11/27, 9:55am
Intel 2010 desktop CPUs to hover at 3GHz
Intel's plans to overhaul its desktop processors early next year have been detailed almost entirely in a roadmap published today. The lineup is now believed to be headlined by low-powered S versions of the Core i5-750 and i7-860 that will run all four cores at 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz respectively; they should use just 82W of power versus 95W or more and fit into tighter spaces. Each will have 8MB of Level 2 cache, though the Core i7 chips will scale up to 3.46GHz where the Core i5 will stop at 3.2GHz.
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11/23, 1:25pm
Core i9's six cores an edge in key apps
Despite being more than a month away from the public, Intel's Core i9 (Gulftown) platform has already been tested and is shown to be potentially as fast as its design implies. The move from four to six cores has translated into an almost perfectly linear increase in speed for those apps that can use multiple processors. In tasks such as 3D modeling and video encoding, a 2.8GHz Core i9 is found by PCLab to be roughly 50 percent faster than a Core i7 at the same clock speed.
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10/14, 11:00pm
Apple may get early use of Gulftown Xeon
Apple may have a temporary exclusive on Intel's fastest workstation Xeons early next year, a purported leak argues tonight. An unnamed source says Apple is readying a Mac Pro based on the Xeon version of Intel's Gulftown six-core architecture and that the Mac builder would have a short exclusive for the processors, launching its own workstations in the winter while everyone else would have to wait until the spring. What configurations would ship aren't known by the MacBidouille tipster.
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09/22, 6:00pm
Intel Maloney keynote leaked
A prematurely released copy of Intel's plans for a Wednesday keynote has surfaced a day in advance and has provided details of the company's plans for the near future. The release obtained by ZDNet has Intel executive VP Sean Maloney revealing that the company has started shipping its many-cored Larrabee graphics chip to developers ahead of a full release and demonstrating what it can do in real-time. The demo should show a custom build of the online shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars running with raytraced lighting, a feat which is technically difficult for any graphics hardware as it calculates the path of each ray of light rather than making "shortcut" calculations.
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08/12, 4:55pm
Sandy Bridge in Q4 2010
Intel has scheduled the release of its 32nm Sandy Bridge processors for the fourth quarter of 2010, according to DigiTimes. The architecture will succeed Nehalem and its condensed 32nm version, Westmere, the latter of which is set to be released in the fourth quarter of 2009. Sandy Bridge supports 4GHz clock speeds, with scalable CPUs using up to eight cores. The architecture also houses CPUs and GPUs on one die, unlike the two-die approach taken with Nehalem.
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07/21, 10:15am
Intel Core i5 i3 Sept 6
Intel's first truly mainstream, desktop processors based on its Nehalem architecture should be ready in less than two months, a leaked roadmap shows. The first three processors tipped earlier are now reportedly due to arrive on September 6th and, as promised, should be headlined by the quad-core 2.66GHz Core i5 750, 2.8GHz Core i7 860, and 2.93GHz Core i7 870. New, however is word that the i5 part won't support Hyperthreading but that all three will overclock substantially in Turbo Boost mode, reaching as high as 3.2GHz, 3.46GHz and 3.6GHz each when one or more cores can be shut down.
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02/10, 3:15pm
Intel Westmere Details
Intel at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference today provided some of the first concrete details of Westmere, the codename for its 32 nanometer processor family. The design is primarily a smaller, more efficient adaptation of the Nehalem architecture in the Core i7 but, in the dual-core desktop (Clarkdale) and notebook (Arrandale) offerings, will include both a two-channel DDR3 memory interface and an integrated but switchable graphics core. Like NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI mode or AMD's Hybrid CrossFire, the technology will let systems with dedicated graphics chipsets revert to Intel's own core in low-demand situations or when on battery.
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