With the two leading chipmakers set to release second-quarter earnings, analyst sees Intel and AMD turning in financial performances ahead of Wall Street consensus estimate.

Optimism returns ahead of earnings reports from Intel, Google and AMD.

Linux-based VoIP for Intel architectures Voice over Internet Protocol - Business - Telecommunications - VoIP - Services

Although the new servers, based on the Intel Xeon 5600 “Westmere” processor, are not expected to ship for another month, Cisco is not waiting to brag about their performance.

As good as it was for Intel and AMD in the CPU business, their graphics business did even better. nVidia? Not so much.

On Sept. 23, chipmaker Intel announced it will launch, in 2010, its own store peddling applications for mobile devices. The app store is expected to cater to devices ranging from netbooks to cars to handsets, and to look similar to the popular Apple App Store.

Clearly, Intel as a company is morphing. Once, it used to make chips that went into computers and other devices. More recently, with the acquisition of WindRiver, Intel has been moving to offer software and services, some of which it may offer to consumers directly. Essentially, Intel is removing the middlemen -- computer makers -- to interact with end users directly.

Can Intel swing it? I don't see why not. Thanks to its famed "Intel Inside" campaign, Intel is a household name. It's already a consumer brand, and Intel is smart to capitalize on that.

Its PC maker partners will be able to promote the resulting apps in their own-branded stores. It looks like Acer, Asus and Dell have already signed up to participate.

One interesting bit: It looks like Intel is courting Windows developers. According to the announcement, "developers will be able to write applications once and have them run on Windows and Moblin -- [that's Intel's software on which apps for the app store will be based] -- devices."

Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co. and other customers of Intel remain cautious about end-user demand, but the chipmaker says things are finally looking up.

Santa Clara (Calif.)-based Intel on Aug. 28 said third-quarter revenues could be half a billion dollars higher than its previous mid-range forecast of $8.5 billion. The company cited stronger demand for its microprocessors and chip packages that accompany them.

To be sure, the new revenue guidance still shaves more than $1 billion off the $10.2 billion in sales Intel logged in the year-ago comparable period. But the announcement will reinforce investor views that the tech sector has reached bottom and should begin recovering through 2010.

It came a day after Dell, the No. 2 pc vendor behind HP, reported better-than-expected quarterly results. Though Dell's profits continued their slide for the fourth-consecutive quarter, CFO Brian Gladden said he was cautiously optimistic that the pc market is beginning to recover, echoing reports from HP that things have stabilized.

Intel also appears to be confirming Dell's comments on Aug. 27 that back-to-school spending on new pc products is going well. There had been some concern that consumers were continuing to buckle down in July and August, after many of the nation's largest retailers reported weak sales of clothing and other back-to-school items.

The big wild card, of course, is whether pc makers are building up inventory that could sit unsold on shelves if consumer spending suddenly weakens again. PC makers have said they do not expect corporate spending on computers and servers to rise in any significant way until next year.

Head of the social network’s technical operations say the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD don’t make the grade.

Are we nearing the end of Moore's law? Intel engineers say don't believe the growing chorus of voices saying there's little time left to the dictum that transistor counts of chips will double roughly every two year.

Chip researcher iSuppli on June 16 became the latest to expound on Moore's law. Chief analyst Len Jelinek predicted that the end will come by 2014 because the equipment that would be required to continue shrinking circuitry will become prohibitively expensive.

Engineers at the company's research day on June 18 disagreed. In a workshop on the subject, they revealed Intel has been testing a variety of techniques to extend the law, including stacking chips on top of one another, using light to layer chips and adding memory.

Engineers didn't offer a new prediction about how long they can extend Moore's law life, but appeared optimistic Intel would be one of the few companies that will have enough cash to fund its continued existence.

The fate of Moore's law has been hotly debated over the years because its advances have contributed to rapid technological advances in all manner of electronic devices. It has helped bring down costs of those products just as rapidly.

If the pace of advances slows, innovation in electronics also could slow.

Who's right? Certainly reports of the death of Moore's law have been greatly exaggerated over the years, but everyone agrees it will become harder in the next few years to fulfill it. But with Intel spending about a sixth of its $38 billion in annual revenues on research and development, don't count it out just yet.

When you are a distant No. 2, you really have to try harder. And sometimes it even works.

A few years ago, AMD launched a campaign against using a processor's clock speed as the principal metric of computer performance. After push speeds to the point where computers became more notable for their heat production and energy consumption than their computational speed, Intel had to concede the point.

Now AMD has taken up arms against a widely used and thoroughly misleading standard of laptop battery life called MobileMark 2007. Patrick Moorhead, AMD marketing vice-president and enthusiastic evangelist, has been on a road trip, meeting with tech writers and analysts to persuade them of the evils of MobileMark.

Just how serious is Intel about breaking into new markets?

The chipmaker made that abundantly clear today, announcing it will acquire Wind River Systems, a maker of software for embedded devices, for $11.50 a share in cash, or about $884 million. The deal marks a 44% premium to Wind River's June 3 closing price.

With the purchase, is Intel picking up some cues with its partnership with Apple? No doubt, the chipmaker is known best for its manufacturing prowess. But it has always had a big group of software engineers who work on ways to optimize Intel's chips for everyday uses.

Intel, for instance, teamed up with Real to develop streaming media software that's widely used today to transmit audio and video over the Web.

But the Wind River purchase points to an increased emphasis on selling or using that software with finished devices. The company earlier this year announced a new collaboration with contract manufacturer TSMC to create customized chips.

Coupled with its focus on developing the Linux-based Moblin operating system for handheld devices such as netbooks, the chipmaker is making clear that the Apple-like strategy of pairing hardware and software is the way to go.

Wind River helps companies develop and manage device software for embedded systems and wireless products.

Intel is betting that its Atom chip family will drive new growth. The company hopes to notch billion more in profits over the next few years, and it making these big moves to make it happen.

CORRECTED second graf to add dropped word "billion"

As one might expect, Intel CEO Paul S. Otellini this morning denied that the chipmaker has engaged in anti-competitive practices, as alleged by European Union antitrust regulators today. "Significant evidence was either ignored or disregarded," Otellini told reporters on an early morning conference call.

The European Commission fined the chip manufacturer a record 1.06 billion euros (about $1.4 billion U.S.)for anti-competitive behavior. Intel announced immediately that it will appeal the decision, but the case is expected to take years to wind its way through the process. In the meantime, Intel must pay the fine or submit a bond within 90 days.

The wording of the initial EU statement certainly raises more questions than they answer about whether unfairly locked rival Advanced Micro Devices out of the market by tying customer rebates to the amount of Intel chips they sold. The heart of the case is whether those rebates were illegally tied to conditions that PC and server makers buy nearly all their x86 chips from Intel.

Otellini flatly denies that happened in the period European regulators were examining. The rebates "are volume-based. The more you buy, the less you pay," he said.

Intel has seized upon language in the initial summary of findings that suggests European regulators found nothing in documents it seized from Intel offices and gathered from PC makers that verified the chipmaker tried to lock AMD out of the market through its rebate program.

Otellini noted that regulators instead seemed to base their findings on the fact that because they didn't find anything, Intel and PC makers must have been actively hiding the truth.

It's hard to say who might have the upper hand on appeal until details of the 500-page finding are parsed by experts.

But already there are questions about whether consumers were really harmed if Intel did engage in the illegal behavior. When AMD introduced demonstrably superior chips than Intel's during a good part of the period, its worldwide market share jumped.

EU's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, argues that if AMD was kept from getting an even higher market share because of Intel's alleged practices, then consumers were harmed by a lack of choice.

That may be true, but it seems hard to prove legally unless it has documented evidence from PC makers that they canceled worthwhile projects that would have substantially benefited the consumer, or that they inflated prices on products because they couldn't sell a lower-priced AMD offering.

Intel, perhaps in part because they feared the EU's conclusion, just launched a new marketing campaign that describes how it has financed and developed many of the innovations we see today in the PC market.

The argument of consumer harm also is open to debate because there are only two chipmakers who supply the lion share of processors in the x86 market. Though AMD has been beset by financial woes over the past 18 months, both companies remain in business. And both companies' fortunes appear on the surface to rise and fall with computer makers when they have a superior product roadmap.

Because of that, it would likely face tougher legal scrutiny in the United States, where the Federal Trade Commission and New York attorney general are probing similar allegations.

Then there's the question about the size of the record fine. Japan a few years ago concluded that Intel engaged in anti-competitive behavior but leveled no fine. South Korea, which has a large and robust PC maker, in June 2008 fined Intel $25 million. When looked at through the earlier judgments, the European fine appears to be excessively punitive.

Indeed, Otellini argued that PC prices have fallen by a factor of nearly 100 in the period they examined, while AMD had some of its best years in terms of sales and profitability. AMD has said that more than 40% of Intel's profits, some $60 billion in the period 1996 to 2006, were generated because Intel had an illegal monopoly on the market.

Certainly there are likely a lot of smiles at AMD's headquarters right now. Executives lined up to applaud the EU decision. “The EU came to one conclusion: Intel broke the law and consumers were hurt,” said Tom McCoy, AMD executive vice president for legal affairs. “With this ruling, the industry will benefit from an end to Intel’s monopoly-inflated pricing and European consumers will enjoy greater choice, value and innovation.”

It's taken nine years to the EU to come to its decision. But no one by a long shot should expect that this concludes the legal and competitive drama that intertwines the two companies.

These two posts pretty much describe my issues:
http://trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/help/intel-sky2-drivers-…
http://trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/help/digium-te120p-compa…

The Dell Optiplex 960 with TB 2.6.2, A101D, and A200 has recently started “locking up”. You can access the unit even from the terminal at the computer. Must power cycle to restore function. I disabled the onboard NIC in the BIOS and installed a DLink DGE-560T PCI Express (only one available at time of purchase). Based on the 2 posts listed above, the driver for this NIC is likely the culprit. So… I want to install a new NIC I know will work. Cost is really not an issue because I really can’t afford the unit to go down sporadically.

Would either of these Intel cards from Newegg work:
EXPI9301CTBLK http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106033

EXPI9400PT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106010
http://www.intel.com/products/server/adapters/pro1000pt/pro1000pt…

One is $87 and the other is $30. The 9400PT appears to be “server” grade and the 9301 appears to be “desktop” grade. So, I’ll buy the 9400 if someone here can tell me it works.

Is is safe to assume CentOS will automatically recognize the new NIC upon installation?

I guess I’m also open to the idea the DLink NIC is not the cause of my lockup. As noted, the 2 posts above seem to describe my issue spot on. I haven’t looked at IRQ settings because I’m not in the same city. Though, I will be in 2 weeks.

Thanks.

Intel makes a bold call, but the company’s guidance leaves room for doubt.