February 10 - 3:15pm EST   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. [full story]

February 10 - 10:55am EST   Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini on Tuesday announced the chipmaker will make its biggest ever investment for a manufacturing process for its 32 nanometer chips. The plan is to spend $7 billion on retrofitting existing production plants to build the new chips in the US over the next two years. The manufacturing plants due for the upgrade are based in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico and will create about 7,000 jobs across the three states. [full story]

August 14 - 1:55pm EDT   Intel's upcoming processor generations will double the number of cores per chip and add a brand new language for specialized code, according to leaked slides obtained by CanardPlus. Although the semiconductor company's Core i7 will just receive a manufacturing process shrink down from 45 nanometers to 32 during 2009, reducing its power use and allowing more complex parts, a replacement architecture codenamed Sandy Bridge will replace it by 2010 and double the number of cores per die to eight. Hyperthreading support will let it handle as many as 16 code threads at once, while a large 16MB pool of Level 3 cache will be shared to make best use of the cores. [full story]