Intel Shows First Working Moorestown Prototypes

 

Moorestown is a chip platform designed for handheld computers that Intel calls mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The heart of Moorestown is a more power-efficient version of the Atom processor, named Lincroft, which is paired with a chipset called Langwell. Intel claims Moorestown uses one-fiftieth the idle power of its predecessor, the Menlow platform. The new platform is available with a range of wireless options, including Wi-Fi, WiMax and 3G cellular connectivity.Engineers managed to get the three devices working and ready for Computex in less than two months, a source familiar with the situation said, adding that Intel originally hoped to show five working prototypes at the show.

Anand Chandrasekher, the senior vice president of Intel's ultra mobility group, showed off a handful of sleek prototype mobile devices containing its upcoming Moorestown platform at the Computex exhibition in Taipei on Thursday.During his speech, Chandrasekher was joined on stage by executives from hardware makers Inventec Appliances, Quanta Computer and Elektrobit, who all have working handheld devices based on the chips. The devices were all running the Moblin 2.0 version of Linux and are expected to hit the market early next year, company executives said.While Moorestown is nearing volume production, the current MID platform -- called Menlow -- continues to be used in new designs, a trend that is likely to continue into next year and overlap with the availability of Moorestown, Chandrasekher said.

Hynix Agrees to Pay Rambus $397 Mln Settlement

 

The decade-old patent infringement battle between Rambus and, well, pretty much everybody has taken another step towards closure, with the U.S. District Court for the North District of California entering a final judgment against Hynix for a total of $397 million. Of that figure, $134 million will cover patent infringement between December 31, 2005, while another $215 million will cover infringement from January 1, 2006, through the end of January 2009. Rambus was also awarded another $48 million in interest."We are pleased with the Court's decision and are gratified by the tremendous time and energy the Court has dedicated to this matter," said Rambus senior VP and general counsel Thomas Lavelle, in a statement. "Though this case has been long and arduous, we remain steadfast in our commitment to seek fair compensation for the use of our patented innovations."

Hynix, for its part, has complied with the orders of the court, but says it disagrees with the judgement and may pursue an appeal to the Federal Circuit, and notes that another court found Rambus destroyed evidence, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issues rulings finding Rambus's patents invalid. Moving forward, Hynix will have to pay Rambus royalties on net sales of particular memory products from January 31, 2009, through Paril 18, 2010: the amounts are 1 percent for SDR SDRAM products and 4.25 percent for DDR SDRAM products, with the latter rate applying to DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, GDDR2, GDDR3 SDRAM, and DDR SGRAM products. Moving forward, Hynix will have to pay Rambus royalties on net sales of particular memory products from January 31, 2009, through Paril 18, 2010: the amounts are 1 percent for SDR SDRAM products and 4.25 percent for DDR SDRAM products, with the latter rate applying to DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, GDDR2, GDDR3 SDRAM, and DDR SGRAM products.

AMD Roadmap: New Athlon II's Coming

According to recent AMD documents that we were able to see, AMD is planning to launch a new Athlon series sometime in June of this year.

The AMD roadmap indicated that there will be several flavors of the Athlon II to choose from. When the new CPUs ship, there will be at least a 2, 3 and 4 core Athlon II all based on the same architecture. In fact, the new Athlon II's are very much based on AMD's current Phenom II. Although similar to Phenom II, the new Athlon II CPUs will not ship with shared L3 cache, which something that the Phenom II's do have.

AMD's roadmap also indicated that the upcoming Athlon II's will be based on socket AM3 and support HyperTransport 3.0 and DDR2 and DDR3 memory.

In terms of frequency, the minimum spec is 2.8 GHz going to the quad-core Athlon II, while the dual-core rings in at 3.0 GHz. The Athlon II's will also carry a maximum onboard cache of 2 MB.

Positioning for the new processors seem to indicate that the Phenom brand will take the high end while Athlon II will take much of the mainstream and lower end.

Unlocking AMD CPU Cores Safe Say Mobo Makers

While browsing through motherboards at Computex, several manufacturers were quick to tell us some details about the recently released dual-core Phenom II CPUs from AMD.

Two motherboard makers told us at the show that AMD's new processors are safe when unlocking disabled cores. In fact, one motherboard maker even told us that when you unlock the disabled cores, they run at slower frequencies than the normal cores.

This is of course all incorrect, and it is indeed not a safe guarantee when you unlock the disabled cores. The reason for this is that the disabled cores are turned off for a reason: they failed factory tests. Cores can fail for any number of reasons, including defects in the silicon, problems running at full frequency, or a bug introduced during manufacturing.

Both AMD and Intel disable CPU cores for this very reason.

When you unlock the disabled cores, they will run at full processor frequency, since you cannot run each core at different speeds. While you may see initial gains and benefits from turning a dual-core CPU into a quad-core CPU, you may introduce instability into your system. Things may corrupt, calculate incorrectly or even crash.

Despite what we were told, we still recommend that if you're going to unlock disabled cores, do so with caution in mind--there is always a risk that something will go wrong.

AMD launches dual-core Phenom, Athlon CPUs

AMD has announced two new dual-core desktop processors that should allow PCs to take advantage of faster memory standards, creating faster models.

The processor maker's Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition processor, introduced on Tuesday, is its first ever dual-core version of its Phenom II CPU. It is aimed at the more hard-core user, such as professional users, games enthusiasts and other breeds of overclockers.

Also released on Tuesday, the new 45nm AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor aims to boost the performance of mainstream consumer PCs. AMD said the key improvement is that the dual-core processors in its Phenom range can make use of better standards of memory. Until recently, they were limited to working with DDR2, but now they can work with the newer, faster memory standard DDR3. The improvement stems from being able to support both AM2+ and AM3 boards for DDR2 and DDR3 memory, according to AMD.

The Athlon II X2 250 has doubled the previous model's amount of L2 cache for each core, creating a total L2 cache of 2MB. This will provide 3GHz performance in affordable PCs, according to AMD.

Another performance boost comes from the optimization with Windows 7, AMD said.

Though the semiconductor market is proving a difficult source of profits for chipmakers, according to Jonathan Cassell, analyst at market researcher iSuppli, the processor market has never been more buoyant. Strong competition is being created by new CPU releases at all levels, from computers for high-end professional users to budget PCs.

One UK-based system builder put the launch into perspective. "AMD will boast about dual-core architecture and efficiency achievable through 45nm technology," said Richard Marsden, sales director at RealTime Distribution, a UK distributor which supplies AMD chips to system builders. "But the bottom line is that an AMD machine will give them 3GHz performance at an affordable price."

Intel Processors, the History

Intel was one of the pioneering Microprocessor manufacturers when it created the 4004 processor in 1971. This was followed by the 8080 processor in the late 70's, which was developed into the 8086 and 8088 processors in 1979. It was only when, in 1981 IBM selected the 8086 processor for its new Personal Computer, the IBM PC, did the Intel processor design gain its opportunity to be used widely.

The Intel 8086/8088 range of processors were based upon Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) which allows the number of bytes per instruction to vary according to the instruction being processed. This is unlike Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) which has fixed length instructions (typically set at 32 bits each). The architechture pioneered by Intel has become known as "x86" due to the early naming system where processors were called 8086, 80186 (not used in PC's), 80286, 80386, and 80486.

In 1982 Intel introduced the 80286 (or 286) processor. This featured significant enhancements over the 8086/8088 line, mainly by introducing protected mode and the ability to address up to 16 megabytes of memory. The 286 processor was used in the IBM XT range.

1985 saw the introduction of the 80386 (or 386), which was the first processor to use 32 bit addressing, allowing it to utilise up to 4 Gigabytes of memory. A cut down version of the 386 known as the 386SX was introduced which had a lower memory throughput, as it could only access 16 megabytes of memory. The 386 processor was manufactured in many different versions and ran at speeds from 16 Mhz through to 40 Mhz.

The 80486 processor family was introduced in 1989. It featured little enhancements over than the 386 other than the fact that it had more transistors and could run at higher clock speeds. Like its predecessor the 386, the 486 was offered in budget (486 SX, minus the math co-processor) and standard (486 DX) versions. The 486 initially ran at clock speeds of 25 MHz (SX only) and 33 MHz. As it was developed the 486 was enhanced with a clock doubled processor core (486 DX-2) allowing it to run at speeds of 50, 66 and 75 MHz, and then tripled (DX-4) which ran up to 100 MHz.

1993 saw the introduction of the Pentium processor, first at speeds of 60 and 66 MHz. This was the first Intel processor not to use the x86 naming system. This processor was enhanced with MMX instructions in January 1997 and ran up to speeds of 233 Mhz.

Intel's 6^th generation processor was introduced as the Pentium Pro in 1995. This ran at speeds of 166, 180 and 200 MHz. What was significant was the integration of the processors 2^nd level cache memory onto the processor module itself. This processor was enhanced with MMX instructions in 1997 with its development into the Pentium II. This marked a departure for Intel as it moved away from the old socket method of mounting processors with the introduction of Slot 1. The Pentium II runs at speeds from 233 to 450 MHz. 1998 saw the development of this familiy into the Celeron and Xeon families for the budget and server/workstation markets respectively.

INTERPOSER

A number of Intel Motherboards incorrectly support the Write Back mode of the Intel Pentium OverDrive processor. Because of this you will be unable to successfully upgrade your CPU. However, to rectify this issue, Intel created a chip called the interposer. This chip allows the computer to work around the design errors.

Documentation for installing the interposer should be included with the interposer. If by chance documentation is not included you can find alternate installation help at Intel's web site (Search for Interposer).