In line with such a strategy, ARM has announced that Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, will bring the full Ubuntu desktop OS to the ARMv7 processor architecture. ARM noted that the development was driven by demand from device manufacturers, and a complete hardware and software solution would increase the likelihood that Taiwan ODMs, which dominate hardware development in the global notebook market, would develop netbook type devices based on an ARM platform.

The Ubuntu ARM distribution for desktops and netbooks will be officially available from April 2009, and will target the ARMv7 architecture including ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor-based systems.

One other area ARM has been challenged by its competitors is the lack of support for Flash software on the ARM platform. However, sources in Taiwan indicated that ARM should soon be making breakthroughs in that area as well.

www.digitimes.com

Some people were surprised when Apple announced that its new MacBooks could come with two Nvidia GPUs, but that’s nothing compared to what Toshiba has just announced. The company’s latest Qosimo laptops come with three GPUs, and they’re set up in a sensible configuration too.

We’re not talking an extreme 3-way SLI laptop here. Instead, the laptops come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for quiet day-to-day work on battery power, and then have a pair of GeForce 9800M GTS cards in SLI mode that can kick in when you need fast 3D frame rates.

Apple was the first company to announce that it was using Nvidia’s new GeForce 9400M GPU when it launched its new MacBooks last month, and Nvidia has since announced a desktop motherboard chipset based on the technology. The GPU has just 16 stream processors clocked at 1.4GHz as standard, with a 580MHz GPU core clock. It might not be very powerful when it comes to running Crysis, but it has enough power to enable Aero glass effects in Windows Vista, and it hardly matters when you have an SLI setup waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, the GeForce 9800M GTS features 64 stream processors, so it’s not as powerful as your average GeForce 9800 desktop GPU, but a pair of them should be able to make these laptops veritable gaming machines. It’s also interesting to see a high-profile company such as Toshiba taking a big interest in the gaming laptop industry, similarly to Dell and HP, to the point where it’s installing three GPUs. It’s also worth noting that the three GPUs could also help to speed up the laptop when running GPGPU apps.

Toshiba’s vice president of product development for Toshiba’s US digital products division, Carl Pinto, explained that Toshiba ‘wanted to deliver an extreme-performance gaming machine that gives gamers a complete, non-compromising system in a laptop form factor.’ He added that ‘The combination of the NVIDIA GPUs and chipset allowed us to achieve a high level of performance, quality and flexibility that our customers are asking for, at a competitive starting price.’

The Qosimo X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven’t seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU. Would you be interested in laptops such as these for a portable gaming machine, as well as general laptops, or would you rather stick with your desktop? Let us know your thoughts.

www.custompc.co.uk

With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam.

www.tribler.org

RNA is a close cousin to the more famous DNA, differing only by the presence of one oxygen atom in its component sugars. Although it acts much like DNA and undergoes base pairing, that oxygen atom makes it significantly more reactive. RNA molecules can twist to form elaborate structures that can catalyze chemical reactions, including those that rearrange RNA molecules (either themselves or others). In the new experiment, researchers built their logic gates using a type of catalytic RNA called a “hammerhead ribozyme.”

As seen here, the hammerhead RNA undergoes base pairing with itself to form a complex, three-dimensional structure. Place the hammerhead sequence within any RNA molecule and it will break up the RNA to cut itself neatly out, leaving the RNA molecule in pieces.

The ribozyme is flexible enough that extra RNA can be inserted into one or both of the two lobes of the structure shown above without destroying its function. The researchers inserted RNA sequences that also formed base paired structures. With the additional sequences in place, the entire molecule acted like a switch: if it base pairs one way, a normal, functional hammerhead ribozyme was formed. If it pairs up using different stretches of RNA, parts of the ribozyme are pulled open, destroying its function.

The authors arranged it so that they could control this switch. Several RNA sequences have been identified that bind small molecules, like the drug tetracycline. The authors inserted these into the extended lobes, such that the drug controlled the folding of the RNA. When tetracycline is present, the RNA would fold so that there was no active ribozyme. Remove the tetracycline, and the molecule would reshuffle so that the ribozyme became active.

The end result is that the drug acts as a switch, turning the ribozyme on and off. Making each of the two lobes sensitive to a different drug even created a biological AND switch; both drugs need to be present for an active ribozyme. But a ribozyme isn’t necessarily easy to detect, so the authors made it obvious: they inserted their logic gates into a gene that encodes a messenger RNA that produces the Green Fluorescent protein (the protein that recently won folks a Nobel Prize). Now, when the ribozyme is active, the messenger RNA gets broken up and no GFP is made; otherwise, the cells glow green.

This setup allowed the creation of an OR logic system as well. Simply placing two ribozymes in the same message, each sensitive to a different drug, ensured that no GFP was made if either drug was present. By combining different versions of these structures in a gene encoding a single messenger RNA, all sorts of basic logical operations were possible, and their state was easy to read out based on whether the yeast cells carrying these genes glowed green or not.

Detecting tetracycline isn’t especially interesting, but RNA that binds to specific small molecules is actually relatively easy to make; repeated rounds of amplification and selection for binding can evolve these RNAs in a couple of days. This means that, in a matter of days, researchers can grow yeast colonies that glow in response to a variety of chemicals, or even to combinations of chemicals.

More complicated circuits should be possible if the ribozymes are inserted into messenger RNAs that encode transcription factors, which could, in turn, regulate genes that encode yet other ribozymes. It’s possible that the first biological calculations using this system are already under way in the lab responsible for this publication.

www.arstechnica.com
www.sciencemag.org

In a software-centric world where we already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring ANOTHER language to the table, titled ‘M’ (for Microsoft?).

The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database.

Microsoft has not said much other than that about the new language, but it will presumably be a compiled .net language (goodbye true native code), and from what Microsoft said, M is to strive to be cross-platform…. with a catch.

By “cross platform”, Microsoft means, “cross platform as long the other platform authors write a backend for the code, and the SQL database MUST be hosted on MS SQL, a proprietary Microsoft Windows service”. It makes perfect sense for being cross platform, if you are Microsoft and trying to purchase many copies of Windows (therefore generating revenue, and presumably the version is Vista or win2k8 since XP is out).

Another source says the language is actually their ‘D’ language (and no, Microsoft did not originally invent D either), only revamped to fit into their new Oslo modeling strategy and renamed to a further letter down the alphabet to attract new interest in an old product. While this may be mostly true, D, which was never really promoted as a .net compilable language (it just kinda disappeared) had many flaws and never really caught on although some were enthusiastic about it (just like Bill Gates said we would write code for OS/2 for the next 10 years after its release).

The fundamentals and principals of the language are attractive, especially for OOP, but its ties to MS SQL and .net would only really make it attractive to Windows-specific applications, although its integration with ASP.net is unclear at this point. The mono project does a descent job of allowing .net code to run on non-windows platforms, and if M adheres to the same standards then after a given time M-written applications will be penguin-friendly as well if Microsoft can get around the MS SQL dependency.

Time will only tell how many will actually use the language outright before Microsoft finds a way to force programmers to use it, most likely by dropping support for some features in all languages except M to promote its usage. For now it appears that the only “non-visual” C/C++ code encouraged for usage with Windows by Microsoft is in fact Windows itself, given the fact that Microsoft’s programmers are on Microsoft’s payroll. But if all newbie programmers learn these new languages, who will manage the billions of lines of C and C++ we currently use in the future, unless it is implied to be completely be rewritten? I’m sure the folks from the original Bell labs team would be interested in the answer to these questions as well.

www.thecoffeedesk.com

AMD’s shares jumped 18 percent to $5 on the news on Tuesday after Wall Street waited for months for the struggling chip maker to formulate its so-called “smart asset” strategy to focus more on chip design and less on costly factories.

Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), an Abu Dhabi state-owned venture capital firm, said it will invest $2.1 billion for a 55.6 percent stake in the venture, of which $700 million will go directly to AMD, which will hold the remaining stake. The two will divide the venture’s board seats equally.

ATIC also committed to investing another $3.6 billion to $6.0 billion over 5 years to fund the venture’s expansion. The 3,000-person new company will hold AMD’s two plants in Dresden, Germany and make all of its central processing units, as well as chips for other companies.

Another Abu Dhabi government company, Mubadala Development Co, will spend $314 million to increase its stake in AMD to 19.3 percent from 8.1 percent and gain a seat on AMD’s board.

Brian Mata, an analyst at IC Insights in Arizona, said AMD desperately needed the boost. The company has posted seven consecutive quarters of losses and is forecast by Wall Street to report another quarterly loss next week.

“The key thing is the financial backing from Abu Dhabi because AMD was essentially out of money,” said Mata.

He said AMD can focus on design and has the money to try to catch up with Intel, but the new venture has a challenge competing with existing contract chip manufacturers.

“The foundry business is already pretty entrenched,” he said, citing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd, United Microelectronics Corp, Singapore’s Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd and China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.

GOING FABLESS

AMD has lost market share to Intel and in the last few years was forced to weigh the price of its pride in owning the semiconductor fabricating plants, or “fabs,” which most other chip makers gave up long ago.

It has also been hit by problems with its high-end personal computer and server Barcelona chip, and had bumps along the road after acquiring graphics chip maker ATI.

Despite the jump in AMD’s share price on Tuesday, the stock remains far below its 12-month high of $14.73.

“Today is a landmark day for AMD, creating a financially stronger company with a tightened focus,” Dirk Meyer, president and chief executive officer of AMD, said in the statement.

The new venture, temporarily called Foundry Company, will assume all $1.2 billion of AMD’s manufacturing operations debt so the remaining company can compete hard against Intel, which sells about 80 percent of the central processing units at the heart of the world’s 1 billion PCs. AMD makes the rest.

“A duopoly is a very helpful market structure for companies and a very profitable one. AMD needs to improve its execution to enjoy the potential benefits,” said JoAnne Feeney, an analyst with FTN Midwest in Boston, who has “buy” ratings on AMD and Intel. “Separating the companies into design and manufacturing will improve their execution.”

The venture plans to break ground next year for a factory in upstate New York, employing 1,400 people, if New York state will transfer financial incentives to the new company.

The chief executive will be Doug Grose, senior vice president of technology at AMD and its new chairman will be Hector Ruiz, now chairman of AMD.

The venture will upgrade one of the two plants in Dresden and build the plant in New York to the latest technology standards, AMD said. It said the venture, which will be on AMD’s balance sheet, may ultimately build a fab in Abu Dhabi.

ATIC Chairman Waleed Al Mokarrab said on a conference call that this was his company’s first major investment and “though owned by the Abu Dhabi government, ATIC will be directed by commercial principals that will generate commercial returns.”

Mubadala, which holds stakes in sectors ranging from energy to aerospace, purchased an 8.1 percent share of AMD in 2007 for $622 million. It will boost that to 19.3 percent by buying 58 million newly issued shares and warrants for 30 million more.

The deal is to close at the end of 2008 or early in 2009, if approved by stockholders. It will also be reviewed by the U.S. government inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS).

The deal will be welcomed by IBM, which has worked closely with AMD and other chip makers to improve chips. The company will be part of the IBM technology alliance, making it easier to build chips for members.

www.reuters.com

Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

B-movie buffs may recall that Clint Eastwood used similar “brain-computer interface” technology in 1982’s Firefox, named for the Soviet fighter plane whose weapons were controlled by the pilot’s thoughts. (Clint was sent to steal the plane, natch.) Yet it’s not as far-fetched as you might think: video gamers are eagerly awaiting a crude commercial version of brain wave technology — a $299 headset from San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems — in summer 2009.

The Army doesn’t move quite as fast as gamers though. The military’s vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality, let alone implementation. The five-year contract it awarded last month to a coalition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to “decode the activity in brain networks” so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades by thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Initially, the recipients would most likely hear transmissions rendered by a robotic voice via earphones. But scientists eventually hope to deliver a version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice and indicate the speaker’s distance and direction from the listener.

“Having a soldier gain the ability to communicate without any overt movement would be invaluable both in the battlefield as well as in combat casualty care,” the Army said in last year’s contract solicitation. “It would provide a revolutionary technology for silent communication and orientation that is inherently immune to external environmental sound and light.”

The key challenge will be to develop software able to pinpoint the speech-related brain waves picked up by the 128-sensor array that ultimately will be buried inside a helmet. Those sensors detect the minute electrical charges generated by nerve pathways in the brain when thinking occurs. The sensors will generate an electroencephalogram — a confusing pile of squiggles on a computer screen — that scientists will study to find those vital to communicating. “We think we can train a computer to understand those squiggles to the point that they can read off the commands that your brain is issuing to your mouth and lips,” Schmeisser says. Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of finding the single right squiggle. “There’s no golden neuron that’s talking,” he says.

Dr. Mike D’Zmura of UC-Irvine, the lead scientist on the project, says his task is akin to finding the right strands on a plate full of pasta. “You need to pick out the relevant pieces of spaghetti,” he says, “and sometimes they have to be torn apart and re-attached to others.” But with ever-increasing computing power the task can be done in real time, he says. Users also will have to be trained to think loudly. “How do we get a person to think something to themselves in a way that leaves a very strong signal in EEGs that we can read off against the background noise?” D’Zmura asks. Finally, because every person’s EEG is different, persons using “thought helmets” will have to be trained so that computers intercepting their unspoken commands recognize each user’s unique mental pattern.

Both scientists pre-emptively deny expected charges that they’re literally messing with soldiers’ minds. “A lot of people interpret wires coming out of the head as some sort of mind reading,” D’Zmura sighs. “But there’s no way you can get there from here,” Schmeisser insists. “Not only do you have to be willing, but since your brain is unique, you have to train the system to read your mind — so it’s impossible to do it against someone’s will and without their active and sustained cooperation.”

And don’t overlook potential civilian benefits. “How often have you been annoyed by people screaming into their cell phones?” Schmeisser asks. “What if instead of their Bluetooth earpiece it was a Bluetooth headpiece and their mouth is shut and there’s blessed silence all around you?” Sounds like one of those rare slices of the U.S. military budget even pacifists might support.

www.time.com

The 20th annual HOT CHIPS conference at Stanford University is an academic show, not a vendor-driven one. That means the biggest guns share the stage with the littlest pistols; and it gives the little guys a chance to shine.

In this case, a Chinese processor project found itself sandwiched between presentations from AMD and Intel, with its own unique story to tell.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is a nationally-funded institution with five main areas of focus, one of which is technology. Within that area is the Institute for Computing Technology, which designed the Godson processor, a project that began in 2001.

China decided to support microprocessors because it has come to realize CPU design is important and one of national strategic importance, said Zhiwei Xu, chief technology officer and a professor at the institute during his speech here.

Now on its third generation of Godson, the ICT has managed to triple performance with each generation, although he admitted it still has a long way to go to close the gap with giants like Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), AMD (NYSE: AMD) and IBM (NYSE: IBM), but added “we are doing our best to join the international community.”

Godson-2 and 3 are scalable 64-bit single core processors built on 90 nanometer design. They are instruction-compatible with the MIPS III processor architecture, and Xu said the company has a license from MIPS for such compatibility. The operating system of choice for Godson-powered computers, said Xu, is Linux.

The current Godson-2 generation, E and F, are both 1Ghz processors, consuming from 3 to 7 watts of power. Godson-2E has an on-chip DDR (define) controller while Godson-2F has an on-chip DDR2 (define) controller. A Godson-2G and –2H are also planned for computers as well as System on a Chip (SoC) designs.

Xu then introduced the Godson-3 design, which will be a four-core, 1.0Ghz chip on a 65nm process design and consume just 10 watts of power. The core will be reconfigurable into one of two purposes and it will have on-the-fly x86 binary translation, which Xu said would be ten times as fast as software-only emulation.

The x86 compatibility still needs work. The goal is to reach 80 percent of the native MIPS performance. Currently, it’s between 48 and 58 percent, according to Xu.

Godson-3 can be reconfigured into one of two designs: general purpose core, and multipurpose core. The general purpose core is just as the name implies, and does more x86 emulation, media acceleration, and general processing. The multipurpose core is for LINPACK programming, a Fortran-style of processing, biological and digital signal processing.

Godson-3 will use a crossbar and mesh interconnect to support rapid communication between the cores. Xu said the processor would be capable of 16 gigaflops at 1Ghz, which is a pretty good showing at that speed. It would put it at a comparable performance range to Intel’s mass market quad core processors.

In 2009, ICT hope to introduce an eight-core processor that is essentially a multi-chip module like Intel’s quad core Xeons, which are two dual core processors on one die. It will also be a combination of general purpose and multipurpose cores, rather than all of one style like the four core chip.

This will bump the power draw to 20 watts, still far lower than any other eight-core processor. The ultimate goal, said Xu, is to build a petaflop (define) computer running Godson-3 by 2010.

www.internetnews.com

The Khronos™ Group announced today it has released the OpenGL® 3.0 specification with strong industry support to bring significant new functionality to the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. OpenGL 3.0 includes GLSL™ 1.30, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides comprehensive access to the functionality of the latest generations of programmable graphics hardware. The OpenGL working group has also defined a set of OpenGL 3.0 extensions that expose potential new functionality for the next version of OpenGL that is targeted for release in less than 12 months, and a set of extensions for OpenGL 2.1 to enable much of the new OpenGL functionality on older hardware. Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 introduces an evolutionary model to assist in streamlining the specification and to enable rapid development of the standard to address diverse markets. Finally, the OpenGL working group has announced that it is working closely with the emerging OpenCL standard to create a revolutionary pairing of compute and graphics programming capabilities. The new OpenGL 3.0 specifications are freely available at www.khronos.org/opengl.

The OpenGL 3.0 specification enables developers to leverage state-of-the-art graphics hardware, including many of the graphics accelerators shipped in the last two years both on Windows XP and Windows Vista as well as Mac OS and Linux. According to Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics market analyst based in California, the installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.0 exceeds 60 million units. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have made major contributions to the design of OpenGL 3.0 and today all three companies announced their intent to provide full implementations within their product families. Additionally, the OpenGL working group includes the active participation of leading developers such as Blizzard Entertainment and TransGaming that have played a vital role in ensuring that the specification meets the genuine needs of the software community.

“We are very pleased to see the release of OpenGL 3.0, which includes numerous features and extensions that will help us and other ISVs bring amazing gaming content to OpenGL-based platforms,” commented Gavriel State, founder & CTO of TransGaming, Inc.

OpenGL 3.0 introduces dozens of new features including:

• Vertex Array Objects to encapsulate vertex array state for easier programming and increased throughput;
• non-blocking access to Vertex Buffer Objects with the ability to update and flush a sub-range for enhanced performance;
• full framebuffer object functionality including multi-sample buffers, blitting to and from framebuffer objects, rendering to one and two-channel data, and flexible mixing of buffer sizes and formats when rendering to a framebuffer object;
• 32-bit floating-point textures and render buffers for increased precision and dynamic range in visual and computational operations;
• conditional rendering based on occlusion queries for increased performance;
• compact half-float vertex and pixel data to save memory and bandwidth;
• transform feedback to capture geometry data after vertex transformations into a buffer object to drive additional compute and rendering passes;
• four new texture compression schemes for one and two channel textures providing a factor of 2-to-1 storage savings over uncompressed data;
• rendering and blending into sRGB framebuffers to enable faithful color reproduction for OpenGL applications without adjusting the monitor’s gamma correction;
• texture arrays to provide efficient indexed access into a set of textures;
• 32-bit floating-point depth buffer support.

The new version of the OpenGL Shading Language, GLSL 1.30, provides front-to-back native integer operations including full integer-based texturing, integer input and outputs for vertex and fragment shaders and a full set of integer bitwise operators. It also improves compatibility with OpenGL ES, adds new interpolation modes, includes new forms of explicit control over texturing operations, provides additional built-in functions for manipulating floating-point numbers and introduces switch statements for enhanced flow control within shader programs.

The OpenGL working group has also released a set of extensions to OpenGL 3.0 that can be immediately used by developers and, after industry feedback, will potentially be included in the next generation of OpenGL targeted for release in less than 12 months. These extensions include geometry shaders, further instancing support, and texture buffer objects.

Khronos today also released a number of extensions to OpenGL 2.1 which enables some of the new features in OpenGL 3.0 to be used on older generations of hardware. These extensions include enhanced VBOs, full framebuffer object functionality, half float vertices, compressed textures, vertex array objects and sRGB framebuffers.

Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 defines an evolutionary process for OpenGL that will accelerate market-driven updates to the specification. The new OpenGL API supports the future creation of profiles to enable products to support specific market needs while not burdening every implementation with unnecessary costs. To avoid fragmentation, the core OpenGL specification will contain all defined functionality in an architecturally coherent whole, with profiles tightly specifying segment-relevant subsets. OpenGL 3.0 also introduces a deprecation model to enable the API to be streamlined while providing full visibility to the application developer community, enabling the API to be optimized for current and future 3D graphics architectures.

Finally, the OpenGL working group is working closely with the newly announced OpenCL working group at Khronos to define full interoperability between the two open standards. OpenCL is an emerging royalty-free standard focused on programming the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute through a C-based language forheterogeneous data and task parallel computing. The two APIs together will provide a powerful open standards-based visual computing platform with OpenCL’s general purpose compute capabilities intimately combined with the full power of OpenGL.

“OpenGL 3.0 is a significant evolutionary step that integrates new functionality to ensure that OpenGL is a truly state-of-the-art graphics API while supporting a broad swathe of existing hardware,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. “Just as importantly, OpenGL 3.0 sets the stage for a revolution to come – we now have the roadmap machinery and momentum in place to rapidly and reliably develop OpenGL - and are working closely with OpenCL to ensure that OpenGL plays a pivotal role in the ongoing revolution in programmable visual computing.”

www.khronos.org

Products based on the new microarchitecture will deliver high performance and energy efficiency. This “best of both worlds” approach is expected to extend Intel’s processor leadership in future mobile, desktop and server market segments.

“The Core name is and will be our flagship PC processor brand going forward,” said Sean Maloney, Intel Corporation executive vice president and general manager, Sales and Marketing Group. “Expect Intel to focus even more marketing resources around that name and the Core i7 products starting now.”

Intel Core i7

The Intel Core processor brand name has gained broad awareness, preference, and market momentum over the past several years. The Intel Core name remains the logical choice for Intel’s latest family of processors. The Intel Core i7 processor brand logo will be available for high-performance desktop PCs with a separate black logo for Intel’s highest-end “Extreme Edition.” Intel will include processor model numbers to differentiate each chip.

Initial products based on this microarchitecture are expected to be in production in the fourth quarter of this year. These processors will feature Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, also known as simultaneous multi-threading, and are capable of handling eight software “threads” on four processor cores.

www.intel.com