant win at Nokia," he said. "It's a big announcement, they're a key guy. The only question now is whether they will actually come out with a product."

This industry's first quad-core processor for mainstream servers provides breakthrough performance and capabilities for the ultimate in powerful, dense and energy efficient servers. With the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor you get breakthrough performance - up to 50% greater than the industry-leading Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor in the same power envelope.

Processor

• Type / Form Factor: Intel Quad-Core Xeon E5440
• Multi-Core Technology: Quad-Core
• Processor Qty: 1
• Clock Speed: 2.83 GHz
• Bus Speed: 1333 MHz
• Thermal Design Power: 80 W
• 64-bit Computing: Yes
• Manufacturing Process: 45 nm
• Compatible Processor Socket: LGA771 Socket
• Thermal Specification: 67 °C
• Packaging Type: FC-LGA6

Cache memory

• Installed Size: L2 cache - 12 MB
• Type: Advanced Smart Cache

Expansion / connectivity

• Compatible Slots: 1 x processor, 1 x processor - LGA771 Socket

Miscellaneous

• Pricing Type: CTO,
• Included Accessories: Passive 2U heatsink,
  
• Package Type: Intel Boxed, OEM/tray
• Compliant Standards: RoHS
• Manufacturer Selling Program: HP Smart Buy

Manufacturer warranty

• Service & Support: 3 years warranty
• Service & Support Details: Limited warranty - 3 years

I don’t usually discuss PC, workstation, and server processors because I’m all about embedded processors these days. But Intel’s photo of the first Core i7 processor stopped me and I thought I’d write something. Here’s the photo:

The image shows four x86 processor cores arrayed across the top. Each core runs at 2.66 GHz (faster cores that exceed 3 GHz will appear in the future). Each of the four on-chip processor cores has its own 64-Kbyte L1 and 256-Kbyte L2 caches. The four on-chip processor cores share an on-chip, 8-Mbyte L3 cache and, of course, main memory external to the chip. An integrated, high-speed DDR3 memory controller links that off-chip main memory to the processor chip. In all, this is a very powerful machine.

Unfortunately, I get the impression from my many conversations with embedded systems designers that a lot of embedded designers think this is the right way to architect embedded systems. When they see three levels of on-chip cache used for this class of processor, they start to believe that all processors need caches—that cache memories are just part of the game now. What they forget or ignore is that processors in the same league with Intel’s Core i7 chip cost hundreds of dollars and dissipate many tens of Watts. This is a great league, but it’s not the embedded league.

Realize new possibilities for connecting with friends, family, and digital entertainment with the phenomenal performance of the AMD Phenom X4 series quad-core processor. Built from the ground up for true quad-core performance, AMD Phenom X4 processors speed through advanced multitasking, critical business productivity, advanced visual design and modeling, serious gaming, and visually stunning digital media and entertainment.

Realize new possibilities for connecting with friends, family, and digital entertainment with the phenomenal performance of the AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processors. Built from the ground up for true quad-core performance, AMD Phenom X4 processors speed through advanced multitasking, critical business productivity, advanced visual design and modeling, serious gaming, and visually stunning digital media and entertainment.

This is an Intel Core 2 Quad processor with a frequency of 2.4GHz, 1066MHz FSB, and an 8MB cache. Leaders of the pack seeking monster performance, look no further. With four execution cores, the Intel Core 2 Quad processor blows through processor-intensive tasks in demanding multitasking environments and makes the most of highly threaded applications.