The Intel blue men have been busy. At a recent press event in Beijing, Intel executives (those little blue men you see on the Intel adverts) announced over 20 new products. We've managed to secure some footage from the event - although we're are not quite sure what Gabe Newell is doing there?

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Under the backdrop of Intel's leadership in 45nm Hi-k metal gate silicon technology and how it will ignite new innovation and growth opportunities, Intel executives at the Intel Developer Forum disclosed new performance details for its next-generation "Penryn" processor family. The company also unveiled two product roadmaps for Intel architecture (IA)-based System on Chip (SOC) consumer electronic (CE) devices and business uses.

"Welcome to the era of multicore, an era in which all of our computing capabilities will multiply our own personal capabilities," said Justin R. Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer. "This Beijing developer forum will show how our multiple innovations go hand in hand with evolutions in social networking, PC and TV entertainment, online commerce and other growing demands on the Internet. Today, Intel is delivering a breadth of multicore processors worldwide and a product roadmap providing the incredible performance boost and energy efficiency needed to put the consumer more in control of the information age."

When Intel released it's Core 2 architecture last summer, there was a product missing from the list: single core solutions.

As they moved on, there was a change of plans, and the Core 2 Solo mutated into the Pentium E1000 and Celeron families. Finally, only the latter remains single core, while the Pentium E2000 will be dual core (with even less cache than Allendale).

If you don't care about multithreaded performance, the Celeron 420 at 1.6 Ghz (with 512 Kb of L2 and a FSB of 800 Mhz) could be what you were waiting for. They don't overclock as well as their big brothers, but at such low prices (down to 40€) you get a much better CPU than what the blue boys have been offering under the Celeron name for the last six or seven years.

Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms.

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We have been hearing all kinds of news about AMD's new quad core solution named Barcelona. These multi core processors are expected to hit the streets in a few months from now. Today, The Inquirer revealed some more information about the Barcelona based Opterons.

There will be four Opterons and they are all chips. They are Quad Core Opteron models 1266, 1268SE, 1270SE and 2258HE and they run at 95W, 120W, 120W and 68W respectively.

Remember that these are native quad cores based on Barcelona, aka K8L to some, so comparing clocks with current Opteron is irrelevant. Note that the models still use the same TDP envelope for the Socket F/AM2 platform.

The four Opterons run at 2.3GHz  2.4GHz, 2.5GHz and 1.9GHz respectively. Cache is 512K * 4 + 2M of L3 for a total of 4MB if you want to count it that way. All the four chips feature 4MB of cache (512x4 + 2MB of L3).

NEWS.com put up an article on their site about the possibility of a leap in the processor GigaHertz war. According to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco, IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz.

The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine chip (shown above), co-developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, has just appeared in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console and can run at 4GHz. The second-generation chip will run at 6GHz, according to the ISSCC program. In addition, the new chip will have a dual power supply that increases memory performance--a major bottleneck in computer designs today.

For servers, IBM has said its Power6 processor, due to ship in servers in 2007, will run between 4GHz and 5GHz. But in the ISSCC program, Big Blue said the chip's clock will tick at a rate "over 5GHz in high-performance applications." In addition, the chip "consumes under 100 watts in power-sensitive applications," a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

Intel isn't standing idly by, though. In September, Intel showed a glimpse of a prototype chip with 80 cores that can perform a trillion mathematical calculations per second. At ISSCC, the company will shed more details on the design, including an updated speed measurement of 1.28 trillion calculations per second.

Intel just announced its plan on its Core 2 Solo single-core processors in Q3 2007. Instead of normal edition, the upcoming Core 2 Solo has ULV (Ultra Low-Voltage) edition only, targeting for the Sub-Note market. Regarding with the rumor concerning Merom based Celeron M is a dual core, Intel has also announced it should be a single core. The rumor is busted.

In the previous plan, since dual core has been put into a common place, there never exists single core Core 2 Solo but Celeron M 500 for entry-level market. However, since single core has a better power consumption than dual core, Intel decided to make Core 2 Solo ULV for the need Sub-Note market.

The new Core 2 Solo ULV includes two models: U2200 (1.2 GHz/1MB L2/533MHz) and U2100 (1.06 GHz/1MB L2/533MHz). They are set to replace U1500 and U1400. These two models have very good power consumption at 5W only, and are support for Intel VT, EIST, XD Bit and 64.

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Intel, set to release 45-nm versions of its current Core 2 lineup toward the end of 2007, is reported to have begun producing its first design samples of its Penryn architecture, which is basically just a 45-nm version of Conroe (a 65-nm architecture).  Two other changes that will be seen in Penryn are a shift from silicon dioxide gate dielectrics to high-K dielectrics, along with a return back to metal gates as opposed to the polysilicon gates used now.

The Penryn core is expected to be available to consumers sometime in the second half of 2007.  Between now and then Intel will be refreshing its Conroe line (hopefully with some more affordable processors and some new ones with higher speeds).  The design samples being made now will be solely used by Intel to verify that things are working as they are supposed to be.