Intel

Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.Ltd will be announcing a " strategic partnership" at a US event on Monday.

The press who have been invited to attend report that TSMC representatives will include chief executive Rick Tsai and the vice president of sales and marketing, Jason Chen, while Intel's will include Ultra Mobility Group general manager, Anand Chandrasekher and chief executive of sales and marketing officer, Sean Maloney. Media reports are speculating on the type of collaboration the two giant chip manufacturers will announce.

A technology licensing suit between Intel and NVIDIA over controller chipsets and the next generation of Intel's Core i7 CPUs may complicate Apple's immediate plans for the next iMac and Mac Pro, and disrupt the company's long term strategy for standardized GPU acceleration using OpenCL.

Chipzilla plans to slash between 200 and 300 jobs in Ireland, despite chairman Craig Barrett assuring Intel workers last month that its Leixlip plant was in no immediate danger of job cuts.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told us the cuts are part of the company's overall scheme of consolidating its manufacturing operations in order to reduce costs. He added the preferred method for the workforce reduction will be through Intel's voluntary redundancy program.

Intel Corp. is studying optical interconnects with an eye toward replacing chip-to-chip electrical interconnects in order to overcome looming bandwidth issues as microprocessors with an increasing number of cores usher in the era of tera-scale computing.

Intel is starting to talk about the upcoming 32nm chips called Westmere. They are going to be a top-to-bottom family, everything from notebooks to 4S+ servers.

The new names you need to know are Gulftown, Clarksdale, Arrandale and Clarksfield. Gulftown is a six-core high-end desktop, the others are all two-core CPUs with integrated graphics. Gulftown and Clarksdale are desktop parts, Arrandale is mobile, and Clarksfield is a server part.

FOR THE NEXT next generation of consoles, PS4, XBox3 and Wii2, it looks like Intel is in, Nvidia is out. The picture for their GPUs is starting to become clear.

Yeah, Intel won the PS4 GPU, no shock considering how much they needed a console win to get people coding for Larrabee. They can either convince companies to put in a code path for the chip in Big Budget Mediocre Sequel 7: Vengeance of the Farmland Creatures by sending people with wads of money and begging, or get a console win. They got a console win, and it was the right way to go.

Now faced with delays, Intel's upcoming Ibex-Peak platform, a next-generation mainstream implementation of the Nehalem architecture, is an interesting mix of technologies, where Intel seeks to minimise the platform and energy footprints while delivering value and performance through a clever bit of rearrangement of system components. HKEPC has learned that Intel's 5-Series mainstream chipsets consists of five models: P57, Q57, H57, P55, and H55. The P57 and P55 are built for the consumer PC with discrete graphics.

CRAIG BARRETT, Intel's Chairman and erstwhile CEO, will retire from his current position and his role on the Intel board this coming May.

Barrett, who joined the chip firm as an engineer in 1974 and was the first non-founder CEO, has announced he will leave the firm in early May, after the annual shareholder meeting. In a surprise move, Intel will name independent director Jane Shaw as non-executive chairwoman, marking the first time for the firm to appoint someone to the position from outside the executive ranks.

Intel Corp. on Wednesday today disclosed plans to restructure some of its manufacturing operations and align its manufacturing capacity to current market conditions. The company will consolidate and streamline some older capacity without impacting the deployment of new, leading-edge 45nm and 32nm manufacturing capacity.

Intel is betting on new technology to spur the market after reporting a 90 per cent drop in profits in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Speaking to reporters Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini said that far from cutting back on research and development spending Intel would carry on investing in new developments and would bring its 32nm production facilities online in the second half of this year. “The best way to beat a recession is with new products rather than sticking with the old,” he said.