Earlier I speculated that some companies may choose to skip Windows Vista in favor of Windows 7, given Microsoft's statement regarding a January 2010 launch of Windows 7 and continued support for Windows XP until 2014.
And it seems like Intel, Microsoft's BFF, is making that choice.
The FTC has opened a formal antitrust investigation into Intel's business practices, as revealed by an Intel press release issued Friday in response to a subpoena. Not just Intel, but rival AMD and several PC makers have begun to receive subpoenas from the commission. AMD, which has long complained about Intel's business practices, has not issued a statement yet.
UMPCs or, as Intel calls them, ULCPCs or netbooks, are hot right now. What they are, either way, are ultra-portable notebooks in the Asus Eee PC or HP 2133 Mini-Note PC vein. On Tuesday VIA introduced the new VIA OpenBook mini-note reference design targeted at the rapidly growing market, and they released it as "open source."
Intel's Fab 68, scheduled to begin construction in 2010 in Dallan, China, is being built with the help of Chinese feng shui masters.
On Monday AMD unveiled GAME!, its new initiative designed to make it easy for consumers to choose components for gaming systems.
After all, choosing a video game console is easy: there's nothing, component-wise, to pick. But what about a gaming PC? What video card do I want? What processor? How much memory? And on and on.
A mashup is "a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool." While this is a great way to extend and combine the power of different sites, there's no way my mother-in-law or my wife, could creates their own mashups. This is the problem that Intel's Mash Maker hopes to solve.
The problem with a lot of security software is reliance on signatures to detect malware. If the malware is new, it may bypass the security software. Intel, specifically researchers at Intel Research Berkeley, are working on a project called Proteus which will learn your behavior and detect intrusions based on statistical modeling.
AMD promised to begin shipping triple-core Phenoms in Q1 of this year, and Thursday it began shipping to OEMs and system builders. That's certainly unusual for a tech company, shipping something on time.
The US subprime debacle has not been kind to Intel's once-troubled flash memory business. First the credit crunch cut down the size of the loan that Intel and STMicro could get for their joint flash memory venture.
That great perpetrator of worldly ills, the cosmic ray, has at last met its match. Intel has patented the concept of an on-chip detector of cosmic rays which would auto-correct for soft errors caused by the cosmic ray's interference.
