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As a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, McAfee will become part of the company's Software and Services Group, run by senior vice president Renee James. McAfee president Dave DeWalt will report directly to James.

McAfee will continue to offer its own branded line of security products and maintain its own customers. The two companies said they're prepping the "first fruits" of their partnership to hit the market later this year.

The need for greater security across a greater array of devices was the driving force behind Intel's bid to pick up McAfee.

Pointing to the growing number of connected devices, from PCs to mobile phones to TVs to medical devices, the two companies have said that today's approach to security isn't enough. And with the mounting threat of cyberattacks, a new security framework that combines hardware, software, and services is needed.

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The flaw, said to affect 5 to 15 percent of all Cougar Point motherboards, results in a performance degradation for storage devices connected to the motherboard's SATA II data inputs. Devices that use those inputs are typically either hard drives or optical disk drives. If the inputs were affected, connected drives would eventually slow down to the point of becoming unusable.

To protect a PC from experiencing that issue, a system vendor could simply use the newer, faster SATA III inputs. Most Cougar Point desktop motherboards we've seen have four SATA II ports and two SATA IIIs. Laptop boards tend to have fewer inputs, but it's not hard to imagine that in a closed laptop or all-in-one chassis a vendor could simply use the SATA III inputs for the hard drive and the optical drive and ship without risk.

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The company expects to begin delivering the updated version of the chipset to customers in late February and expects full volume recovery in April. Intel stands behind its products and is committed to product quality. For computer makers and other Intel customers that have bought potentially affected chipsets or systems, Intel will work with its OEM partners to accept the return of the affected chipsets, and plans to support modifications or replacements needed on motherboards or systems. The systems with the affected support chips have only been shipping since January 9th and the company believes that relatively few consumers are impacted by this issue. The only systems sold to an end customer potentially impacted are Second Generation Core i5 and Core i7 quad core based systems. Intel believes that consumers can continue to use their systems with confidence, while working with their computer manufacturer for a permanent solution. For further information consumers should contact Intel at http://www.intel.com on the support page or contact their OEM manufacturer.

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Access to Hollywood content is also baked into the chip--a technology called Intel Insider. "This will unlock premium high-definition content, like movies, to your PC," Kilroy said. "We've gone out and engaged with the studios. So, you'll see Warner Bros. and Fox at launch [of Sandy Bridge] and several other studios to come. They're eagerly embracing this platform as a distribution means for premium high-end content--as Internet content [offered] directly to the end user."

Kilroy continued. "What Intel Insider does is deliver HD digital distribution rights to the PC. This could be enabled through multiple content storefronts through OEMs (PC makers), retailers like Best Buy. Essentially, the PC now becomes an on-ramp for HD 1080p movies," he said.

And Intel has added security features to protect the content. "And we've built in security capability into this platform that will enable end-to-end hardware protection for the content. So, it will protect the premium content rights of the studios," according to Kilroy.

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For AMD, the 2001 Intel agreement allows it to manufacture chips using Intel's X86 design and rely on chip foundries for up to 20 percent of their total manufacturing capacity. Intel, meanwhile, receives royalties from AMD, under the deal. The companies, despite their heated legal battles over antitrust matters, have had a long-standing patent and licensing relationship, going back to 1976. But this latest turn of events could result in a change in that relationship. AMD, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, said Intel sent it a letter that alleges AMD: Committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the company's Global Foundries joint venture and purports to terminate the company's rights and licenses under the cross license in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

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For Intel, that means a $7 billion, two-year investment in existing factories in New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon to manufacture silicon wafers with 32nm process technology. The investment is expected to support 7,000 high-wage jobs at those factories and support thousands of contract jobs for technicians and construction workers. The investment is Intel's largest ever in a single process technology. "As a global company, we have made a conscious decision to expand these factories here because we believe that investing in the future of American discovery isn't just the right thing to do," Otellini said, "it is an essential business decision if we want the United States to continue to be the engine of new ideas and technical leadership."

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The Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan typically takes place in October, while China IDF is in April. The IDF in the United States in September will not be affected, Intel said Monday. The Beijing IDF will be shortened to a one-day event. It is typically two days. Intel uses IDF to launch many of its products and technologies. For example, the new Core i7 chip was launched at the U.S. IDF last year. "It's the economy," said David Dickstein, an Intel spokesman. "The reaction we've gotten from exhibitors and sponsors when we told them about the scale-back in Beijing and cancellation of Taiwan, actually was overwhelmingly positive. They're saying it helps with their bottom line."

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In another GDC session, Intel is also pushing the CPU for physics and AI: "How can your game have more accurate physics, smarter AI, more particles, and/or a faster frame-rate? By threading your game's engine to take advantage of multi-core processors. Intel has built a threaded game engine and demo called 'Smoke' that shows one way of achieving this goal," the abstract states.

It continues: "This presentation examines the Smoke architecture and how it is designed to take advantage of all CPU cores available within a system. It does this by executing different functional and data blocks in parallel to utilize all available cores."

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Intel cuts were concentrated on quad-core chips like the Q9650 (3.00GHz), reduced 40 percent, to $316 from $530, to counter AMD's Phenom II. But Celeron processors received some of the largest reductions. The mobile Celeron 570 (2.00GHz), was slashed 48 percent, to $70 from $134, for example. Some Xeon processors also received hefty cuts. The price on the X3370 (3.00GHz), for instance, was cut 40 percent to $316 from $530.

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Intel is offering a "dashboard" for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this "User pinning." Custom pinning profiles can be created to pin applications or files that match the user's activity, according to Intel. Data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software are examples of applications that will see the most benefit, according to Intel. Intel is trying to address a longstanding shortcoming of Windows: its inability to take full advantage of flash storage devices. "There are issues related to taking full advantage of the speed of a (flash drive)," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in an interview at the Flash Memory Summit.

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Intel has four new desktop chipsets to show off from this year's Computex trade show in Taiwan. The G45 and the G43 focus on HD video playback by way of a new Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD integrated graphics chip. The P45 brings support for faster memory and is the first mainstream Intel-made chipset with two graphics card slots. A scaled-down P43 chipset rounds out the new 4 Series. All of the chipsets use Intel's familiar LGA 775 processor interface, which means support for Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad desktop CPUs. Intel has also added a 1,333MHz front side bus to each chipset, as well as support for DDR3 RAM, as well as DDR2 or DDR3 RAM at speeds up to 1,333MHz.

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Intel's 32Gb chip will enable more cost-effective SSDs, "instantly doubling the current storage volume of these devices and driving capacities to beyond 256GB in today's standard, smaller 1.8-inch form factor," Intel said in a statement. Intel SSDs will be "introduced and ramped" in the second half of this year, said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND Products Group The 32Gb chip marks a big step up from the 16Gb technology Intel introduced about a year ago. At that time, Intel announced a 50nm process. "This product is essentially the same die (chip) size as our 50nm product but double the density," said Hazen.

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That didn't exactly send shivers down the spine of executives at Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and others that build chips for mobile phones. They've seen this coming for a long time, an inevitable consequence of Intel finding itself with reams of chipmaking capacity and a maturing PC market. And Intel has already tried this once, spending billions trying to develop a combination of chips for the cell phone market but failing miserably. Following Intel's show in San Francisco last week, ARM developers will be meeting next week in Santa Clara, Calif.--Intel's hometown--for its annual developers' conference to discuss new applications and techniques for extracting more performance out of ARM's processor cores. The collective effort of both camps should do wonders to jump-start a market for mobile devices built for real people, not just coffee-toting executives rushing through O'Hare trying to get the 7:42 flight to San Francisco.

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Havok most recently announced Havok 5 at the Austin Game Developers Conference, adding "major new features" in this latest edition of its modular suite of run-time technology and artists' tools. As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.

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In a sense, these long-range Wi-Fi antennas would perform the same function as WiMax, a long-range wireless technology that many, including Intel, are experimenting with now. The difference is that a WiMax tower costs about $15,000 to $20,000. The long range Wi-Fi towers might only cost $700 to $800. Additionally, long range Wi-Fi could spread faster, Brewer said. The radio spectrum employed by WiMax is regulated by local telecommunications authorities. Putting up towers or offering services can require getting governmental permission.

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As reported earlier, the plant will be located in an industrial rust-belt hub in northeast China called Dalian in the Liaoning Province and will cost around $2.5 billion to build. The Chinese government is providing financial incentives to Intel, according to company spokesman Chuck Mulloy, and has built up the infrastructure around the city. Chips will start coming out of the factory in the first half of 2010. Initially, Intel will make chipsets--which shuttle data back and forth across the processor to the microprocessor of the computer--and possibly communications chips.

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Schwartz has been instrumental in transforming Sun into a more neutral company. In 2004, when he was promoted to chief operating officer and McNealy's No. 2 man, Sun buried the antitrust suit hatchet with Microsoft. He was willing to work with Linux, too. He even floated the idea of running Solaris on Intel Itanium and IBM Power processors--the latter idea now a reality by virtue of OpenSolaris' portability. And most relevant to Monday's news, he was an advocate of x86 servers, not just Sun selling its own, but also Sun offering Solaris as a free download that could be installed on machines from IBM, HP and Dell.

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The basic idea was a clone of Intel's Centrino strategy: put a colorful sticker on a PC, get PC makers to put a combination of Intel-developed technology inside the PC and reward them with marketing assistance, then blast the airwaves with snappy messages promoting the product. But Centrino took a technology concept that both businesses and consumers were starting to embrace--wireless networking--and made it easier for average PC buyers to understand. In Viiv's case, Intel and its partners are trying get people to use PCs in very different ways while wading into a new world of on-demand content delivery that is still challenging even for established cable and satellite companies.

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Carbon nanotubes, the reigning celebrity of the nanotechnology world, conduct electricity far better than metals. In fact, nanotubes exhibit what's called ballistic conductivity, which means that electrons are not scattered or impeded by obstacles. Nanotubes, which measure only a few billionths of a meter thick, are also far thinner than metal interconnects can be made. Potentially, this eliminates the problem with shrinking interconnects. IBM and others have made transistors out of carbon nanotubes. In its experiment, Intel aligned bundles of nanotubes by means of an electric field and then measured their frequency with fairly standard equipment.

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The complaint charges that Intel has infringed and is infringing Transmeta's patents by making and selling a variety of microprocessor products, including at least Intel's Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core and Core 2 product lines. The complaint requests an injunction against Intel's continuing sales of infringing products as well as monetary damages, including reasonable royalties on infringing products, treble damages and attorneys' fees.

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Theo pointed out that when the open source community works together they can help improve the situation, "in the past, our users have shown that they can help us convince vendors to do the right thing. They have shown vendors the path towards freeing up many pieces of documentation or granting firmware distribution rights. This has helped with many vendors, most of them quite large." He explained that until Intel releases their firmware freely and without restrictions that they are not open source friendly as they claim, "by withholding, Intel is being an Open Source fraud." He went on to suggest that Intel should follow the example of other companies in the market, "Intel must do this firmware grant in the same way that Adaptec, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Cyclades, QLogic, Ralink, and LSI and lots of other companies have granted distribution firmware to be used by others." He concluded by requesting that the open source community contact Intel to help get them to change their policies, "let's win back the rights to run the hardware we purchased."

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Intel's work on silicon photonics, including its recent announcement of a silicon laser, could help contribute toward the core-to-core connection challenge. Rattner and Prof. John Bowers of the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrated Intel's newest breakthrough model of silicon laser, which was constructed using conventional techniques that are better suited to volume manufacturing than older iterations of the laser. Many of the architectural nuances of the 80-core chip can be traced back to earlier research breakthroughs announced at previous IDFs. Connecting chips directly to each other through tiny wires is called Through Silicon Vias, which Intel discussed in 2005. TSV will give the chip an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1 terabyte per second.

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But attendees will definitely hear new information about Intel's quad-core chips. Enthusiast sites have been reporting that the processor will bear the "Core 2 Quadro" moniker, although Intel representatives have strongly denied that is the name for the upcoming chip. Whatever brand Intel chooses for Kentsfield, the desktop version, it will probably be associated with something expensive, as the initial buyers of Kentsfield should be early adopters willing to pay big bucks for the highest-performing chip on the market.

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This release represents the start of a long term effort by Intel to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers. While these drivers represent significant work at both Tungsten Graphics and Intel, as our first release of this code, they're still in need of significant testing, tuning and bug fixing before they'll be ready for production use. We're releasing them now to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to providing free software drivers for Intel hardware.

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But some analysts, such as NPD Techworld's Stephen Baker, fret that without a compelling reason to upgrade a PC this holiday season, holiday shoppers will spend their money on goodies like digital televisions and gaming consoles. In that sense, "the Core 2 Duo probably couldn't have come at a better time," Titera said. On top of the buzz that comes with a new chip, the performance delivered by the Core 2 Duo could also generate interest in high-end desktops that also deliver better margins for PC companies, he said.