While many will take these numbers with a grain of salt since they came direct from Intel, it’s not hard to believe how strong performing Intel’s Sandy E is up against its old aged X58/LGA1366 predecessor, and with the (quite disappointing) benchmarks out on Bulldozer, it only puts AMD in an even dimmer light. 
Intel has shared some internal test results of its soon to be launched Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition processor; a six cored / 12 threaded beast clocked in at 3.3GHz with 15MB of cache. The results were directly compared to the top dog in Intel’s current flagship platform, the Core i7 990X EE, which runs a stock clock of 3.46GHz. < Read more…
Computers-Plus
More than simple IT news!
IDF When Intel releases its Sandy Bridge-based two-socket “Romley” platform in the middle of next year, its “Patsburg” platform controller hub (PCH) will include support for serial attached SCSI (SAS).
By putting SAS support on the motherboard, Intel is embracing what it formerly shunned: software RAID.
“I’ll plead guilty. We stood up here 10 years ago and told you software RAID sucked, you didn’t want it, it wasn’t a viable solution,” Susan Bobholz of Intel’s storage product marketing group told attendees at a Wednesday SAS and RAID session at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
“But that’s one of those things that’s starting to change in the industry,” she added.
The tech world is still recovering from the shock of Intel purchasing McAfee for nearly $8 billion. As analysts and media struggle to make sense of the move, McAfee competitors weigh in with insight and opinion regarding the Intel acquisition.
Here is a sampling of what rival security organizations have told me about the Intel McAfee purchase:
Philippe Courtot, Qualys CEO:
“This acquisition is another example of the rapid consolidation taking place in the enterprise software industry, as traditional high tech vendors have an increasingly harder time competing against SaaS [software-as-a-service] and cloud computing offerings and can only find growth by embarking on aggressive pricing against their competitors to steal market share.”
This is precisely what McAfee did against Symantec.
Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday announced new mobile processors as it tries to bridge the power and performance gap with Intel, while trying to lower laptop prices.
The company’s new processors include its first triple-core and quad-core laptop processors as part of a new Phenom II line, which will boost application performance while reducing power consumption, AMD officials said. Mainstream laptops mostly come with dual-core chips, and adding cores brings more performance to users at lower prices.
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“We’re able to hit triple-and quad-core price points at US$799,” said Leslie Sobon, vice president of marketing at AMD.
Intel announced the Atom processor in 2008. That same year we were introduced to the first two members of the family: Diamondville and Silverthorne. The chips were both called Atom, but they differed in their application. Diamondville was used in desktops, nettops and netbooks, while Silverthorne was almost exclusively for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).
Atom continues its split personality. Silverthorne begets Moorestown, the next-generation Atom for MIDs and smartphones. Diamondville, on the other hand, leads us to Pine Trail – the next-generation Atom for desktops, nettops and netbooks.
Pine Trail is the platform codename.