Intel

Intel has said it will continue buying up companies to fill "holes" in its own business. The company laid out nearly $8 billion to pick up security firm McAfee last month, and picked up TI's cable business for an undisclosed amount and Infineon for $1.4 billion just weeks later.

CEO Paul Otellini said Intel's summer spending spree was intended to strengthen the company. "We don't have an acquisition strategy," he told IDF delegates in San Francisco. "We have a strategy to fill the holes in our [company]. Not all are filled, but the major ones are now."

Intel's Sandy Bridge is apparently capable of outperforming all current integrated graphics platforms. But does the processor microarchitecture threaten low-end, discrete GPUs?

Well, according to AnandTech's Anand Lal Shimpi, Sandy Bridge is already "nipping at the heels" of lower-end, discrete cards.

As the world's biggest maker of computer chips, Intel Corp. can't afford to ignore its huge blind spot in mobile phones.

Eighty percent of today's personal computers use Intel processors. But Intel is absent in smart phones, which are threatening PCs as gateways to the Internet. One reason is that Intel still doesn't have good ways to design chips to use less power, so Intel's products drain batteries more quickly — something smart-phone makers won't tolerate.

Intel, the world's largest maker of microchips, is paying $7.7bn for the software company McAfee, in a deal analysts described as "weird", "out of left field" and "not the combination investors were expecting to wake up to".

But if the immediate reaction to the acquisition was one of surprise, Intel insisted that it would usher in a new era where security against hackers and computer viruses was built into the very hardware at the heart of the tech industry.

Intel has added a second six-core desktop chip to its roster of high-end processors used to crunch through the most demanding games and multimedia applications.

The Core i7-970, announced Sunday, is priced at $885 and follows the six-core i7 980X ($999) released earlier this year. Like the 980X, it has 12MB of L3 cache memory and is made on Intel's latest 32-nanometer manufacturing process.

Since 1998, Intel’s Celeron brand has been the red-headed stepchild of the company, a value chip designed to be installed in the absolute cheapest computers so that Intel could compete with companies like AMD, which were well entrenched in the value computing space.

But Celeron has never really gotten any respect. Out of the box, performance is dismal, and it’s only been through the overclocking efforts of a few power-mad PC hackers that Celeron has maintained any mindshare at all. Its current share among all desktop chips sold by Intel hovers around 5 percent.

Since humankind is naturally so inventive, there have been, over the years, many who demonstrated a great idea or another that would have the potential to advance a certain segment of the IT industry. On a more particular front, in the touchscreen segment to be precise, emphasis is placed on recognition of multiple inputs, and gestures. There are, however, certain solutions far less common than anyone might think. Intel's latest idea seems to be one of them.

Intel is trying to get its paws on America's finest minds after investing huge amounts of cash in plants in foreign parts.

Sillicon Valley Intel's director for Global Public Policy Peter Cleveland told the Hill that the semiconductor manufacturer has always tried to hire Americans but has not been able to find enough qualified homegrown engineers for its high-level projects.

GINGERBREAD, Android Froyo's expected successor, could be the first Google OS to run on an Intel Moorestown powered smartphone.

Intel is predicting that Moorestown, one of its current Atom processor variants, will be used for smartphone handsets in 2011 and Gingerbread is rumoured to be coming by the end of this year. Chipzilla has been working with Google to port its popular open source handset OS to x86 chipsets.

Intel announced a new 32-core server chip based on a new high-performance computing server architecture that mixes general x86 cores with specialized cores for faster processing of highly parallel scientific and commercial applications.

The chip, called Knights Ferry, is Intel's fastest processor ever and delivers more than 500 gigaflops of performance, Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's data center group said Monday in a speech at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, which was also webcast.