New Sony Products Powered by Intel’s Latest CPUs

new specifications for its products planned to be released this year, including several VAIO notebooks with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
VAIO AR60 series equipped with a 17-inch WUXGA widescreen display having 1080p and X-black LCD screen technology, 50GB Dual Layer Blu-ray Disk drive, 4GB SDRAM memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT graphics processing unit with 512 MB dedicated, will be powered by the advanced Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 processor to deliver outstanding graphics and will feature also the Deep Power Down technology for longer time on the go between charges.

Intel D945GCLF (with integrated Atom 1.6Ghz CPU) BOX

Intel D945GCLF (with integrated Atom 1.6Ghz CPU) BOX

• Intel Atom Silverthorne !
• 1.6Ghz !
• Intel Rapid BIOS Boot
• 4x Rear USB 2.0

Intel's 'Tolapai': for workstations, not tellies

The QuickAssist Accelerator ties the SoC into Intel's QuickAssist Architecture, its framework for application-specific co-processors that connect to the host computer's CPU via the standard frontside bus. This is not so very different from what AMD is proposing with its Torrenza programme, which, in part, is about establishing a framework for application accelerators that connect to the AMD CPU via the HyperTransport bus.

Intel's own take on HyperTransport, QuickPath Interconnect, is due to debut late next year as a key element of its 45nm 'Nehalem' processor architecture, and the use of the 'Quick' prefix - QuickPath, QuickAssist - may not be entirely coincidental.

Incidentally, Intel and IBM are working to deliver the same kind of approach, but using PCI Express add-in cards. That project, codename fans, is called 'Geneseo'.

Canmore, of course, doesn't need any of this, so is likely to come to market much sooner than Tolapai, especially if Intel's keeping the enterprise SoC waiting in the wings until Nehalem-based machines debut at the end of 2008.

Intel News Release

Researchers from Intel Corporation and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have built the world’s first electrically powered Hybrid Silicon Laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.

The researchers were able to combine the light-emitting properties of Indium Phosphide with the light-routing capabilities of silicon into a single hybrid chip. When voltage is applied, light generated in the Indium Phosphide enters the silicon waveguide to create a continuous laser beam that can be used to drive other silicon photonic devices. A laser based on silicon could drive wider use of photonics in computers because the cost can be greatly reduced by using high-volume silicon manufacturing techniques.

“This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical ‘data pipes’ inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. "While still far from becoming a commercial product, we believe dozens, maybe even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could be integrated with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip.”

"Our research program with Intel highlights how industry and academia can work together to advance the state of science and technology," said John Bowers, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara. “By combining UCSB’s expertise with Indium Phosphide and Intel’s silicon photonics expertise, we have demonstrated a novel laser structure based on a bonding method that can be used at the wafer-, partial-wafer or die-level, and could be a solution for large-scale optical integration onto a silicon platform. This marks the beginning of highly integrated silicon photonic chips that can be mass produced at low cost.”

Turbo Memory

Turbo Memory, formerly code-named Robson, is a NAND flash hard disk cache that's designed to reduce boot times, boost performance and conserve battery life.

More performance, and lower power consumption, comes from a flash-based hard disk cache called Turbo Memory. Previously codenamed Robson, this devotes 512MB or 1GB of NAND flash memory to holding system files and other data that the operating system requires at start-up, restoring from sleep or during application switches. Intel claims that with a suitable operating system -- and Windows Vista is designed for this -- Turbo Memory can more than halve application load and wake-from-sleep times, while adding up to twenty minutes to battery life. Like any cache, its performance can vary according to how it's used, the mixture of reads and writes and the nature of the data sets it handles. However, with luck and application, the advantages will increase as programmers learn how to write optimal code and as flash memory gets bigger and better.

Inside Intel's Santa Rosa platform

Processor
The processor has changed the least. It's a 65nm Merom-based Core 2 Duo with a few tweaks, and will be the last of these CPUs before the arrival of 45nm Penryn processors in the next update. The major change between Santa Rosa's processor and its predecessors is the acceleration of the frontside bus (FSB) from 667MHz to 800MHz , together with the ability to slow it down during light loads. This technology, called Super Low Frequency Mode, knocks the bus speed down to 400MHz, the CPU's clock speed to 600MHz and reduces the core voltage. Another tweak, called Enhanced Deeper Sleep, means that the memory controller in the chipset won't wake up the processor to check on cache status if the system knows the cache is empty and the CPU is sufficiently comatose not to be able to change things.

A rather unusual performance boost comes in the form of Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology. The Santa Rosa processor can run one of its two cores at full tilt while the other is in one of a number of sleep states, at which time the total thermal energy is somewhat less than the maximum allowed when both cores are running. Under conditions where only one core is running, Intel can effectively overclock it, taking advantage of the increased thermal headroom left by the other core ticking over. This will give single-threaded tasks a boost, says Intel, without risking overheating.

Centrino Pro is the business version of the Santa Rosa platform

Improvements to the processor, chipset and wireless components of Intel's latest mobile platform should result in a new generation of faster notebooks with longer battery life. Business systems will also get Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) for the first time, while Turbo Memory should reduce the frequency of hard disk accesses, saving power and boosting performance