intel

In commemoration of the 30 years of its Embedded and Communications Group (ECG), Intel Corporation today announced the launch of the Intel India Design House Program.

The program plans to aid design houses develop platforms on the Intel embedded architecture.

Announcing the launch here today, Joe Jenson, general manager, Embedded Markets Division, Intel, said that the ECG is focusing on India.

“Design houses have become more and more important these days. Today they design the whole solution,” said Jenson.

In India the company would bank on verticals such as retail, infotainment, interactive clients and medical.

Companies joining the India Design House Program will have access to Intel roadmaps, reference platforms, product samples, training and seminars. The companies can also get access to Intel Premier Support and Intel business link for non-public data and product information.

Jensen said that the reference designs as part of the India Design House Program is targeted at third party design houses, multinational companies having their own design houses in the country and electronic manufacturers.

“We see the (India) market is hot,” Jensen said. Referring to the current trends, he added multi-nationals are shifting design from in-house to third parties and look for local talents who can do the job more cost effectively. Also, Intel had noticed electronics manufacturers moving up the value chain and getting into design, he added.

According to India Semiconductor Association and Frost & Sullivan, the Indian Semiconductor and Embedded Design market is to touch $36.3 billion by 2015.

Intel started the ECG here in 2000. The group started to focus on software development for network processors, now has end-to-end capabilities working platform enabling and market development.

On a global front, ECG caters to over 3000 customers covering more than 30 market segments.

Intel Corp said on Wednesday it had won a mobile WiMax chip order from the world's top cellphone maker Nokia, which will use its semiconductors in Internet-focused devices from 2008.Nokia will roll out the first WiMax-enabled Internet tablets using Intel chips in the first half of 2008, a Nokia spokeswoman told Reuters.

Mobile WiMax, the high-speed wireless standard, is expected to support Internet access at speeds as much as five times faster than typical wireless networks, though it will be slower than the fastest wired services.

Intel has had little success in the mobile phone chip market and ended up selling its cellular chip unit to Marvell last year. Its push behind short-range wireless technology Wi-Fi was a big factor in the widespread adoption of that technology.Texas Instrument is Nokia's largest chip supplier, and it also uses STMicroelectronics, Broadcom and Infineon as suppliers.

Currently, Nokia is not manufacturing mobile devices using Intel chips.Intel said the companies were testing interoperability across Intel's forthcoming WiMax silicon "Baxter Peak" for laptops and mobile Internet devices, Nokia WiMax devices and Nokia Siemens Networks' WiMax infrastructure equipment.

Intel, Nokia and NSN have already started testing devices with other device makers' products, using Sprint Nextel's laboratory in Herndon, Virginia, Intel said.

ASUS has announced the launch of the U1F notebook in the India market.

Targeted at the technology user, the compact 11.1” widescreen U1F is tailor made for metropolitan professionals, ASUS said in a statement.

It is based on the latest Intel Centrino Duo Mobile Technology, Windows Vista operating system, the U1F offers a dynamic computing experience with blistering speed.

Francis Kao, product manager, Notebook Business, ASUS India, said, “The U1F is one of our best offerings in the Ultra Portable series. It aims to balance luxury, fashion and extreme mobility. The powerful configuration makes it an ideal possession of the business and lifestyle conscious elite customers.”

The U1F screen adopts a special LED backlight panel that is half the width of and 1/3 lighter than the traditional LCD panel. It operates with lowers power consumption and offers better luminance as well as faster response time.

The notebook offers a smart balance of mobility and performance with comprehensive security features. Data security is uncompromised with built-in fingerprint scanner that reads from the live layer of skin, preventing common skin surface conditions from impairing scanner accuracy.

Embedded Trusted Protection Module (TPM) hardware solution prevents attacks by hackers looking to capture passwords and encryption keys to sensitive data. The TPM allows the U1F to run applications securely and to make transactions and communications more trustworthy. When bundled with ASUS Security Protect Manager, it ensures overall system security, file protection capabilities and protect against email/privacy concerns.

It features high-resolution webcam module is one of the smallest lenses available that integrates seamlessly into the U1F’s LCD panel and together with a built-in high quality microphone wire-free video conferencing is possible anywhere. Wireless connectivity of the U1F is also extensive with built-in WLAN 802.11 a/b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 enhanced data rate for high speed Internet access and data transfers.

Mobility is further fueled with extended battery life that empowers better productivity. ASUS Power4 Gear eXtreme power management extends battery life up to 20-25 per cent, providing a reliable and continuous operation power.

Intel Corp said on Friday it would buy Havok Inc, a provider of software and services to the games and movie industries, as the world's top chipmaker seeks to beef up its visual computing and graphics efforts.

The privately held Irish company's technology has been used in some of the most widely known video game titles, including "BioShock," "Stranglehold," "Halo 2," and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

The deal comes ahead of Intel's biggest technical conference, the Intel Developer Forum, in San Francisco next week. Intel is expected to expand on plans for next-generation chipmaking technology, commonly known as 45 nanometer, and give more details on its forthcoming chip design change.

Havok's collection of software development tools is used by game and digital-animation creators to build realistic video games for myriad types of hardware and digitally animated movies, Intel said in a statement.

The deal could also heighten competition with Intel's biggest rival in microprocessors, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, which acquired video chip company ATI Technologies nearly a year ago.

Intel has so far partnered closely with ATI rival Nvidia Corp for video-processing chips used in personal computers.

Havok, a Dublin-based company founded in 1998, will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Santa Clara, California-based Intel and would continue to operate as an independent business.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Intel Corp. executive Patrick Gelsinger gave a variety of updates on Intel's work with the industry on the company's processors, surrounding technologies and "tick-tock" design cadence, including new details on Intel's upcoming 45nm products. He also discussed the industry's recent moves in energy efficient computing, virtualization, broad range of software enabling, as well as recent system architecture initiatives spanning the popular USB interconnect to upcoming lead-free products for the company's Intel® vPro desktop PCs.

"Intel's development model and cadence is a predictive, efficient and effective way to deliver products and provide the industry with an exciting computing roadmap in our relentless pursuit of Moore's Law," said Patrick Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. "In addition to our processors, we're focused on delivering energy efficiency via design of better, Hafnium-based High-k transistors as well as enhancements in overall system level architecture to minimize the computer's energy usage."

During his speech, Gelsinger showed the first-ever Intel 45nm High-k metal gate next-generation microarchitecture (Nehalem) dual processor server that uses the element Hafnium instead of silicon in portions of the 700 million-plus transistors inside the processor die, which is about the size of a postage stamp. Nehalem is the codename of a new processor microarchitecture arriving in 2008 that will provide up to three times the peak memory bandwidth of current competing processors. He also showed broad industry support for the Intel QuickPath Architecture. The QuickPath Interconnect provides high-speed data paths to Nehalem's processor cores.

In addition to compute performance and memory bandwidth, Intel continues to provide leadership in I/O when Gelsinger announced the formation of the USB 3.0 Promoter Group. This revolutionary architecture will use a single connector and cable delivering over 10 times the performance of USB 2.0 while preserving backwards compatibility to more than 2 billion existing USB devices.

Along with Intel, the promoter group has been formed with HP, NEC, NXP, Microsoft, and TI. USB 3.0 will be the first I/O interface to include support for both optical and copper interconnects, scalable protocol, and energy efficiency optimizations for use in the PC, consumer electronics, and mobile segments.

Gelsinger reviewed Intel's QuickAssist Technology and its escalation of industry product development. QuickAssist Technology, first disclosed at the IDF in Beijing in April, is Intel's suite of hardware and software technologies addressing the unique requirements of accelerators in enterprise platforms. He reviewed the first Intel device to include the Intel® QuickAssist Integrated Accelerator for cryptography, codenamed Tolapai.

With availability targeted for 2008, Tolapai – a system on a chip – will deliver significant improvements in power-efficient performance and form factor with up to eight times the IP Security throughput, up to 20 percent reduction in power, and up to a 45 percent smaller footprint over previous multi-component security solutions in embedded and communications market segments.

On the heels of the latest-generation roll-out of Intel vPro processor technology, Gelsinger revealed plans to further evolve security and PC management benefits through the 2008 product codenamed McCreary. McCreary will include new halogen and lead-free 45nm dual and quad-core processors, a new chipset codenamed Eaglelake, an integrated Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and a more secure, manageable data encryption solution codenamed Danbury.

Danbury technology builds data encryption and decryption directly into the hardware providing greater protection of encryption keys and allows much simpler system management and key recovery. Intel Active Management technology also enables these operations to occur in "out-of-band" environments, meaning even if the OS is down or inoperable.

Bob Heard, founder and chief executive officer of CREDANT Technologies, discussed how their software security solutions can be improved in the future by leveraging Danbury and vPro technology. Mark B. Templeton, chief executive officer of Citrix Systems, showed how data protection and centralized data management can be balanced with an end user's desire for mobility and a responsive PC experience.

John Fowler, executive vice-president of Sun Microsystems, appeared with Gelsinger and pointed to the virtualization "wave" that Intel and other technology leaders are driving through the industry. Parallels demonstrated how they are taking advantage of innovations such as Intel Virtualization Technology and Intel Trusted Execution Technology to provide protection for virtual environments in future workstations and desktop PCs.

Gelsinger pointed to a wall of computer systems that Intel will deliver to suit most users' computing and cost needs. He showed how customers, such as Paradigm, will use Intel Xeon-based workstations with a new 1600MHz front side bus and Intel software tools to solve scientific problems, such as oil and gas exploration. Mark Barrenechea, president and chief executive officer of Rackable Systems, discussed Rackable's ICE Cube Modular Data Center on Wheels, which has 1400 quad core Intel Xeon servers in a single 40-foot truck container.

Gelsinger also discussed the improvements that solid state disk technology can bring to enterprise server and storage technology for IA platforms. He announced that products delivering substantial improvements in read performance and power savings from Intel utilizing non-volatile memory technology will be available next year.

Gelsinger shared his vision for I/O consolidation on Ethernet and steps to get to a converged network that supports both Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and local area networks. In support of this vision, he announced availability of Intel® 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller now with full support for FCoE solution stack coming in 2008

Intel Corp, the world's largest chipmaker, is on the verge of making its biggest push yet into mobile consumer electronics, seeking to replicate its success in mobile personal devices, as well as personal computers long before that.

In the first half of next year, Intel will deliver its Menlow platform, a collection of chips and other components to power so-called Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, said Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group at the company's twice-annual technical show, on Wednesday.

IronPort Systems, a business unit of Cisco has announced the use of Multi-core Intel Xeon processors to power IronPort’s next generation of email and Web security appliances.

The next generation email security appliance IronPort X1050, uses the dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series to stay in front of new spammer tactics. The IronPort AsyncOS operating system takes full advantage of all eight cores, yielding system throughput approximately 800 per cent greater than a comparable single-core appliance.

This increase in processing power allows the IronPort appliance not only to process more email messages, but also to run more sophisticated rules and analysis to help thwart the latest spam techniques.

This helps enterprises, Internet service providers (ISPs) and smaller organizations stay ahead of the never-ending deluge of spam e-mail, Cisco said in a statement.

The combination of IronPort software and Intel's advanced hardware systems yields a robust solution to surging spam, Cisco statement added.