Three months after CEO Paul Otellini announced that the PC market had bottomed out, Intel’s latest quarterly numbers indicate that the industry may be stabilizing.
Intel July 14 posted strong numbers in the second quarter, including $8 billion in revenue and a $1 billion profit. However, when the European Commission’s $1.45 billion fine for antitrust violations was factored in, Intel’s profit swung to a $398 million loss.
According to Digitimes, Intel's next-generation chips for notebooks, codenamed Clarksfield, CPUs will debut around the end of September and October in the flavors of Core 2 Extreme XE at 2 GHz, Core 2 Quad P2 at 1.73 GHz and Core 2 Quad P1 at 1.6 GHz.
Of course, those names are subject to change, especially since Intel said that all Clarksfield mobile chips would carry the Core i7 moniker. New Celeron chips for the mainstream ultra-thin and light segment for notebooks are also set for a late September debut.
Chip giant Intel told TG Daily today that it was in cahoots with Google on the Chrome OS project. A representative confirmed this to us this morning.
He said: "We have been privy to the project for some time and we have worked with Google on a variety of projects, including this one. We welcome Google's move here." The statement is likely to throw Microsoft into total panic. Intel and Microsoft were always "friends", but some have speculated they've always been enemies.
Rumours are growing louder that Intel will be launching new SSDs based on the firm's 34nm NAND chips within just a couple of weeks. Previous reports had said Chipzilla planned to come out with its new 34nm flash memory drives in Q4, but that timetable has been nudged up.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) have been around for a while, but their high costs, limited capacities and sometimes questionable reliability have ensured the drives have remained somewhat niche. But this is all about to change, apparently.
Intel Corp plans to phase out some of its brands, including the "Centrino" for computers, to focus on fewer top names as the chip maker expands into new markets such as mobile devices.
Santa Clara-based Intel said on Wednesday it will stop using "Centrino" to refer to personal computers beginning next year. Instead, it will use the brand to refer to WiFi- and WiMAX-based wireless products.
Intel Corp. said that while there are netbooks with relatively large 12” screen and some companies have plans to produce Intel Atom-based mobile systems with even bigger displays, such computers should not have large screens since this leads customers to believe that performance and capabilities of netbooks are akin to notebooks.
Later this year netbooks will cease to have screens larger than 10.2”, a guideline defined by Microsoft Corp., but while this may potentially reduce popularity of netbooks, Intel Corp. has perfect explanation why netbooks do not need larger screens.
Intel Corp. on Thursday said that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wind River Systems, an embedded software vendor. The world’s largest maker of chips hopes that acquisition of the software company will help it to find new customers for its embedded products.
CHIPZILLA has dusted off the name Pentium as its mainstream performance brand for mobile computers.
PC Magazine says that Pentiums will appear inside machines in the higher-performance "ultrathin notebook" market segment, which is just above netbooks. Those systems require something with a little more bit-crunching oomph than an Atom processor but less power than a normal CPU chip.
Pentium has been an Intel brand since 1993 and has had good innings in terms of marketing. Apparently the label will be stuck on the 1.3-GHz ULV chip that Intel will call the Pentium SU2700.
After multiple delays, Intel on Thursday once again pushed back the release of its next-generation Itanium server chip to the first quarter of 2010.
The Itanium chip, code-named Tukwila, was originally due for release by the middle of this year. Tukwila is being delayed for certain "application scalability" enhancements that Intel wants to make to the chip architecture, the company said in a statement. The chip maker declined to elaborate on the type of enhancements it plans to make.
Earlier today, the European Commission issued a ruling against Intel and fined it $1.45 billion USD, which it must pay into a holding account while it appeals the decision. The company held over $3.5 billion in cash and over $4 billion in short term investments at the end of the first quarter.
The fine will not affect Intel's operations and its planned 32nm transition to the Westmere family of products. "Intel will continue to invest and innovate," according to Intel spokesperson Claudine Mangano.
