Intel

Intel Japan has been hit with a two-month government procurement ban.

According to a Japan Today report from 20 April, the Kinki (!)Regional Development Bureau, part of Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, knocked Intel Japan off its list of bidders for IT procurement contracts.

The punitive ban lasts for two months, and comes after the Japanese Fair Trade Commission told Intel to stop providing local computer makers with rebates in return for only ordering Intel processors.

INTEL HAS FINALLY let the cat out of the bag and announced the Merom clan. I say finally because it is pretty much an open secret that they are coming. Intel was forced into this by a lack of current product and a rash of bad PR. The PR was mostly self inflicted, and I actually prefer the honesty that came forth this week to the usual answering of tangential questions.

ABOUT ONE YEAR AGO, Intel went public with the first news of its near-religious conversion to the gospel of multicore processors. Prior to that fateful day, Intel had been talking optimistically about hitting 4GHz clock speeds by the end of 2004 and eventually reaching 10GHz with the Pentium 4 "Netburst" architecture. Such achievements were, in fact, business as usual at the world's largest chipmaker before news of its conversion.

Intel this month is expected to formally detail its plans to bring 64-bit computing to its value-priced Celeron processor family, TechWeb has learned.

The lukewarm response for the EPC--a living room computer that functions as a DVD player, a digital-video recorder and a media storage vault that sort of looks like a VCR--is prompting the company to rethink the design and function of the devices, said Don MacDonald, general manager of Intel's home product group. Future living room units will be smaller, more stylish and likely less costly, he said. They could possibly even be integrated with movie delivery or other content services. Equally important: The fact that the box is a PC will be heavily de-emphasized.

IF YOU'VE BEEN paying attention over the last few months, you've no doubt noticed that AMD's latest Athlon 64s trounce Intel's newest Pentium 4s almost across the board. That's a real shame considering that Intel's 900-series chipsets bring so much to the table, including PCI Express, advanced Serial ATA and RAID features, and high-definition audio. There could be hope for Intel fanboys, though. Since the Pentium 4 500 line stretches from 2.8 to 3.6GHz, lower speed grades may have considerable overclocking headroom just waiting to be exploited.

Leading chipmaker Intel Corp. has unwrapped some of its plans concerning the server and workstation processors and chipsets. The main headliners of Intel’s pedestal and rack server roadmap – Intel Xeon MP processor code-named Potomac and Intel’s dual-core chip code-named Smithfield – finally got their target clock-speeds and cache sizes from Intel’s official documents.

WORD HAS REACHED MY TENDER ears that there will be a shuffling of execs happening at Intel in the next couple of days. This will be higher up the food chain rather than lower, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out which divisions are going to be hit.

Intel's fourth-quarter profit fell 2 percent despite record sales and strong holiday demand for computer chips as it worked to reduce a massive inventory buildup from earlier in the year, the company said Tuesday.
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Intel, the world's largest maker of chips that are at the heart of personal computers, said it saw strengthening demand for microprocessors as well as flash memory, which is used primarily in cellphones.
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Makers of mainboards, systems and other computer hardware equipment are reportedly testing the new Intel Corp.’s Pentium 4 processors with enhanced performance and functionality, according to various sources in Taiwan.