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Popular online computer parts vendor Newegg this week gave one of its suppliers, IPEX, the boot. The reason, says Newegg, is that IPEX was the one who supplied the vendor with fake Core i7 chips. "Initial information we received from our supplier, IPEX, stated that they had mistakenly shipped us ‘demo units.’ We have since come to discover that the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier," Newegg said in a statement. Initial reports had pegged D&H Distributing as the culprit, but the supplier has since been cleared of any wrongdoing. "Contrary to any speculation, D&H Distributing is not the vendor that supplied us with the Intel Core i7 920 CPUs in question," Newegg added. Fake CPUs weren’t terribly difficult to spot. There were several misspelled words on the retail packaging, including a sticker that spelled "socket" as "sochet," eWeek.com reports. In some cases, the user manual inside the box was blank. As for customers who were affected, Newegg said it is sending out replacement chips. See here for an unboxing video of one of the counterfeit chips.
Image Credit: ZDNet Already the performance leader in desktop processing, Intel is following its quad-core Bloomfield design up with Gulftown, a hexa-core design sporting 12MB of shared L3 cache. Is the lone Gulftown model, Core i7-980X Extreme, worth a $1,000 asking price?
Forget that six-core Gulftown Core i7. There’s a new Intel Xeon chip on the way with a whopping eight cores of processing goodness. Surely you can utilize eight cores in your home system, right? Well, maybe not, but the Nehalem-EX chip is likely to spice things up in the server sector when it launches later this month. The Nehalem-EX will be a Xeon part built on Intel’s 45nm process technology. The chip will have hyperthreading, meaning up to 16 threads per processor. Clock speed is currently unknown. Being a server part, scalability is important and the Nehalem-EX won’t disappoint here. Thanks to the 4QPI links per chip, the new part will be scalable to eight sockets. So that’s 64 physical cores, or 128 threads. We’re pretty sure the benefits for Crysis 2 drop off around 48 cores or so. Intel is promising big performance gains over the previous generation of Xeons, with nine times the memory bandwidth of the old chips. The part seems aimed at holding back AMD’s Magny-Cours six-core server parts due out soon. One way or another, servers are about to get a lot faster. 
According to news and rumor site Fudzilla, Intel plans to beef up its entry-level Celeron notebook processor line with the introduction of its Celeron P4500 processor. Due out in the second quarter of this year, the P4500 will supplant the T3300. Unlike most other Celerons, however, the P4500 is built around Intel’s 32nm Arrandale platform. It will come clocked at 1.86GHz per core, while the graphics will cruise along at 500MHz. You won’t find any Turbo Overclocking on the P4500, though the graphics can be juiced to 667MHz. Other features include DDR3-1066 support, 2MB of cache, and a 35W TDP. By comparison, the T3300 comes clocked slightly higher at 2GHz, but has half the amount of cache at 1MB.
Image Credit: Intel
It’s a pretty good question, and we really don’t have a ton of ideas. There might not be a lot of real world use cases for a 48-core setup, but maybe you could come up with a few if the price was right. Like for instance, if AMD would give you those 48 cores if you came up with a good one. Well, that’s just what they’re doing. AMD wants people to submit essays, videos, or blog posts explaining how they’d use a monster 48 core server to “make the world a better, more interesting place”. The contest is seemingly meant to promote the upcoming Magny-Cours based Opteron CPUs AMD will be releasing this quarter. If you can come up with the best idea, AMD will provide you with four new AMD Opteron 6174 12-core CPUs, a TYAN S8812 motherboard, and a copy of Windows Server 2008. So what’ll it be? Super powered Folding@home box to cure cancer? Rendering farm for underprivileged, inner-city video producers? Check out the full rules here before you formulate any plans. Anyone planning on submitting an entry? Drop us a line if you win… 
Intel’s Atom platform isn’t just for fun and play, at least not anymore. The No. 1 chip maker on Thursday launched its first Atom processor-based platform designed specifically for home networks and small office/home office (SOHO) storage devices. "NAS systems have traditionally been found in businesses to manage, store and access data," said Seth Bobroff, general manager, Intel Data Center Group, Storage. "Today, households and small offices have an ever-increasing number of computers, laptops, netbooks and mobile phones that create and consume digital content. This advancement in mobility coupled with the explosive growth of data and media are creating the need for centralized, easy-to-use network storage solutions for the home and small office." Available in both single core (D410) and dual-core (D510) flavors, Intel says you can expect up to a 50 percent power reduction compared to the company’s previous generation Atom processors. Other features of the new platform include six PCI Express lanes, 12 USB 2.0 ports, a port multiplier function, and eSATA ports.
Image Credit: Intel
ASRock recently stated it wanted to start targeting the enthusiast crowd, and making good on that intention, the company will start slapping a new UCC chip onto its motherboards. So what’s the big deal? UCC stands for Unlock CPU Core, and as you might have guessed, it’s designed to make easy-work out of turning AMD’s triple-core processors into unlocked quad-core parts. All you do is go into the BIOS, enter one of the options, and if the parts play nice together, you’ll be sitting pretty with four cores where previously there were three. The best part about this is ASRock said it intends to plop the UCC chip onto entry-level motherboards too. This tactic of putting high-end features onto lower-priced parts has helped ASRock build a following, and something like this could go a long way in upping the company’s geek cred.
Image Credit: Fudzilla Intel has S-models for several Core 2 processors that offer lower power consumption and comparable performance. However, the first S-model in the Core i5 family is actually slower than its regular counterpart—and it’s even less efficient, overall! |
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Intel is preemptively launching the first hexa-core desktop CPU weeks ahead of actual availability. But how does this 32nm monster perform when we take a deeper look into performance per watt? After yesterday’s preview, today we look closer at efficiency.
Think your Athlon or Phenom processor is already tuned to deliver the best balance between performance and power consumption? Think again. We show you how to tweak Cool’n'Quiet for more aggressive power savings at standard speeds using several AMD CPUs.
