On Sunday Intel launched new processors with smaller chips that go by the name Penryn that are produced with a 45 nanometer process which is significantly smaller than the 65 nanometer process used today. Intel announced plans for this launch earlier this fall which introduces such small circuitry thirty million of these 45nm-wide circuits could fit on the head of a pin.

There are multiple advantages to this smaller design. First, the smaller circuits allow Intel to create more chips using the same single platter of silicon making overall production more efficient and Intel is expecting as much as a 15 percent increase in processing speed with the new design. It also currently puts them undeniably in front of rival Advanced Micro Design in an ongoing head-to-head battle for the fastest and most efficient processors. AMD launched 65 nm chips earlier in the year as well as a triple core processor, and plans to also have 45nm chips in production by next year.

Intel along with HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated have announced the formation of the USB 3.0 Promoters Group with a goal of creating the next generation of USB interconnect for use with PC’s and other mobile and consumer gadgets.

As need for increased storage continues to grow along with larger file sizes, the need for a faster connection becomes increasingly important. The USB 3.0 will create a new standard that will be backwards compatible to support existing USB 2.0 and 1.1 connections while providing the ability to transfer data at 10 times the current speed available with USB 2.0.

Intel announced today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Fancisco that the companies next generation of processors, code named “Penryn”, are slated to start hitting the streets November 12. This announcement continues to fuel the race between Intel and rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, who within the last week unveiled new quad-core and triple-core processors.

The new Penryn chips from Intel promise a 20 percent performance boost along with improved energy efficiencies over the current chips available. The new Penryn’s are able to achieve faster processing with less energy due to the companies new 45 nanometer manufacturing process, which creates ridiculously small circuitry that’s only 45 billionth of a meter wide. Thirty million of these circuits could fit on the head of a single pin. Moving ahead to the 45 nanometer production gives Intel an additional edge over AMD in the processor manufacturing race since both companies currently product chips using 65 nanometer construction.

Intel unveiled six new chips today that raise the industry’s benchmark for how fast quad-core processors can run handling multi-processor servers. Translated from geek speak, these chips run amazingly fast but you don’t need them for your home PC. However, they will help the companies that handle your banking, phone service, cable provider and so on.

The sextet of Quad-Core Xeon 7300 series processors, dubbed Tigerton, deliver more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt over Intel’s earlier generation of dual-core clips. The fastest model is the X7350 running at 2.93GHz, 8M bytes of shared on-chip cache and a thermal design power of 130 watts. The next fastest is the E7340 at 2.4 GHz and the same 8M cache followed by the E7330 at 2.4 GHz (6M cache). Next follows the E7320 and E7310 with both having 4M bytes of shared cache and pace along at processing speeds of 2.13GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively. Finally there is the L7345 at 1.86GHz and a 8M cache, designed exclusively for blade servers and high-density rack servers.

Intel has announced the first laptop CPU for the companies Extreme Edition of processors called the Core 2 Extreme X7800. The X7800 is a 2.6GHz processor with 4MB of L2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus which all makes for great news to gamers who would like to get desktop-like gaming performance out of a mobile computer. In addition, this new high-end mobile chip will have nothing to stop you from overclocking it, at your own risk of course.

On Friday Intel announced that it will join Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative to provide inexpensive computers to the children of developing nations. This announcement came as somewhat of a surprise to many since Intel also has a similar, what some might say competing, initiative with its Classmate PC.

The Classmate PC from Intel is priced at $225 and requires external power, while the OLPC machine, originally targeted for $100, is now costing $175 and is powered by cranking a handle on the side.

Intel may have gotten a “can’t beat ‘em - join ‘em” attitude, or it could be that both companies simply realized that they both had the same goal and could possibly achieve a greater good by combining forces. There are speculations that the two products may go …

Notebooks utilizing Intel’s latest Santa Rosa upgrade to the Centrino platform recently launched on computers from Dell, HP and Gateway many other manufacturers.

“When we introduced Intel Centrino 4 years ago, Intel changed the computing landscape with our mobile innovations,” said Intel vice president Mooly Eden. “Now, simply said, we have improved virtually all aspects of Intel-based notebooks, the most popular and fastest growing computing market segment in the world.”

The new “Santa Rosa” promises to add less power consumption and in turn a longer battery life for you notebook without sacrificing speed. The Centrino Duo name will not change for consumers looking for the chip, but this upgrade will bring faster processing, support for 802.11n WiFi and something called Turbo Memory which utilizes NAND Flash memory in conjunction with the hard drive to shorten booting times due faster reads.

For business …

Today Intel announced a new addition to its quad-core processor family with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

The Core 2 Extreme delivers the fastest clock speed ever reached for Intel in a quad-core desktop. While this is good news for really any type of processor intensive applications, where it really gets the most notice is from the gamers. Intel mentioned some games that are already built utilizing the quad-core functionality to improve gaming performance, such as Crysis, Supreme Commander and Hellgate London. Intel stated that these games have ‘undergone substantial joint engineering efforts with Intel to use more than two processing threads to their advantage,’.This new quad-core runs at 2.93 GHz with an 8MB cache and supporting 1066 MHz system bus.

This announcement from Intel follows a number of new releases from the chip-maker as it keeps up its …

Today Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, took their first crack at a new product line of solid state drives based on Nand flash memory.

The new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive is intended to be used in the place of traditional hard drives offering a more cost-effective and high-performance storage solution. The Nand flash-based drives can offer quicker boot times and faster data access while using less power in systems such as PC’s, routers and gaming devices. Aside from just being able to improve boot times and the ability to find and read data faster, the flash memory based drives would also most likely last longer than a traditional hard drive since there are no moving parts involved.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said …

As chip design companies, Intel and AMD are locked in a seemingly never-ending race to outperform the other, with every little technological advantage that they can wring out of their designs trickling down to the bottom line and how much money they stand to make.

However, it looks like Intel just took the lead with today’s announcement that it is now selling more energy-efficient quad-core microprocessors. For companies that have data centers, the annual power savings could be significant if they used the power wise chips. Intel says that its new Xeon L5320 (1.86 GHz) and L5310 (1.60 HGz) quads consume just 12.5 watts of juice, a reduction of between 35 percent and almost 60 percent less electricity needed for the older models. At bulk orders of 1,000 units the cost of the L5320 is $519 while the L5310 …

Today Intel and Motion in Computing have both announced the Motion C5 mobile clinical assistant (MCA). The C5 is the first product built on Intel’s MCA platform and is designed for use in the health care setting to allow providers to spend more time near patients while staying connected and can also help with medication administration.

The MCA platform is the Intel’s first built specifically for healthcare and works towards connecting clinicians on health care facility floors to real-time information with a light, durable and easily-disinfected device. The Motion C5 features wireless connectivity to send and receive data in real time, security through fingerprint biometrics or RFID badges, a built-in digital camera and Bluetooth connectivity to connect wirelessly to monitors that track patient vital signs.

The mobile healthcare device has a bar code reader that allows users …

Pictured here is ASCI Red which was the first computer to reach a Teraflops of processing, equal to trillions of calculations per second. ASCI Red did this in 1996 using almost 10,000 Pentium Processors running at 200MHz and using 500kW of power. (Another 500kW of juice was needed to keep the room cool.)

Intel has now announced just over 10 yeas later that they have developed the world’s first processor that will deliver the same Teraflops performance all on one single 80-core chip using less electricity than a typical single-core processor at only 62 watts and small enough to rest on the tip of your finger.

This exact chip design from Intel is not intended to actually go to market, but this processor will be instrumental in looking into the types of interconnections needed for moving this amount of data as well as …

Today Intel has announced plans for their next generation processor chips, intended to improve processing speeds and increase the lead between themselves and their competition when the new chips go into production. The new processor, code named Penryn, will used a 45 nanometer manufacturing process to provide faster processing on the same amount of physical space without significant changes to power consumption.

Intel’s ability to improve performance is due to the implementation of high-k dielectrics and metal material for the transistor gate electrodes. According to Mark Bohr, senior fellow at Intel, the insulation layer of the silicon on transistors has gotten so thin that there is a risk of excessive electricity leaking from the chips which would cause laptop batteries to run down too fast, among other problems. To solve this problem Intel implemented a new denser hafnium metal.

Intel claims that …

The wireless connectivity options on a laptop are becoming increasingly important considering the growing availability of bandwidth-consuming content such as movies, videos and music. The quality of this experience can be limited by current networking technologies which may not provide adequate bandwidth or wireless range.

To help with this problem, Intel is promoting a new wireless product that works with its Centrino Duo line of processors to assist users in getting more out of their wireless networks. Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N is based on the draft 802.11n Wi-Fi specification and offers users more speed, extended wireless range, and longer battery life.

Uncharacteristic of Intel, it has decided to make a commitment to the draft Wi-Fi standard, known as 802.11n. Intel typically chooses to stick with approved standards to avoid the headaches of early adoption.

Intel has also started a program with vendors like Asus, …

After some recent rumors about a collaboration between Sun Microsystems and Intel, both companies confirmed today in a press conference that Sun will begin using chips made by Intel in some of its servers. This is another major step ahead for Intel after landing a deal last October to provide processors for Apple MacBooks. At the same time this announcement is a set back for rival chip maker AMD who has been in head to head competition with Intel in coming out with more advanced, multi-core chips sets. AMD also currently provides processors for Sun servers.

Sun stated that it is planning on integrating the Intel Xeon chips yet in the first half of this year. They will offer systems running not only Solaris, but also Windows and Linux OS’s with the new Intel chip as …