Gizmodo: pentium

Intel Chips 1971 to 2007, Plus a Timeline of the Transistor's 60 Years

Wilson Rothman — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 EST

As promised, here are stats for 20 different Intel chips from the past 35 years, most of which I included briefly in the Moore's Law video I made earlier, along with bonus factual tidbits I came across while looking over some Intel stuff today. Here you can enjoy it at your own pace (and without the music that some of you found not to your liking), but sadly the pics are not in any particular order, thanks to the way we serve up Flickr galleries. Enjoy it, but remember, it's only Intel's side of the story. Perhaps AMD would be kind enough to shoot over a similar dossier of fun facts. After the chip gallery is a timeline of transistor-related happenings from 1947 up to today.

Intel Chips from 1971 to 2007:

Intel's History of the Transistor:

[Intel]

Fifteen years of the Pentium brand came to...

Wilson Rothman — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:32:00 EDT

Fifteen years of the Pentium brand came to an end today when Intel formally announced the availability of its 3GHz quadcore Xeon X5365 processor, while quietly confirming the phase-out of the last seven Pentium 4 single-core and Pentium D dual-core chips. (Sniff.) [TG Daily]

Pentium-Powered Coffee Warmer Warms Our Coffee and Soul

Gizloco — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:27:38 EST

Put those old Pentium processors to good use by making you a nice warm cup of coffee in the morning. By the looks of it, all you have to do is hook up some wires from a USB cable to the processor itself and wait for the chip to heat up. Throw a cup of coffee on top and you're well on your way to a coffee-powered morning bender.

It's a little known fact that Gizmodo is more or less powered by gadgets and coffee. Combine the two and you've just about made our day. Cheers to gadget recycling! – Nicholas Deleon

Put that old CPU to use [Kustom PC's Forums via Ubergizmo]

Intel Gets More Aggressive, Pentium Prices to Plummet

Charlie White — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:14:44 EDT

Chip giant Intel Corp. took the gloves off yesterday, announcing that it's going to be able to cut prices on its older chips faster because of its implementation of more-efficient manufacturing technologies. As Intel moves into a fourth factory it's built, it will be easier for the company to quickly ramp up to more 65-nanometer Core architecture products by the end of the year. According to Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy,

"We have a more aggressive product and manufacturing ramp, so those older Pentium products will move down faster. It's not like we're cutting prices for the sake of cutting prices."

Although Intel wouldn't say how much of a price cut this would mean, analysts predicted that old-school Pentium chip prices could plummet by somewhere between 8% and 61% by late next month. This will make everything cheaper. – Charlie White

Intel says set to cut prices more quickly [Reuters]

Toshiba HD-DVD Player Dissected

Jason Chen — Wed, 03 May 2006 09:46:25 EDT

Audio/Video nerd Lorin over at geeks with blogs bought himself a fancy new Toshiba HD-DVD player and prompty dismantled it without even plugging it into a TV. Even though we question his priorities, we do salute his DIY-ness in exposing the guts of the machine for all the internet to see.

The most interesting find is that the OS is stored on one 256 meg NAND flash memory device and is based off Red Hat Linux. Lorin also thought it may be possible to plug the disk into a USB-connected hard disk and boot from it, but never got around to doing it himself (slacker).

Also confirmed were the rumors that the unit uses a 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of PC2700 RAM. Looks like Toshiba is rehashing the strategy Microsoft used with the original Xbox and using off the shelf components to get to market faster.

Up close and personal with Toshiba's new HD DVD player [Lorin Thwaits]