Products using the chips won't arrive for a year, at least, but we can assume that Apple wouldn't spend $278 million without some plans to use 'em soon as it made sense, and I'm sure Intel and ARM aren't stoked. The negotiations, which finished recently, took place in The Steve's home. Owning its own chip design is an interesting move. While the iPhone's had a lot of off the shelf componentry, it makes sense that working on its own internal hardware could yield better devices. Or a PowerPC repeat..which is the architecture I believe that the above processor is built on.

More research on that chip shows how it achieves such power efficiency. From Ars: "For instance, the chip sports over 25,000 clock gates so that clock pulses to different regions of the processor can be shut off dynamically to save power...All of the PA6T's major on-die components have their own separate clock and voltage domains, so that the L1, L2, DRAM controller, I/O subsystem, and each of the two cores can all be placed in different low-power states independently of one another."

Of course, the chips in portable such as an iPhone and iPod (as Forbes speculates) wouldn't be running so fast as the chip above. While it's unlikely they'd use that dual core 64 chip in Macs, given the Intel switch was so recent, it's my guess that P.A. Semi has a unannounced mobile chip that Jobs lusts after. Stands to reason, although Owen at Valleywag believes that the lack of economic scale for Semi makes it more likely that the buy is for IP to be implemented by others, as a bargaining chip. Regardless of tactics, the unnamed chip would have to be very efficient to best other offerings.

Intel's mobile platform, Atom, by comparison, can do 0.8 watts of usage at 800MHz, and VIA has a 0.1 watt solution that runs at 500MHz. ARM, designer of the current iPhone chip, is boasting that they can do a 0.25 watt A9 chip with multicores at 1GHz.

Historically, P.A. Semi was trying to be the chip provider for Macs around the time they chose to go for Intel, and it is reported that Dobberpuhl was furious when they went x86, thinking the Intel talks were just a bargaining chip. Some think that P.A. Semi lost its chance to be a brand name like AMD or Intel, but clearly, being under the brand name of Apple isn't half bad. [Forbes, Ars, Reg, VW]

The platform will scale from two to eight cores, and eventually from "notebooks to servers." That's the scalable part, so you'll see it everywhere. Simultaneous Multi-Threading will let each core run two threads at once, plus it quadruples the memory-bandwidth of the current top-o'-the-line Xeons. It's also got an 8MB level-3 cache, Quickpath interconnects (up to 25.6GB per second), integrated memory controller (AMD what?) and supports up to DDR3-1333 memory, plus a bunch of other hardcore geek stuff, which you can scope out at Intel. [Intel]

The Dunnington is for the server line, as a successor for the Xeon Tigerton, and will be "Intel's first Core 2 Duo processor with three dual-core banks." The Nehalem should be of more interest to most of our readers, as it's the Intel Penryn successor (consumer line), and will have on-die memory controllers for "the first time in 18 years," along with tri-channel DDR3 memory. This means it'll be quite a bit faster than what you're currently running in terms of memory bandwidth. [Daily Tech]

Apparently the date was finalized after Apple pulled out of the National Association of Broadcasters show, which means they might save the Final Cut Pro server announcement (if there is one) for the Feb 26 event as well. Remember, no one can confirm what Apple's announcing until they announce it, but this is what we know so far. [9to5Mac]

The same Singaporean chip manufacturer, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, has been making 65nm chips for two quarters now. This probably means Xbox 360s will go 65nm fairly soon, but will have to wait about 18 months or so to get to the 45nm threshold. Will it actually make a difference? From what we heard, most of the overheating problems came from the GPU, not the CPU, which is what lead to the added cooling in the Elite version recently. [PCAdvisor]

And though we saw and liked plenty of new laptops today, it's the HP HDX which bowled us over with its massive, but not overwhelming, design. Check out the gallery and the review below. – Louis Ramirez

HP HDX Review [Computer Shopper]

So for you guys who made a little wish to your fairy godmother that the Xbox 360 Elite was going to have cooler parts, you may want to wait until fall. And for those of you who already purchased an Elite? We're sorry. – Jason Chen

Xbox 360 GPU to go to 65nm in fall, TSMC to see side benefits, says paper [Digitimes]

On the performance side, this upgraded model does cool "a lot better than the stokc intel cooler", but isn't terribly quiet, and doesn't cool enough for overclocking. Plus, the temperature's only in Celcius and the decibel meter is only theoretical noise level, not an actual noise reading.

In the end we're not sure how practical displaying this info on the actual CPU fan is, but it sure is neat. Hit the jump for a video.

ThermalTake BlueOrb FX [DVHardware]

p.s. Here's a cat on a laptop courtesy Cute Overload – Jason Chen

Zune [Gizmodo]

The bottom line: Congrats on the teraflop chip, Intel, but wake us up when this baby is for sale. The Verdict: Vaporous CPU, solid PR move by Intel.–Brian Lam

Intel's Teraflop Chips [NYTimes and Businessweek]

Topping off the facts is speculation that the main CPU is Marvell's PXA320, a "descendant of the StrongARM processor" which used architecture from ARM. Given the need to maximize battery life in a high performance, multi-function device like the iPhone, both the low-power processor and multiple-core approach make sense. – Matt Buchanan

What's Inside Apple's iPhone? Three ARM Processors [InfoWeek]

What we really like is its low noise levels, just 20dB at its lowest 2000rpm speed, clearly into church mouse territory and almost as quiet as not using a fan at all. We thought our 28dB CPU fan was nice and quiet, but that's as loud as the Ultra gets at its highest speed.

Plus, it looks like a Borg hive, doesn't it? This $130 cooling fan looks cool enough to warrant a place in a PC with a transparent door and lots of lighting. – Charlie White

Ultra's heat-pipes salve your CPU [Slash Gear]

you'll see double digit performance gains on your multimedia apps. (We'll see about that). So what comes after Penryn? Intel's got a completely new microarchitecture called Nehalem. So no matter how you cut it, just buy your new computer now cause it's gonna be outdated either way. – Louis Ramirez

Life with Penryn [Daily Tech]

Well, upgrading the CPU from 90nm to 65nm means the processor will run less hot, and will require less power and cooling. This means less fans, less noise, and less power consumption from the console as a whole.

Should you wait until '07 to buy your 360? Only if you're really picky about how much noise the 360 makes in comparison to the PS3 or the Wii. Most of the noise in the earlier units was due to the DVD drive, which was lessened when Microsoft switched manufacturers on those as well. Otherwise feel free to buy a 360 now. It won't be that huge a difference. – Jason Chen

65nm Xbox 360 CPUs delayed until mid-2007 [Digitimes]

Toshiba: We'll Beat Sony to the Living Room [PC World]

Now he's taken ray-tracing to the next level using Quake 4. Up until now, the problem with incorporating ray-tracing into real-time gaming has been that typical processors were not fast enough to process all of this data. Pohl says parallel processing on the latest multicore processors along with advanced graphics chips will further accelerate these graphics, bringing us closer to the day when real-time ray-traced games are commonplace. More pics and an ass-kicking movie download:

You might want to check out this movie, too. Amazing stuff!

If these pictures are any indication, we're stoked. Couldn't the mighty Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 handle this kind of number-crunching? – Charlie White

Ray Tracing and Gaming - Quake 4: Ray Traced Project [PC Perspective, via The Inquirer]

AMD [Press Release]

Thanks to their respective expertise, ATI and AMD can come together and make a CPU that's capable of handling many GPU tasks. Instead of offloading graphical functions to the card, which then has to be piped back to the CPU for additional computation, many things can be done "in house", saving time and making your apps faster. These Fusion CPU/GPUs aren't going to be available until late 2008/early 2009, so whatever you purchase now should be safe from obsolescence until then. – Jason Chen

Press Release [AMD via Randomly Accessed]

Why did you cancel my order I still expect the chip at the price you quoted

The company responded:

Hi Brian,

We received a notification from AMD this week stating this processor has been discontinued. We will not be receiving it anymore and all backorders for this model have been cancelled. I apologize for the inconvenience and please let me know if you have any question.

Have any other readers ordered an X2 5000 recently? The chip supposedly just came out recently, so it's strange that AMD would cancel it so soon. Or is Crecente just getting the shaft? – Jason Chen

Can anyone do better? Maybe some sysadmin from Google/Yahoo? Let's see what you guys got!–Brian Lam

[Previously: Mad Hatter's Quad Core 2 Duo Server Goes Sixteen Ways]

There's a good reason why you'd still want these PCI express accelerators in your rig. Basically, you're either broke, or your box is too small to fit the $775 top-of-the-line, double-chipped, double-whopper sized, 1GB Nvidia 7950 GX2 card we spoke about a month or two ago.

Here's the geek-speak:
The 7900 is the mainstream part, that will sell for $250, feature 256MB of RAM running at 1320 MHz, a 256-bit memory interface, and run at 450MHz. (Pictured)

The high-ish end 7950 GT will go for around $350, and has a 550Mhz chip, 512MB of RAM dashing at a fair clip of 1400MHz through a 256-bit interface.

No word yet on how comparably fast they are to each other, the top of the line 7950 GX2, or ATI's gaming parts. I'm sure the reviews will hit shortly though. Might be worth waiting to see how they run before picking one up.–Brian Lam

New NVIDIA GeForce 7 Series GPUs Deliver Incredible Value to PC Gamers [Nvidia]

A Gizmodo reader just sent this screen shot in of task manager running on a server he built for work. It runs 4 processors, that have 2 cores each, with each of those cores hyperthreaded. So...That shows up in Windows as 16 procs. I'll stand back and let the man speak for himself:

Dell PE6800, Quad Processor Dual Core w/Hyperthreading running Win2003-R2 Enterprise. Windows sees all that processor goodness as 16 separate processors. The onboard 26GB of RAM and 3TB of local storage round out this sweet server. Price ? $25k-ish. It's going to be a kickass SQL server machine.

We asked him to send us a picture of it loaded. Since it was a preproduction server, he had to run some apps. Namely, "defrag, scandisk /f, virus scan on all fixed disks, and finally a five minute CPU stress/reliability test" Click to the jump to see how the monster fared.

Swimmingly, I'd say!

What this means for the future is still unknown, but talking heads (or, rather, typing fingers) are already pretending to know just what's going to happen. Apparently, the new entity will be looking at ways to try to put a GPU and a CPU on the same dye, which is pretty much sensational. Other analysts now predict that Intel will try to make a move for nVidia, just to keep up. See, with all this healthy competition, we'll just end up with one, ultra-powerful corporation. – Nicholas Deleon

In marriage of 'CPUs and GPUs,' ATI snapped-up by AMD. Is NVidia next? [ZDNet.com]

The results also show a significant advantage for Intel over AMD by pretty much every metric that counts to power users: price, performance, power consumption, and all the combinations of those three.

We'll spare you the extreme details that you need a degree in EE to understand—we have one and we still don't—but suffice it to say that the Core 2's performance on everything was excellent. The $316 Core 2 Duo E6600 is a great deal for the power it's got, and if you're after the most amount of power, there's the Core 2 Extreme X6800 at $999.

If you're into the nitty gritty like charts and performance comparisons, check out the links below. – Jason Chen

Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors
Conroe at last [Tech Report via Ars Technica]

Intel releases new Pentium Extreme Edition 955 CPU [Ars Technica]