Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

An Intel experiment in cooling data centers has discovered that cooling servers with plain outside air is almost as effective as air conditioners. There was only a tiny increase in server failure. [Intel is a sponsor of SVW]

This could save data centers millions of dollars in power costs and allow expansion. Currently, many data centers have limited expansion options because they are limited by how much electric power they have available.

Here are the details from ZDNet:

. . . The experiment was run for 10 months, between October 2007 and August 2008. Server units with over 900 blades, used for production design, were split into two compartments. One of the compartments was air cooled, with temperatures ranging from 18 to 32°C. The other compartment was cooled using air conditioning, and used as a control.

. . . Intel used a normal air filter that took larger particles out of the air but not fine dust. While the 32 servers and racks became coated in dust, and humidity was monitored but not controlled, the failure rate was 4.46 percent, compared with a 3.83 percent failure rate in Intel's main datacenter over the same period.

. . . Intel estimated an annual cost reduction of approximately $143,000 (£79,000) for a small, 500kW datacenter, based on electricity costs of eight cents per kWh. In a larger 10MW datacenter, the estimated annual cost reduction was $2.87 million.

Foremski's Take: This is a big power saving. This will enable expansion in some data centers but it could also put off the installation of more power efficient hardware based on Intel's latest power-saving chip sets, and also power saving hard drive systems from 3PAR and others. Power savings have been a key incentive for many data centers to rip out and replace their older power hungry gear.

Since environments such as high humidity are less of a problem maybe we'll see server farms combined with greenhouses :-) Cloud computing plus vine-ripened tomatoes.

Please see:

Intel Community: Free Cooling for Data Centers - video and whitepaper

http://wikis.sun.com/display/freeaircooling/Free+Air+Cooling+Proof+of+Concept

I spent much of the day at the Intel Developer Forum Wednesday at the Moscone in San Francisco (Intel is an SVW sponsor). It was great to bump into old UK buddies such as Joe Fay, news editor at The Register, and Mike Magee, the UK's most entrepreneurial journalist, and many others, including a bunch of my favorite ex-Podtech people.

Here is a short peek into my day at IDF.

A short description:

Here is part of my day at Intel Developer Forum. You get to see some of the Intel Insiders in action; plus you meet the founder of XIHA Life, a multi-lingual social network site from Finland, and a lady from Intel, demos TV widgets, developed by Intel and Yahoo.

Included: cameo's from well known local bloggers and personalities, such as Cathy Brooks, JD Lasica, Eddie Codel, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Heuer, Ken Kaplan, Christine Ngo and other familiar faces...

Jeremiah Owyang

Cathy Brooks

Eddie Codel

JD Lasica

Ken E Kaplan

Chris Heuer

Christine Ngo

Please see: UK's Pioneering Publisher Mike Magee Launches Indian-based IT Publication

Intel (An SVW sponsor) today announced it would give out four awards of $100,000 each for innovative ideas in education, healthcare, economic development and the environment in 2009.

The announcement was made by Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Dean Takahashi from Venturebeat reports:

I can remember years when Barrett, as CEO, came out on stage to pound home the message that Intel’s processors were better than those from Advanced Micro Devices and we would all one day be using computers with Itanium chips. Now that there are a billion Internet users in the world, Barrett is taking his foot off the pedal on that hard sell on Intel. It tells you, perhaps, how unconcerned Intel is about competition now that it has reasserted its dominance over AMD and what Barrett really cares about.

Intel Developer Forum: Chairman Craig Barrett takes us on a world tech tour » VentureBeat

I'll be at IDF on Wednesday and Thursday.

Here is some additional info on todays IDF from Annie Rodkins:

The conference unofficially started today with a press briefing put together by Intel’s Corporate Technology Group – the guys and gals who run R&D here at Intel. Here, researchers spoke about their vision of the future as Connected Visual Computing; you can catch up with Intel Fellow Jim Held at http://tinyurl.com/58hnlc or see some pretty amazing slides and highlights athttp://tinyurl.com/5e9cc2.

Rehearsals took place for two talks that will be livecast on Tuesday: “Using Information Technology to Meet 21st Century Challenges & Opportunities” and “Nehalem: Screaming Performance, Efficient Power.” For links to livecasts see http://tinyurl.com/5mtsek.

Lastly, the Upload Lounge is all set and ready to host bloggers and podcasters the world over:http://tinyurl.com/5j6mcm. Tomorrow at the Lounge you will be able to meet some guests from Craig Barrett’s opening keynote (we can’t say who), astronaut Story Musgrave and Intel Sr. Fellow Gene Meieran, and others.

Intel [a SVW sponsor] has responded to Advanced Micro Devices acquisition of graphics chip giant ATI Technologies. At the coming SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference Intel is revealing details of its "Larrabee" visual architecture, which describes its graphics technology.

Here is Intel's account of what it will discuss at the show:

Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications.

The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based on an array of many processors.

There is a lot of detailed info here Monday morning: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1360612.1360617

Foremski's Take:

AMD's acquisition of graphics chip leader ATI Technologies forced Intel to come up with a response. In the mean time, the acquisition has been troublesome for AMD. The valuation of the deal had to be drastically reset leading to a massive $1.6 billion write off for AMD.

Also, the management time required to integrate ATI has not helped AMD capitalize on its lead in low-power server microprocessors.

Intel [INTC] hasn't had to deal with such a distraction [think GOOG versus YHOO if MSFT had succeeded...] it has had time to craft its response, which is Larrabee.

An additional advantage for Intel is that it can include Larrabee in its chip sets as an easily integrated technology from scratch. AMD has to work to integrate ATI's architecture with its process technology.

Also, AMD has to juggle its production through its own chip fabs versus fabless production models. One of the advantages of the ATI acquisition is that AMD can learn from ATI how to better use foundries to improve its history of production problems.

However, AMD's German based chip fabs make it difficult for the company to switch to foundries because of the commitments it made in return for tax and other government support. Chip fabs, unless they are run at 95 percent plus capacity are a quick way to lose lots of money. As the chip fabs get larger, there are fewer chip companies that have the volumes required to keep chip fab production lines full.

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Jon Peddie, a leading analyst on graphics talks about Larrabee:

Why not Larrabee? :: JPR Staff blogs

When is a GPU not a GPU?

One final note. GPUs. Larrabee is not a GPU in the sense an ATI, Nvidia, or S3 chip is a GPU. It is gang of X86 cores that can do graphics processing, so it is a GCPU – graphics capable processing unit, as are ATI, Nvidia, and S3’s chips.

(Intel is a sponsor of SVW)

Intel announced plans for a new business group manufacturing system-on-a-chip (SOC) semiconductors. SOCs are souped-up microprocessors that are tuned for specific types of devices, such as mobile internet devices, smart phones, or medical devices.

Intel's SOC chips combine a microprocessor with memory, graphics, and embedded software plus specialized chip and software functions.

SOCs can shrink almost an entire board of chips into just one or two chips. This makes digital products more reliable and less expensive to make.

Intel predicts that within a few years there will likely be billions of digital devices connected to the Internet. Most of these billions of devices won't be PCs but will include virtually any industrial, office, or home electronics device that can benefit from some processing and Internet connection--which is most electronic products. Intel wants its PC architecture to move into many different devices helped by the massive number of Intel architecture software developers.

To target non-PC products Intel is making SOCs that are specially designed for a specific product category.

Intel has several advantages against SOC rivals:

- It owns advanced fabs in which its design software is already tightly integrated into the complex process technologies used to make chips. It takes several hundred processes to make a chip and each machine has to be finely tuned to the design--minute differences can lead to low yields and other problems.

- Most SOC rivals rely on third party chip foundries to make their chips and sometimes it can take several months to fine tune a production run.

- Intel's microprocessor design is difficult to clone.

- Intel has unique chip functions that it can easily combine on its process technology.

Wednesday it announced 8 SOC chips and said it would have 15 SOCs in 2009.

Foremski's Take:

I asked Intel if it would make an SOC only for one customer. I was told that the goal is to create a broad family that would be available to any buyer.

However, Intel already makes specialist products for just one customer. It makes the motherboard for Apple's MacBook Air. It was given just a year to design the board, which gives the MacBook Air its super slim shape and lightness. It was a challenging project but Intel managed to do it--and it did it for just one customer. Why not do the same with SOCs?

One way for Apple to reduce its future costs of manufacture is to shrink as much of a notebook computer's motherboard onto SOC chips, making it a natural customer for Intel's SOC group.

If that were to happen, would Apple seek to enhance the uniqueness of its notebooks and hardwire special functions into the chip that would provide its products with special qualities--but also guard against clones?

Could others follow? Would it make sense for Dell notebooks to have different sets of chip based features from Lenovo or other notebooks?

Closer to customers . . . SOCs can also tie customers more closely to Intel because switching to rival Advanced Micro Devices' microprocessors would be more difficult due to the specialist nature of the chips.

Fragmenting the PC platform? There will be at least 15 different SOC platforms next year with different sets of capabilities--that means software won't be easily portable between the many Intel PC architecture platforms.

The SOCs will represent fragments of a 26 year old PC platform standard. It'll be interesting to see how those fragments will grow into billions of connected devices. Intel's latest business launch seeks to make a big impact on the future of tech.

WSJ: Intel Brings Out Multifunction Chips

News.com: Intel storage chips point to SoC future

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[Intel is a sponsor of SVW]

Intel today announced the Centrino 2 chip set which is its most powerful mobile processor. The Centrino, launched in 2003 was incredibly successful for Intel, its most profitable product. The world's largest chipmaker hopes to repeat that success with the Centrino 2.0.

Here is a short video of Intel's presentation boiling down the key advantages of the Centrino 2 in consumer and in enterprise uses.

The best part of this video is when Intel talks about the technology trends it is seeing. Especially the fact that social networks now represent an incredible 25 % of Internet bandwidth.

Something has changed deeply - we're not in Kansas anymore.

YouTube - Centrino 2 - And Social Media....

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On a recent visit to Intel as part of the Intel Insider group, Sean Maloney, Intel's CMO, talked about online marketing.

In this clip Mr Maloney talks about sometimes feeling that he is in a "fog" in terms of online marketing because of the fragmented nature of the online world. This is a good example of the challenges facing nearly all Chief Marketing Officers, a job that has become one of the most challenging in any organization.

[Please see: Chief Marketing Officer - Toughest Job Around . . .]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0jch0hlnwM

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Tuesday I was over at Intel as part of an Intel Insider group meeting. Sean Maloney, number 2 executive at the world's largest chipmaker discussed the reasons why Intel has moved nearly all of its advertising away from TV. As Chris Heuer points out in the comments, Intel has been moving towards a nearly complete online spend over the past year.

And it is moving a lot of money. The problem, however, is where to spend it.

In this video Mr Maloney also talks about Intel's first lessons with online media.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5g9RBGm7j8

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[Intel is a sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher.]

I'm a member of a small group of advisors to Intel to provide consulting and feedback on corporate communications programs being developed by the world's largest chip maker.

Tuesday marked the first meeting of the "Intel Insider" group. I know many of the people involved in the creation of the group and also many of those chosen to take part. And I like the calculated risks that Intel is taking by involving some of the top names in the blogosphere and not imposing any restrictions on what we write about. There is some compensation provided for our time. It is mostly in the form of early access to news and also we get to keep some consumer products that contain Intel chips. There is no requirement to write anything about Intel, or the products.

It's an interesting project and I'm always interested in new ventures where we don't yet know what the answers are, where we don't yet know what are the best practices. And as Intel celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, it is a bold step for what has traditionally been a conservative company.

The Intel Insider program seeks to discover some of the best practices in corporate social/new media and in doing so, the results can be shared broadly. There is no restriction on the Intel Insiders sharing the results of the program with others.

What I like about the Intel Insider program is that it's innovative but it's not about technology -- even though Intel's business is all about innovation in technology.

Sean Maloney . . .

Tuesday we got to spend some time with Sean Maloney, Intel's number 2 executive next to CEO Paul Otellini. I've followed Mr Maloney's career for many years, he always gets the most interesting and also some of the toughest jobs at Intel.

Mr Maloney spoke about Intel's decision to pull nearly all of its TV broadcast spend and to go almost completely online. He said it was because Intel could not be sure it was reaching the right people through TV. There will still be some spending on newspaper ads but not much.

Moving online however, is a problem. He said that the fragmentation of the online media and the differences in how that plays out in various countries has created a "fog." It is difficult to know where to spend online and then how best to measure the effectiveness of that spend.

(I will be posting a short video of Mr Maloney discussing this topic as soon as YouTube has processed the material.)

It was very interesting discussing the latest online trends with all the other Intel Insiders, including some of Intel's top communications and marketing people. I'll be sharing some of these discussions in additional posts this week and over the coming months.

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Intel launched its Atom brand to describe its latest microprocessor architecture designed to be used in small computer devices such as pocket PCs and ultra-light notebooks like the Asus EEE.

It's the smallest microprocessor Intel makes with the smallest transistors - 47 million. With its huge 300mm chip fabs, Intel is going to be able to produce a massive number of these chips.

The Intel Atom processor is based on an entirely new microarchitecture designed specifically for small devices and low power, while maintaining the Intel® Core™ 2 Duo instruction set compatibility consumers are accustomed to when using a standard PC and the Internet.

The design also includes support for multiple threads for better performance and increased system responsiveness. All of this on a chip that measures less than 25 mm², making it Intel’s smallest and lowest power processor yet.* Up to 11 Intel Atom processor die -- the tiny slivers of silicon packed with 47 million transistors each -- would fit in an area the size of an American penny.

Intel expects the Atom chips to also be used to make inexpensive notebooks and desktops which it has dubbed "netbooks" and "nettops." These could find markets in developing countries.

The first devices using the Atom microprocessor chips will be out later this year.

Here is a quick video introducing Atom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ2sZk-0UKE

According to Intel, [Nick] Negroponte asked the chipmaker to stop selling its Classmate PC while it was part of the OLPC [one laptop per child], which is currently shipping its XO laptop based on a chip from AMD. The Classmate PC was one of the sources of friction between Negroponte and Intel before they joined forces in July. Negroponte went on 60 Minutes in May and accused Intel of dumping Classmate PCs below cost in order to keep OLPCs out of the hands of needy children.

From CNET: Intel leaves the OLPC after dispute - By Tom Krazit

Foremski's Take: MIT's Mr Negroponte is making a classic mistake of identifying with the hardware instead of with the noble concept of bridging the global digital divide and bringing computing to students in the developing world. If he left it to Intel and the others to figure out the hardware and he concentrated on the evangelizing, which is his strength, the project would progress much faster.

Intel "dumping" laptops is a good thing, it provides low cost laptops. Using Intel and Asus, and others to design and manufacture the motherboards, etc, is a good thing. Create a common set of specs for a OLPC and let the massive PC industry compete and produce the laptops.

You'll get a much better price and you will have several giants helping with the promotion and distribution. Otherwise you have to deal with the difficulty of design, manufacture, and distribution which require economies of scale to be marginally profitable and sustainable.

(Intel is one of the sponsors of Silicon Valley Watcher.)

Technorati Tags: OLPC

Intel is challenging modders (hobbyists who alter the standard PC) to show off their creative skills in building Intel processor-based mods for an online competition. Intel delivers the unrivaled performance and energy efficient processors that modders can then build just about anything from, including an 18-wheeler Mac truck. Get a glimpse at these creations and vote on your favorite one by visiting the Intel Modding Competition Group on Channel Intel. Check out the contest

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/chipshots/chipshots.htm?cid=rss-90004-c1-192263

Now that you can stick a high performance PC in just about anything, I wonder what there is out there that you can't stick a high performance PC into? It would be interesting to see a category of modds that would be unbelievable. Such as a plate of Jello?! You'd certainly need a low-power chip for that one...

Or take advantage of the power dissipation and create a PC that also toasts Pop-Tarts...!

Technorati Tags: puppy

The Intel Developer Forum happens this week in San Francisco. Some of the conference will be livecast through UStream. (Intel is a sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher.)

My panel is on Tuesday at 3pm:

Social Media: Friend or Foe of the IT Org:

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2007/09/social_media_friend_or_foe_at.html

Gordon Moore on Stage with NPR's Moira Gunn
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2007/09/moores_law_speaks_live_to_you.html

And a discussion on Wednesday (9/19 at 1:30 p.m. PT) lead by Intel's Top Minds, a group of Intel Fellows talking about the future of computing.

Technorati Tags: IDF, Gordon Moore

Over on the Intel blog (http://blogs.intel.com/views/ ):

Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president and Co-General Manager of the Server Products Group at Intel announced information about Intel’s new MP server platform Codenamed ‘Caneland’.

* Caneland is Intel’s new Xeon MP platform. It is composed of the ‘Clarksboro’ chipset and the ‘Tigerton’ processor.

* The earnings call last week saw double-digit growth in servers, both units and revenue. Both year-year and quarter on quarter.

* Quad-core has already ramped with over 1 Million shipped in volume servers

* The Caneland platform is tracking extremely well towards launch his quarter.

The main points of new information that Kirk disclosed in the 6 min video:

[Intel is a sponsor of SVW}

On Wednesday I went to Intel's launch of its latest Centrino chipset for notebooks. Everything, of course, is a lot faster, but what caught my eye was a new technology embedded in the chips which, although aimed squarely at business users, would be a god-send for consumers.

Take a look:

Intel® vPro™ processor technology. IT departments will be able to reliably manage both desktops and notebooks and deal with what plagues them most – security threats, cost of ownership, resource allocation, and asset management – and do so wirelessly.

One of the key innovations designed in Intel Centrino Pro – Intel® Active Management Technology – provides business-class notebook PCs with wireless PC management, protection and remote repair work thereby increasing productivity, IT savings and uptime.

For example, if a virus or other type of malware gets into the notebook, the Intel technology will shut it off from the network, and the IT department is notified, downloads software to get rid of the problem and repair any damaged files. It's all done in a minute or two.

This technique can be used for other things too, installing software across hundreds of clients etc, etc.

At first glance it sounds like many other remote management software applications/utilities that provide similar capabilities, what's new here?

It turns out there is a microcontroller (a separate chip) that creates a wireless back channel to a central location. This back-channel remains unaffected and is used to deliver new software and repairs--even if the notebook is disconnected from its main network and has been completely taken over by hordes of malware!

This Active Management Technology is inside every one of the new Centrino chipsets, but it is only used in business-class notebooks. It allows the notebook vendors to charge corporations a premium. However, it is there in the consumer notebooks too, it is just not turned on.

But it could be turned on with the right software and it could become a platform to deliver repair and maintenance services to millions of consumers! It's potentially a massive business for some future companies. Who will be the first to do this?

Best Buy and its fleet of Geek Squads running out to people's homes to fix their machines might soon become a thing of the past...

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Multitude Of Innovations Boost New Intel–Based Laptops›
NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 9, 2007 – Faster processors and chipsets. Great-looking video and graphics. Stronger and faster wireless signals. Better security and manageability. Designed for energy efficiency to enable great battery life.

Intel's PR agency, Burson-Marsteller says that there are some misconceptions in the mainstream media about Intel's new Quad-Core microprocessor. (Intel is a sponsor of SVW).

Samantha Saephan from Burson-Marsteller writes:

Since the launch of the Intel® Quad-Core Xeon® processor and the Intel Core™ 2 Extreme quad-core in November 2006, and the more recent Intel Core 2 Quad processor; research has suggested that there remain some misguided perceptions about performance, price and compatibility. So, in the spirit of the Final Four, and in honor of the 4^th of April, we’re hoping to address what are the four biggest misperceptions about Intel Quad-Core processors.

Misperception #1:

Why pay more for Quad-Core when I don’t yet need that level of performance?

At Intel, you’re getting better performance and better energy efficiency for the same price – Quad-Core offers up to 80%* more performance for the same price as Intel’s dual-core chips. These products deliver immense speed and responsiveness for general purpose servers and workstations and for digital media creation, high-end gaming and other market segments that crave absolute performance. Software developers are also increasingly moving toward per socket licenses which will lower software costs making now the ideal time to skip Dual-Core and upgrade straight to Quad-Core. (* - For detailed system information and performance claim, please visit http://www.intel.com/performance/desktop/extreme/3d_ray_tracing.htm).

Misperception #2:

My systems are already equipped with Dual-Core – now I have to take the time and effort to install Quad-Core?

Advanced technology adoption is not a problem. Quad-Core is easy to install, with drop-in compatibility with Intel’s previous Dual-Core platform. This also makes it easier on data center managers by streamlining the path to server consolidation. In fact, business data centers can achieve significant cost savings/server thanks to the optimal utilization, lower power consumption, and lower software costs of Quad-Core systems.

Misperception #3:

Before using Quad-Core I’d rather wait until software applications can actually take advantage of the performance. Besides, when it comes to some applications, Quad-Core isn’t much better than Dual-Core.

Server software has been threaded for years. But whether it's encoding, rendering, editing, or streaming - or running a variety of applications at once, an innovative Intel processor with four processing cores will deliver more performance and responsiveness. Check out what the press have to say about Quad-Core gaming on Intel processors: Click here http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiwxMCwsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=  and here http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2107337,00.asp

Also check out Quad-Core gaming at the 2007 Game Developers Conference and World Series of Video Games:

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2505/gaming-with-intel-quad-core-processors

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1924/intel-gives-gamers-max-power-at-ces

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1863/ces-2007-intels-world-series-of-gaming

Misperception #4:

Intel’s Quad-Core is ugly, and far from elegant  

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When performance is as great as it is today, customers don’t care about the intricacies of how the cores are connected inside the CPU package. Intel’s solution allowed a much faster time to market and Intel will have shipped more than a million of them before any other x86 competitor has shipped a sizeable volume. Using Intel’s industry-leading 65nm manufacturing technology also allows for smaller die size, better yields and lower cost. This also means better supply. So, it is a careful choice of performance, schedule and cost. Intel is already demonstrating 45nm processors which will further its lead in processor performance, innovation and nanotechnology.

For more information, visit: http://www.intel.com/quad-core/ and http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1139/idf-preview-quad-core-microprocessors.

Intel's new processor families are on track to deliver faster processors without consuming more power. The Penryn family will be released this year and the Nehalam family is due next year, The New York Times reports.

The chips will have wires as thin as 45 nanometers, a scale at which 2,000 transistors will fit in the width of a human hair. The resulting chips will have as many as 820 million transistors, making it possible for Intel’s designers to add parallel computing, energy management and graphics to the computing engines that are the mainstay of its business.

This news puts Intel - which has been playing catch-up on energy efficiency and parallel computing - ahead of release schedules for AMD and IBM, which have said they'll release 45-nanometer chips in mid-2008.

AMD's Barcelona is due out in late 2007, based on 65-nanometer technology with four cores. On Wednesday, AMD said Intel won't catch up with them until Nehama comes out in '08.

Pat Gelsinger described Intel’s approach as a “tick-tock” strategy in which it would make incremental changes with the Penryn processors and then more sweeping design changes with the Nehalam chips. The Nehalam chips will have as many as eight or more processing cores, as well as the potential for built-in graphics and memory control processing and networking.

Intel is a SVW sponsor.

Intel (an SVW sponsor) has encouraged PC makers to go beyond the beige box for many years. Here is Intel's latest challenge to PC makers, and this time Intel is seeking help from PC users to vote and comment on a variety of PC designs.

You can win $100 in a random drawing by taking part in Intel® Core™ Processor Challenge PC Design People's Choice Awards.

Intel will open a $2.5 billion wafer fabrication plant in China, the first major production facility there, according to the New York Times.

Labeled Fab 68, the new plant will join just seven other plants in the world capable of producing Intel 300mm wafers when it opens in 2010. But Fab 68 will produce only chipsets. Microprocessors themselves will not be produced in China. That's a distinction that won US government approval for the plant.

The move is a huge win for China, which is trying to become a high-tech center.

“The Intel plant is very symbolic,” said Li Ke, a senior analyst at the Semiconductor Industry Research Center in Beijing, a government body. “It is inspiring and will help to expand the production scale of the industry.”

Private industry has been relucant to move to China because of weak protection for intellectual property and the federal government is very concerned about China getting a hold of private sector technology that it can use for military operations. But by the time Intel opens its facility in the northeastern city of Dalian, the company will have opened production lines of at least two generations of more advanced equipment, Intel officials said.

While other companies have assembly facilities in China, Intel stands alone in the size of the investment and the nature of the operation. It's just Intel's third 300mm wafer facility outside the US. The others are in Ireland and Israel.

The judge in the Intel-AMD lawsuit ordered both sides to work with a mediator to figure out how serious Intel's loss of email is, InfoWeek reports.

Intel admitted recently that it had deleted some of the emails AMD had requested in discovery in the case.

The judge gave Intel 30 days to determine whether any of the lost email was relevant to AMD's suit and how important they are. After that, AMD will have two weeks to respond and Intel will have 10 days to answer AMD's response. All of this to be done under the eye of a mediator, who will report to the judge. Intel could face sanctions for the destruction of the email.

Intel in court filings on Monday acknowledged that for three and a half months after AMD filed its suit on June 27, 2005, a small number of employees whose e-mails were considered potential evidence failed to move all messages to their hard drives, which means they would have been purged automatically from Intel's system. In addition, "a few" employees believed erroneously that Intel's IT group was automatically saving their e-mails.

The judge considers the deletion unintentional but AMD is fuming.

"Given the obvious implications to the administration of justice, it is exactly right that Intel must now prepare a full accounting, fashion an effective remedy, and be accountable for the loss of evidence," Thomas M. McCoy, chief administrative officer and executive VP of legal affairs for AMD, said in an e-mailed statement.

If the judge rules against Intel on this discovery issue, Intel could be fined millions of dollars, or the jury could be told to presume the emails were damaging to Intel.

Intel's already delivered 17 million pages of potential evidence and will deliver 30 million more before the trial resumes in May.

Well it would be handy to AMD's lawsuit alleging anticompetitive behavior against Intel, but the chip giant just can't seem to find some of the emails AMD asked to see, the Mercury News reports.

Intel told U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan that it had some "document retention lapses" in the discovery process.

Intel said it has been communicating its problems with AMD and that it is doing everything it can to piece together e-mails that were inadvertently deleted by employees. It said that certain employees failed to move e-mails from their sent boxes to their hard drives, as the company asked them to do, and that they were purged automatically by Intel's e-mail system.

AMD's response? In typical fashion, Intel's archrival says the "lapses" were hardly inadvertant. The Mercury reports AMD wrote in a court filing:

``Intel executives at the highest level failed to receive or to heed instructions essential for the preservation of their records, and Intel and its counsel failed to institute and police a reliable backup system as a fail-safe against human error.''

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "We did not intentionally destroy anything. We are attempting to recover everything. We are leaving no stone unturned." He said Intel is spending ``millions'' on looking for e-mails, reconstructing e-mail traffic and creating a new backup system.

Intel said that in July 2005, it sent a notice to hundreds of employees who, based on the complaint, were the most likely to possess relevant documents. It asked those employees to save their sent e-mails and other documents to their hard drives.

But some employees did not comply with all the requests, and some terminated employees' documents may also not have been saved. Mulloy said that from December through last week, Intel has supplied more than 17 million documents to AMD as part of the discovery process.

If the court finds Intel's failure to produce the emails unjustified, it may impose sanctions. In an extreme case, the court could dismiss the case against the party who refuses to disclose. It's more likely the court could impose financial penalties and block Intel from making certain arguments in the trial.

[Intel is an SVW sponsor.]

[UPDATE: Please also see: IBM says Intel not alone in solving 45nm chip roadblock]

People mistake Intel for being a microprocessor manufacturer. That's just an application of what it does best: it knows how to make the world's most advanced chips in massive quantities.

Late last week Intel briefed reporters and analysts on what is likely the most significant breakthrough in chip making since the late 1960s.

Intel said it had discovered materials that would enable it to make the world's tiniest chips in high volumes--and place it years ahead of competitors seeking to do the same.

With the its new materials, Intel is able to make chips with geometries of 45 nanometers, half the size of most leading edge chips at 90nm.

Intel shares a lot of its chip research but it said it will keep these materials secret. If the information leaked out, it would enable competitors to shave years off their R&D efforts and enter lucrative chip markets years earlier.

Quite rightly, Intel is racing to take advantage of this lead. It is building three giant chip fabs which will use its secret process on silicon wafers the size of large dinner plates, 300mm (12 inch) across.

By the end of this year two fabs will be completed and ramping into high volume production, closely followed by a third in Israel, in early 2008--all using this advanced chip making process. This means servers, desktops, and notebooks  will run faster and cooler and will be less expensive.

With more smaller chips being able to be squeezed onto giant silicon wafers Intel will be able to do a combination of several things:

• Existing chip designs will run faster because of shorter distances between transistors.
• Power consumption is reduced because of the smaller size of the chip.
• More transistors can be crammed into the same sized space which means larger memory caches-a performance bottleneck.
• Manufacturing costs are dramatically reduced. It costs about the same to process a silicon wafer in any process. More chips per wafer means more product for the same cost. Intel can choose to lower prices or pocket the productivity increase. (It always lowers prices but it can decide the rate.)

Intel makes microprocessors because they are the most profitable high volume application of its core ability: to make chips cheaper, faster, smaller, and in vast quantities.

All of the above means that rival Advanced Micro Devices is in for a tough time. It won market shares against Intel in server markets because it spotted a trend in low power consuming microprocessors. That was great because it brought Intel into that market and now server buyers have a choice of two very good server chip families.

Mind t