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As others are pointing out, thats just BS.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/manufacturing/manufacturing_qa.htm#1

Fab production sites within the United States are located in Chandler, Ariz.; Santa Clara, Calif.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Hudson, Mass.; Rio Rancho, N.M.; and Hillsboro, Ore.; and outside the United States in Leixlip, Ireland; Jerusalem, Israel; and Kiryal Gat, Israel. Two new fabs are under construction at existing sites in Arizona and Israel.

The company has six assembly and test sites worldwide and is building a seventh, all of them outside the U.S. Assembly and test sites outside the United States are located in Shanghai, China; Chengdu, China; San Jose, Costa Rica; Kulim, Malaysia; Penang, Malaysia; and Cavite, Philippines. An assembly and testing site in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is under construction. There is one testing facility and one assembly development facility inside the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries

It currently owns eight fabrication plants. Fab 1 (Module 1 & 2) is in Dresden, Germany. Fabs 2 through 7 are in Singapore, and a new plant, Fab 8, will be operational in New York in 2012.

Intel is a terrible example, they do most of their chip fabrication in the U.S, with much of the rest of it done in Ireland and Israel.

They say they do 75% of their chips in the U.S.:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2009/20090210corp.htm

Yeah, it's just a cache. But it's a really big cache.

Actually, it sounds a lot to me like a beige-box version of Intel's Turbo Memory thing for laptops, which only has drivers for Windows.

Really the only time you have to handle assembly in a PC application is when you're implementing a just in time compiler, and it's becoming the fashion to let LLVM do that for you.

That's an interesting combination of overstating and understating the case.

For one thing, your favourite C/C++ compiler likely contains a hand optimized memcpy() routine, down to assembly if it exposes a worthwhile gain, or coded in C with or without intrinsics if it doesn't. Many C/C++ compilers contain hand-optimized floating point routines, even more so in the embedded world. Plus there are many performance libraries out there to handle the heavy lifting in multimedia, mathematics, and encryption, some of which are vendor tuned to the n'th degree. It's been a while since I've used an Intel library, but this is likely one of the breed:

Intel MKL

As for LLVM, I'd say it's more than fashion. The differences in performance characteristics from one micro-architecture to another are nightmares to cope with at the assembly language level. The average tablet computer these days could probably play Kasparov to a draw, and there are still macho programmers out there who think they can do register assignment and live range analysis better than your compiler? Dude, if you've got that much talent, roll up your sleeves and fix the freaking compiler. Hopefully LLVM will solve that old problem of first having to swallow the gcc ast syntax enzyme.

Tautology #1: I can beat my computer at chess => your chess computer sucks (or it's running on your wristwatch).

Tautology #2: I can beat my compiler at coding a non-trivial loop => your compiler sucks.

Unless your goal in life is to win rigged competitions, LLVM is a lot more than a fashion statement.

Q8XXX got VT in mid 2009.

I have a Q8300 and it has VT, see http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=39107 for further details.

Got a heck of deal on it, so I can always upgrade the CPU to a Q9XXX and still come out on top.

I wonder how long it will last as the "standard" with Light Peak allegedly only a year away? Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm

Light peak is not competing as a display standard. It is competing as a universal data cable. Replace "Displayport" with "USB 3.0" and you'd be right.

I wonder how long it will last as the "standard" with Light Peak allegedly only a year away? Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm

Westmere and onward have instructions that implement the cryptographic primitives used by Rijndael (of which AES comprises three modes); MixColumns, SubBytes, and ShiftRows (and the alternative Inverse variants for decryption). Keying, encryption, and decryption will be significantly faster.

Even worse than that, at least one model, the Q8300 Core2Quad both does and does not have VT, depending on the sSPEC code; SLB5W doesn't, SLGUR does. Good luck trying to buy one of those online and being sure of what you're gonna get!

Even worse than that, at least one model, the Q8300 Core2Quad both does and does not have VT, depending on the sSPEC code; SLB5W doesn't, SLGUR does. Good luck trying to buy one of those online and being sure of what you're gonna get!

Yeah - I'd be surprise if you could damage the CPU in the way described in the original post.

There's a bunch about thermal monitoring and control from Intel here:

http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2006/volume10issue02/art01_intro_to_core_duo/p06_thermal_design_point.htm

The relevant bit is:

"The power monitor continuously tracks the die temperature. If the temperature reaches the maximum allowed value, a throttle mechanism is initiated. A multi-level tracking algorithm is implemented. Throttling starts with the more efficient dynamic voltage scaling policy and if not sufficient, the power monitor algorithm continues lowering the frequency. If an extreme cooling malfunction occurs, an Out of Spec notification will be initiated, requesting controlled shutdown. Lastly, the CPU can initiate a thermal shutdown and turn off the system."

I'd guess the thermal shutdown cannot be configured by software and would prevent any damage if the other mechanisms were either ineffective or somehow disabled by software.

Diamondville. Atom 230, 330. Pineview is 64-bit as well.

http://www.ibd-aut.com/de/produkte/mt/index2.html

http://www.tetra-computer.com/

http://www.beltronic.com/

http://www.intel.com/healthcare/ps/mca/affiliates.htm?iid=healthcare_mcaoverview+body_affiliates

http://www.amrelmedicalcomputers.com/medicaltablet.asp

http://www.aispro.com/TabletPC/ruggedTabletPC.asp

etc.

No joke. I can live without a full PCI-e bus IF you give me some decent performance I would let it ride. God don't they own Ati?

But this thing? Its DESIGNED to take the Ion and anyone else who wants to make a chipset for it out of the game. Look at the whitepapers here: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/atom/techdocs.htm

There will NEVER be a system, using this chip, with a DVI out neither. Why? The CPU outputs DIRECTLY to VGA. It has a LDVS interface, but it doesn't look like you can split it off for a second display. Maybe as a motherboard but never for the laptop. With the exception of directly connecting it to memory, the only outside interface to the chipset is its "direct media interface", but it looks like the same signaling for PCI-E. One channel.

Thats it. You got a PC with a signle PCI-E slot, were all your USB/Wireless/Ethernet and Hard drive pipe though. They did this to lock down the chip.

All that being said, if they make this chip cheap enough then everything I said is moot. IF the D510 sells for under 299 and the D400's make a 199 laptop, its worth it for the price. But if AMD can get on the ball with their new chip and the ion chipset, they might win this war.

"Intel® Professional Edition Compilers include advanced optimization features, multithreading capabilities, and support for Intel® processors and compatible processors. They also provide highly optimized performance libraries for creating multithreaded applications."

Taken directly from http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers/.

The difference is MS would be saying "We don't support OS X", and actively enforcing it. Intel are saying that their compiler does work for AMD processors, without any mention of the fact that they put time and money into actively making it worse for AMD processors (instead of just not doing anything to improve performance specifically for them)

Ok, given the prices listed here, it looks like the un-discounted components of a common 1.6Ghz/945GSE Atom chipset are $44/$26/$13 for the processor/northbridge/southbridge, for a total of $83.

Intel doesn't seem to show bundle discounts anywhere I can find on their public site, so I can only guess at what exactly they are. If only the CPU received any discount at all, the discounted bundle bundle would cost $64, but if we assume the other components are discounted at the same rate needed to bring the Atom itself down to $25, that means the whole bundle would cost about $47. That's more than the $44 the Atom alone would cost but not by much, especially on the low end.

If my exact statement was untrue I apologize, but the core fact remains that Intel was using their processor pricing to undermine their chipset competitors.
That may be business as usual in some circumstances, but it's a problem if the business doing it is considered a monopoly, and even if they're not a monopoly it can be a problem if they're found to be dumping (ie, if the price of an Atom with a chipset bundle minus the price of an Atom alone is greater than the chipset's production costs, iirc).

Intel delivered the first sub-40nm flash memory and has delivered two generations of top-flight solid state drives. Intel has always been strong in flash memory.

Intel insiders have seen this coming. Dadi won. Three strikes and you're out for Pat.
1. Itanium
2. Pentium 4
3. Larrabee

Fortunately for the guys in Hillsboro, Nehalem is a glowing success.

In this position, you will be responsible for architecting advanced client platforms for 2015 and beyond. We are now in the early research and pathfinding for the 2015 generation of CPU products. Our team engages in early architecture analysis, microarchitecture research and/or development, performance and/or power modeling and analysis, including detailed architecture validation versus RTL

Here's what they do in Bangalore: http://www.intel.com/jobs/india/iidc/index.htm. Seems like some people in India have enough skills to design a CPU.

This would be excellent advice, but unfortunately, he's using a netbook. This normally means an Intel Atom processor, which is sadly devoid of any hardware visualization support whatsoever, therefore stopping the otherwise excellent virtualbox from working. Some very good points otherwise though.

Hah, good point! I, unfortunately, misread the OP as "Notebook". The VM stuff is out the window, then. Although, looking at Wikipedia, it looks like models such as Atom Z520, Z530, Z540, Z550 will have VT-x extensions.

Regardless, thanks for pointing that out!

If you are worried about viruses on your machine, only let Virtual Machine snapshots connect to a network

Buy a USB-based wireless device (they're only $20 or so). Disable the wireless device on your Notebook's OS. Before you leave, build a Virtual Machine running an OS of your choice (Linux works nicely). Install the OS from scratch, boot it, update it, and then open up a browser instance. Configure it so that the USB wireless device is forwarded directly to the VM, and install its drivers in the VM. Snapshot the Virtual Machine's state. When you're travelling, turn off your Notebook's wireless signal the entire time. If you want to use the Internet, plug in the USB wireless device, start your VM, and use the Internet through it. When you're done, shut down the VM and revert its state to the saved snapshot state that you made before you started your trip. This should help ensure that any viruses you are hit with only survive the duration of that single VM session.

This would be excellent advice, but unfortunately, he's using a netbook. This normally means an Intel Atom processor, which is sadly devoid of any hardware visualization support whatsoever, therefore stopping the otherwise excellent virtualbox from working. Some very good points otherwise though.

      Tom, you might want to look over the
"Intel (r) Core (tm) i7-900 Desktop Processor Extreme Edition Series and Intel (r) Core (tm) i7-900 Desktop Processor Series".

      It has around 69 pages of ... well, I'll let Microsoft say it ... the processors "may contain design defects or errors known as errata..."

      It's dated November 2009.

      Here's a URL:
              http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.pdf

          Thanks, Dave

That's not true at all. RAM draws a fixed supply of power, but flash certainly doesn't. That's why you're able to unplug a flash drive and have it keep the data!

The only parts constantly in need of power are the controller electronics. The power rating for Intel's enterprise SSDs, for example, is shown as 2.5 Watts active and 0.06 Watts idle. On the newer 34 nm drives, Intel (PDF warning) claims 0.15 W active, 0.075 W idle.

That's not true at all. RAM draws a fixed supply of power, but flash certainly doesn't. That's why you're able to unplug a flash drive and have it keep the data!

The only parts constantly in need of power are the controller electronics. The power rating for Intel's enterprise SSDs, for example, is shown as 2.5 Watts active and 0.06 Watts idle. On the newer 34 nm drives, Intel (PDF warning) claims 0.15 W active, 0.075 W idle.

If you check your CPU/FPU programming manual, you can see there are different modes the FPU can be put in regarding the way floating-point numbers are rounded up/down:

Intel FPU options

Sometimes the Makefile will specify these options. Other times the default option will be specified by the compiler, which can in turn depends on the OS release.

There are even differences between Fortran-90 and C floating point calculations:

F90 vs. C

The atom is only one. Could it be, just possibly, that Apple has decided to increase the efficiency of their operating system by optimizing for multiple cores?

Not the case.. There are dual-core atoms, for example, the Atom 330

Also, There are old Apple systems that are single-core 32-bit like the Atoms: the Mac Mini Intel Core Solo 1.5GHz

Which is supported by Snow Leopard...

From the Snow Leopard Tech Specs:

General requirements
Mac computer with an Intel processor

But, the Atom IS an Intel Processor, just not one sold in a Mac n Cheese.

Which is the whole point of my post, which was a reply to eldavojohn, who felt that "They should explicitly state their product's system requirements and let the consumer decide (like everyone else)".

From the Snow Leopard Tech Specs:

General requirements
Mac computer with an Intel processor

But, the Atom IS an Intel Processor, just not one sold in a Mac n Cheese. If they lost ARM support, sure, cry... but this is a deliberate act to stop some of the processors from working because of Apple failing to produce a product to compete in that market. The quickest (and easiest) way to salve this wound is to release a product in that market to compete, and maybe there will be fewer people trying to make their own.

For example sake, would it be "ok" for them to disable support of Core 2 Quad if they only wanted to support Core 2 Duo? Given the similarities, it would require a specific check by the kernel to deny access to the sister processor. Thats what this is boiling down to. The active efforts to sabotage some of Intel's product line, rather than leaving it open as it has been. Unfortunately, this wont impact their sales much, but it is a loss of freedom. The "Man" has won this round.

"Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive."

Really?

How much do you know about "that SPARC stuff?" It's true that x86 has finally surpassed a lot of the things that Sparc led the way in, but there are still ways that traditional Sparc scales better.

Now moving to the next generation of Sun's gear, we have hardware virtualisation and CoolThreads. Under a hundred grand will buy you a system with four 8-core CPUs, and each core can process eight simultaneous threads. That is OLTP nirvana! Too much power? Chop it up into a handful of smaller servers, each running their own OS. Any one of them can in turn be split into zones--soft OS partitions.

I keep hearing about how Sparc is obsolete, and yet the new generation of Sparc processors and supporting hardware is pushing the state of the art that Intel and AMD aren't even planning in yet.

Umm... what?

First of all, for "a hundred grand", I can buy 10 systems that add up to 80 Intel 3Ghz cores (160 threads) with 720GB of memory, which is going to shit all over that SUN box with its anemic 1Ghz processors. That's retail pricing, in Aussie dollars! Including tax! Delivered to your door in under a week, assembled!

Meanwhile, to get that SUN box, I'd have to "call your nearest SUN dealer". Oh good, I can't wait to have him explain to me how spending $100K is going to "save me money", or something.

I'll grant you that 32 cores in a single box is needed for those rare cases where you need "one big box to rule them all", but SUN has dropped the ball on that too:

Intel is releasing their 2GHz+ 8 core, 16 thread Nehalem-EX processors this year (or very early next year), and it has glue-less scaling to 8 processor sockets (64 cores, 128 threads) and a jaw-dropping 128 DIMM sockets. With the dirt-cheap 4GB DIMMs that most people are buying, you could pack in 512GB into a single box for a mere $24K. Again, that's retail pricing, in Aussie dollars, including tax.

Meanwhile, IBM is about to ship their 4GHz+ 8 Core, 32 thread POWER7 CPU, which scales to 32 sockets. In case you missed that, it's 4x the clock rate and 8x the sockets, or 32x the performance of that SUN server.

Not to mention that both IBM and Intel processors have had virtualization (same thing as "zones" or "partitions") for a long time now, and can run more than one kind of OS side-by-side. The POWER processors can run various IBM operating systems as well as Linux, and Intel is compatible with damned near anything, including Solaris.

Face it, SPARC is dead, the big-boys are making chips with several times the power, for a fraction of the cost. (admittedly, POWER7 isn't going to be cheap)

PS: I'm not surprised SUN is generally losing their market share, even their x86 kit is overpriced. I personally love the concept of the SUN Thumper ZFS-based storage array, and was all excited about it, right up until I saw their pricing model: They only go to up to 1TB drives, and it's actually cheaper to buy the model with 250GB drives, then throw the drives out, and go buy 48 replacement 2TB SATA drives from a retail store. That's 2x the storage for 1/2 the cost. Insanity.

I think SUN forgot that some of their potential clients can count.

Z-Cam signed an exclusive deal with Microsoft to make their time-of-flight camera a device for X-Box only. Natal is based on depth images.

The thing shown in the video is face tracking in camera images (plus some classification algorithm to detect face expressions). Tracking is probably done using Gary Bradski's Camshift algorithm and you can read about how it works in his paper.

My understanding, from talking with Intel employees, is that Paul Otellini is not a good CEO.

My understanding is that only one member of the Intel Board of Directors has any technical knowledge. How can people with no technical knowledge oversee an enormously high-tech company? They can't.

Intel board member John L. Thornton was president and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group, it says. Goldman Sachs helped engineer the present financial collapse. Since the collapse, Goldman Sachs has been very profitable. The U.S. government has done NOTHING to prevent further abuse.

Does this mean Intel has been "exploiting" Windows Virtual WiFi with the "My WiFi" feature on their 5000 series WiFi adapters all this time?

Old news, it's absolutely not an exploit or some hack and has already been in use by Intel for months if not the past year.

Lightpeak may be your answer next year.

not only that but intel has pissed off a lot of the g1 owners by their incriminating silence about trim support in g1 drives.

He probably means the TRIM firmware updates discussed on Anandtech from:

• Intel*
• Crucial
• SuperTalent
• OCZ

* Admittedly, Intel's pulled theirs temporarily due to issues.

Oops.

At least not with the avertised link: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3114&DwnldID=17485&lang=eng
Am i missing something?

The "Intel SSD Toolbox" is also kind of unstable.

more at http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/solidstate

Here:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17485

• Intel D945GSEJT http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/D945GSEJT/D945GSEJT-overview.htm
• 500 GB laptop harddisk
• 2 GB RAM
• 12V PSU

Eats about 10 watts on idle.

How expensive are they?

If you're looking at hundreds of thousands of writes a day to your database, you really only need somewhere between 10 and 100 IO/second (there are 86,400 seconds in a day). Most hard drives handle that somewhat decently, especially if you use a good RAID configuration.

Looking at 100,000,000 updates a day (1,158 writes/second)? Intel's X25-M is rated at more than 4 times that

Iometer* Queue Depth 32
Random 4 KB Write:
80 GB - Up to 6.6 K IOPS
160 GB - Up to 8.6 K IOPS

Let's compare that to a 15k.2 Seagate Savvio harddrive. Oh, right, they don't list their IOPS ratings. Let's look at what they do have though:

Not including controller overhead (msec):
Single track, typical: 0.2 (read) 0.42 (write)
Average, typical: 2.9 (read) 3.3 (write)

Intel lists these figures:

Latency Specification:
- Read: 65 micro seconds
- Write: 85 micro seconds

In other words, for a single track, the Intel drive will be almost 5 times as quick to start the write, and on average the Intel drive will be 38 times faster.

Or looking at it in another way, the absolute best case scenario where we simply ignore actually writing something, the Seagate drive can achieve 205,714,286 write operations per day (86,400 seconds/0.42 milliseconds). The Intel drive will hit 1.016.470.588.

While I can't find anyone benchmarking Intel's SSD offerings directly against the Savvio, I can find a mix of tests. From Tom's Hardware we see that SAS drives tops out at about 400 IOPS for any given task.

Using Tom's Hardware for a comparison, their review of the X25-M had it bottoming out at around 900 IPOS, making it perform 225% better at its worst, compared to the SAS drive's best.

Prices:
Newegg.com doesn't have the Savvio, so I'm using Google instead:
Seagate Savvio 15k.2 146 GB edition: US$ 226.44 or US$1.55/GB
Intel X25-M 160 GB edition: US$ 439 or US$ 2.74/GB

Considering the performance advantage of at least 225%, you'd have to spend at least US$ 509.49 just to get the same kind of performance as you'd get from the US$ 439 drive from Intel. And that's just their mainstream edition. AND we're talking SSD's worst case scenario vs. SAS's best case scenario. Realistically we're talking much greater advantages for the SSD.

And you keep talking about "commodity SSDs" but refer to datacenters. A commodity harddrive is a 7.200 RPM 8 MB SATA drive, and they aren't suitable for a datacenter either. Duh! So why the fixation of comparing commodity hardware from one technology to enterprise hardware from another? Stop buying commodity hardware for your datacenter needs.

Sorry, the FACT that SSD has had write performance problems, wear leveling, and write endurance issues is by no means 10 year old information.

And yet you haven't caught on to the fact, that this isn't that big of a problem. Anandtech wrote an excellent paper on write performance problems, and his benchmarks are based on used drives (the drive has to perform deletes before writing), and he got these performances:

4KB Random Write Speed
Intel X25-E 31.7 MB/s
Intel X25-M 23.1 MB/s
Western Digital VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s

The VelociRaptor i

The U2400 is either a low power Core 2 Duo CPU from Intel or a Nano CPU from VIA. The Mini 5100 uses an Atom N280, which is a different processor entirely. While all three are supported quite well by Linux, none of them do much for wireless networking.

What you probably have is an HP un2400 (USB ID 03f0:201d), which uses the Qualcomm GOBI chipset. You'll need the qcserial module to run it, and that is included in the 2.6.31 kernel which ships with Ubuntu 9.10. I can't speak for how easy it will be to use, but support is in the kernel and will be installed by default if you upgrade to The Koala.

The U2400 is either a low power Core 2 Duo CPU from Intel or a Nano CPU from VIA. The Mini 5100 uses an Atom N280, which is a different processor entirely. While all three are supported quite well by Linux, none of them do much for wireless networking.

What you probably have is an HP un2400 (USB ID 03f0:201d), which uses the Qualcomm GOBI chipset. You'll need the qcserial module to run it, and that is included in the 2.6.31 kernel which ships with Ubuntu 9.10. I can't speak for how easy it will be to use, but support is in the kernel and will be installed by default if you upgrade to The Koala.

"Windows 7 (like all modern versions of Windows) does nothing with the BIOS at all - the BIOS ceases running as soon as Windows starts booting." - by sunderland56 (621843) on Wednesday October 21, @10:03AM (#29822923)

Per my subject-line above? What you've stated, is NOT entirely true:

See, You've overlooked how "ACPI" actually works though - & all it REALLY does, is TELL THE BIOS when to 'power things down', but the BIOS still does the actual work essentially ONLY IT DOESN'T MANAGE/COMMAND IT, itself!

So, instead of controlling that via the BIOS ONLY?

An OS that has the ACPI spec built in manages it all, allowing for extremely lower & fine grained power mgt./use control!

That let's Windows manage it basically, just like a "boss" does @ work, telling the actual workers (BIOS) to do tasks... &, iirc, it needs SMBus functionality.

ACPI can't be applied to old hardwares either.

In order for it to do its job, BOTH the OS + the mobo's chipset have to be ready or it, and for some functions even CPU's themselves need to be designed to be compliant for it as well.

So - YES, the BIOS is still needed & does actual work (when told to do so).

ACPI replaced the older APM power spec (Win95 onwards up until 1999 (around when Windows 98 came into the picture, right on upwards, iirc),

Plus, you have to set your BIOS to use it (on modern mobos, like the ASUS P6T I have here powering an Intel I7 Core 920), it's not just telling the BIOS you have a PnP (Plug-N-Play ready OS), but I have to also set ACPI on also.

In fact, just for your own reference? See this here:

Advanced Configuration & Power Interface (ACPI):

http://www.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi/index.htm

APK

P.S.=> Probably some "oversimplifying" on my end, but, I'd say it's fairly accurate... but, correct when & where I am off/wrong, IF I am fellas - I can stand correction as much as the next guy can, always learning here, like anyone else (cuz nobody "knows it all")... apk

Intel even updated some existing low-end CPUs, including the E5300, E5400, E7200, E7300, Q8300, with VT technology. They updated the OEM version in June (PCN was issued in April) and the retail version in August (PCN was issued in July). No, the stepping has not been changed, the only way to tell is by the S-Spec and the product code.
For more info, look up these CPUs on http://ark.intel.com/ or find the PCNs at http://intel.pcnalert.com/Portal/SearchPCNDataBase.aspx.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so
by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip.

That's not exactly correct. Moore's Law (or observation more like) reads in the original article as:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

All he's concerned about is quoting how many components can fit on a single integrated circuit. One can see this propagated to processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras but his observation itself is about the size of transistors -- not speed.

The title should be "The Ultimate Limit of Computing Speed" not Moore's Law.

Furthermore, we've always had Planck Time as a lower bound on the time of one operation with our smallest measurement of time so far being 10^26 Planck Times. So essentially they've bumped that lower bound up and it's highly likely more discoveries will bump that even further up. I guess our kids and grandchildren have their work cut out for them.

Vertex Processing Selection Capability

That's what Intel call it.

Even the netbook processors (Intel Atom and VIA Nano) have full 64-bit support.

Educate yourself. Only two shipping Atom models have x64 support - 330 and 230 - and I'm not aware of any netbooks in production using either one (Intel itself positions them for "nettops", and the rest of the model line for "netbooks"). Most certainly, all popular netbooks are not x64-capable.

Any new laptop is probably going to have a bunch of cores and hardware virtualization

I agree - using a virtual machine is nice, but be sure the CPU in your laptop supports it. Start by looking here and make sure. Virtual machines suck without hw support.

You'd be surprised how many mainstream laptop CPUs do NOT have virtualization support, especially many of the "Sunday Ad" bargain machines.

It is truly awful. For example, I have an E6300 in my machine. But which one? On the box or the BIOS it says "Pentium E6300", but it's actually a Core 2 processor internally, and a completely different process (45nm) from the original Core 2 Duo E6300. Apparently mine has VT (as it turns out, both E6300s do).

You're right. Intel has made a MESS of their naming scheme that will confuse anyone that doesn't look carefully. Average Joe with his 1 or 2 year old home machine or buying his computer from a big-box store won't have a clue. The salesperson probably won't either. Pentium? Core 2? They mean nothing.

The least Intel could do is put a little "VT" sticker somewhere, now that the feature will actually matter.