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Why oh why oh why oh why do so many posters to slashdot link to an article about something, instead of linking to the thing? You could provide the link to the bbc article *as well* but you should link to the comp. You idiot.

And most of the articles you people link to are almost word-for-word copies of press releases, so please take the time to find the press release on the companies web site in that case, and link to that, not the shoddy journo's crap copy. You idiots.

http://www.intel.com/idf/corechallenge.htm

Intel's got one already :-)
http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing /community-PC-0506.htm
I saw a demo at one point, kinda cool. Made me think of putting it on an excercise bike with an auto alternator attached.
-nB

Does Intel have a C compiler that was designed for miiltiple CPU systems?

What about GCC?

If all they did was increase clock speeds, we wouldn't need as many major advancements in compiler theory.

Does Intel have a C compiler that was designed for miiltiple CPU systems?

What about GCC?

If all they did was increase clock speeds, we wouldn't need as many major advancements in compiler theory.

Pretty much all the newer processors are 64Bit (EM64T), including the newer Celerons. Check out this page: http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/cha rt/core2duo.htm Or better yet this PDF: http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/pro c_info_table.pdf

Pretty much all the newer processors are 64Bit (EM64T), including the newer Celerons. Check out this page: http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/cha rt/core2duo.htm Or better yet this PDF: http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/pro c_info_table.pdf

This link (http://download.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/ 30922105.pdf) points to the Core Duo data sheet. Where does it say it is 64 bit capable ? I can't see it.

I have been researching notebooks in the last few hours and the only ones I can definitly say are 64 bit capable are the AMD AM2 Turion's. Also, if you look at this link: AMD benchmark PDF, it's hard to imagine that the intel offering is at all interesting.

I need a fast AMD64/EMT64 capable notebook, I don't mind if it's Intel or AMD. I can't see a better offering from a value for money or even just outright value perspective than the AMD TL-60 based notebooks (if you look at CPU that is.)

If you can kindly point out how the Intel offerings are dramatically superior, I'm listening.

Intel do some pretty beefy ARM compatibles.

800Mhz, 333Mhz FSB.

http://www.intel.com/design/iio/iop333.htm

It's still in order, no SMT, but I reckon most embedded applications can live with that.

Also forgot to mention:

I can't wait for AMD's 65nm to start shipping once their process is all sorted out, since 90nm SOI has worked so well for them.

They'd better hurry.. Intel is planning on moving to 45nm in mid-2007.

Had I presumed that, I would have saved US$200 (and tax) by going to the 2.0 GHz BTO configuration.

It's US$300 less for that configuration, actually (in the US, at least), but on the cost:benefit scale, dropping .66GHz to save $300 isn't quite the same as paying an extra $800 to gain .34GHz.

But here's a thought: can you get away with installing only one quad-core processor, leave the other one bare, and use the extra space for more internal hard drives?

The 5000X chipset allows for single processor configurations, so it's probably possible.

is it's super-low up-front costs, not for the hand-sets, but for an operator to offer initial coverage.

With wired service, you have to invest up-front, burying cable throughout a population center before you can acquire your first customer. With wireless, you put up one tower, set it for maximum range, and open shop.

A single WiMax tower can reach 40 miles in radius. After Katrina, Intel donated $5M in hardware, and was basically able to cover the Gulf Coast. Bell South says they'll needs between $700M and $900M, and they're still not done with repairs. That cost might be fair, but it shows the advantages in bringing in wireless cheaply. Here's an Intel link:

http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/communica tions/hurricane-relief-1105.htm

I think we should be using cheap wireless technology for IP based emergency communications, enabling people to help each other so they wont have to wait for FEMA to arrive. Check out what hams do for free:

http://eng.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs.html

A system built on the Internet model might enable neighbors to help each other, which is basically required after a mass disaster, since any emergency response team will be overwhelmed. Do you know how you'd find your neighbors after a disaster? How would they find you?

Douglas, this might help: http://developer.intel.com/design/xeon/applnots/24 1618.htm
An Intel hardware engineer recently told me a newer version of this doc is also coming soon (date on this one is 1/06).
I have found when dealing with Intel customer support that calling is often not the best way to go. Pissed-off emails to the relevant group containing lots of details about your situation can get results if you ask your case to be escalated.
Unfortunately as far as the larger discussion goes, it's likely that the support people you dealt with weren't true Intel employees, but instead were outsourced and low-paid temps given the bare minimum amount of training to get by.

Nah. Here's what Intel's 45nm page says: This important milestone demonstrates that we are on track for 2007 to manufacture chips on 300mm wafers using the new 45nm (P1266) process, in accordance with Moore's Law.

Intel shipped a few 65nm processors in 2005, but didn't really get started until 2006, and full conversion might not have happened yet, although all the important plants should have migrated by now.

Even if true, AMD has yet to ship a SINGLE 65nm processor. By this measure alone, I'd say the claim that they are a year behind is quite adequete. But by the speed at which AMD is producing fab plants, I'd argue that they are or soon will be an entire chip generation behind.

AMD have been behind on the process node, but that's not the only issue when it comes to making chips, although it is the most major. SS + SOI are other technologies that AMD is far ahead of Intel on, and they help reduce power significantly - hence AMD's low power 90nm processors compared to Intel's 90nm, and even Intel's 65nm P4s, and AMD aren't doing too badly in terms of performance/Watt right now either.

Traditionally Intel has won the absolute performance title. As you said yourself it is the biggest factor when it comes to performance/Watt statistics. If been following any of the Core 2 Duo reviews, Intel is now dominating in that arena too.

Intel marketing is an example of Intel's unbelievably, extremely, amazingly bad management. The major problem is not to get rid of the time wasters in Intel marketing, the major problem is to get rid of the top management that let Intel marketing become the joke that it is.

Intel's board is obviously incompetent, and obviously not paying attention. The board let the stupidity happen.

Intel marketing is so disgusting that it is difficult to find words that are negative enough. Here is an example that paraphrases an actual Intel marketing email: "Jump through hoops and get an Intel BunnyPeople(TM) doll." Yes, hmmm, hmmm, ahem, Intel did lots of high-level research and analysis and determined that the people who make decisions about processors and motherboards also collect dolls! So, giving away dolls is an effective marketing tool! NOT!

Don't worry about the fact that the Intel web site is a mess, Intel markets processors with deliberate product confusion (What's an Intel 531 processor?), and Intel marketing people are the most dedicated work avoiders I've ever known.

Someone should step forward and say this about the Intel board of directors and CEO, and it might as well be me: Craig R. Barrett, Paul S. Otellini, Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, E. John P. Brown, D. James Guzy, Reed E. Hundt, James D. Plummer, David S. Pottruck, Jane E. Shaw, John L. Thornton, David B. Yoffie, you are incompetent! You let Intel marketing become the waste of time and resources that it is!

Here a few of the qualifications of the board of directors, according to the Intel web site:

CEO Paul S. Otellini: Has an MBA. Can someone with no technical training run a high-technology company? No need to understand what you "manage", right?

Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky: On the board of directors of Estee Lauder, a company that manufactures makeup and therefore encourages women to live in a fantasy world. Maybe she has influenced Intel marketing to live in its fantasy world. "She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations", it says, and we all know the quality of the U.S. government's foreign relations.

Dr. Jane E. Shaw: Experienced in running pharmaceutical companies. Would such a person notice if a high-tech company's marketing is a joke? No.

David B. Yoffie: Professor of business administration. Would such a person notice if a high-tech company's marketing is a joke? Uhhh, what's a processor?

E. John P. Browne: Helps run BP, formerly British Petroleum. The company is apparently part of the reason for the Iraq war. The idea, apparently, was to invade the country with the second-highest proven reserves of oil in the world, and restrict the production so that the price of oil would go up. This also benefited Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, whose friends and family and business associates are heavily invested in oil and weapons. See the free Google video, Robert Newman's History of Oil. The U.S. taxpayer pays and pays and pays.

Reed E. Hundt: A lawyer.

David S. Pottruck: Knows the stock market. "In July of 2004, Mr. Pottruck resigned after a 20-year career having served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of the Charles Schwab Corporation." Does that prepare him to understand the needs of a very, very high-tech company?

Boards of directors usually do not have enough education, time, or interest in the companies they "direct" to do a good job. The entire board of director system is out of control. But Intel's board of directors is especially inappropriate.

Logic parts of a die are much more sensitive to problems, especially critical speed path problems. Caches have been done using redundancy for many years now, and scrapping a die because of faults in the cache parts are very rare today.

The Cell CPU is much more prone to yield problems than a SRAM cell for example.

This PDF is a bit old but good, and the use of redundancy has increased since then.
http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q41997/p df/manufacturing.pdf

You're neglecting recent progress in the field; as stated in the FTA for traversal it's all about coherence. Note that coherent traversal (read SIMD friendly) has been transposed to other hierarchies, grid, bvh, bih... you name it.

Scan-line will remain mainstream as long as it will be the only method with a cheap specialised hardware implementation in town, even if objectively it doesn't make much sense.

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d975xbx/ index.htm
$265 USD -> $295 CDN
Four SATA's w/ raid, ability to add four more SATA's easily.

Also, you bought a 3800+ X2, you obviously weren't paying attention. It gets beat by the 3800+ 64 in some cases.

Since it's probably BS, I don't really have to worry about either one of those two thoughts

As with all perpetual engines with a surplus of output energy, wake me up when they have one running a load and not connected to a power source. I'll be interested in a few months of unattended operation.

In the meantime keep it to the cheap checkout magazines. When they stick some magnets on a flywheel and after starting it gains speed on it's own unless a load is applied, and it is no longer connected to a power source, and a sustained steady state of energy production goes for weeks, then post the results for peer review and duplication of the experiment by third parties.

Going back to real news for nerds in the meantime. The Core Duo is due out next month which replaces the Crusoe chip. Now that's news for nerds. http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/i ndex.htm?ppc_cid=ggl|c2d_us_brand|k6CDC|s
They claim up to 40 percent faster and 40 percent more energy effecient. It sounds like the new laptops will be real screamers while using less power for long battery life. Woo Hoo!

If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.

Right; because damned if human greed hasn't kept the price of those computer chips right up where they always have been, $60 per 1000 transistors [1], keeping all the profits for themselves. Corporate bastards.

[1] Intel 8080 retailed for around $360 IIRC and had 6,000 transistors. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.ht m#i486

This is a lot of work but also a lot of fun! I did it for a real-time demo project with a few friend. We used Christmas fairy lights and 5 mini-VHS camcorders. You can see the result at the very end of our Childbone demo.

Nowadays, using webcams will save you a lot of troubles, and you can find lots of very useful codes on the Internet (such as Intel's OpenCV, however majors issues that you still have to solve would be calibrating camera positions and reliably tracking crossing markers in images. In my system I had to do an editor to manually reassign markers when incorrectly detected or labeled, which can be a very tedious task...

I would recommend Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 webcams, as they are USB 2.0, can do 640x480 at 30 fps, and most importantly use the somewhat recent generic USB Video Class spec, for which a driver for linux is available. I have a few of those and the image quality is quite good :)

Good luck!

If Vista supports EFI, then Boot Camp is not needed. The reason Boot Camp is needed is because Windows XP needs BIOS to boot.

Tell you the truth, I would be very surprised if Vista does not support EFI, since this is clearly the direction Intel wants new hardware going.

Yes. http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/

Of course this is intended for highend systems. Like all other technology expect to see it in regular systems in no time.

The next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa and detailed for the first time in Maloney's keynote, is designed to give users better overall performance and graphics, improved wireless connectivity and improved security and manageability. Santa Rosa is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset, codenamed Crestline, an IEEE* 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, codenamed Kedron, as well as Intel-optimized advanced management and security solutions. The platform will also include Intel's NAND flash-based platform accelerator, codenamed Robson, which enables much more rapid boot-up time and power savings. Santa Rosa, available in the first half of 2007, will use Intel's next-generation dual-core mobile microprocessor based on Intel's Core(TM) microarchitecture, codenamed Merom, Intel's new foundation for delivering even greater energy-efficient performance. An initial version of Merom will also be available for the current Intel Centrino Duo platform to align with the 2006 holiday buying cycle and will be socket or pin-compatible with the current version of Intel® Core(TM) Duo processors.

The 486 wasn't introduced until April 10, 1989.

Source: Intel Microprocessor Quick Reference Guide

I hate fucktard journalists. Wireless ethernet does not make the Internet blazingly fast. A fast connection makes it fast. I had an iBook with an AirPort card and an AirPort base station that connected to my regular ISP via dialup and it was NOT blazingly fast!

I was so pissed off I went out and bought a Pentium III PC to make my Internet better and that didn't work, either. ;-)

Actually you don't need an uber system for Windows MCE. Intel makes a great 945 chipset Media Edition motherboard http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d945gnt/ index.htm/ as do a couple of other vendors. You can get a DVI daughter card for less than $50 for your digital out, but I even skipped that for a better solution.

I have my MCE server set elsewhere in the house and use my XBOX as the head unit that's plugged into my home theater system. It was really easy to do and now I don't have to pay a monthly subscription fee to Replay or Tivo anymore.

The original XBOX 1 worked just OK at this but the XBOX 360 really shines as a MCE extender providing in Microsoft's promise of being a home entertainment hub...no I'm not kidding, I was really amazed at how I could play Uno on Live, listen to music from my MP3 collection and them jump out to watch a recorded TV show, all from my remote control.

My MCE server has a dual tuner card and several hard drives set up as RAID5 using the Intel motherboard. I also have two HDTV OTA cards but have not had a chance to get an HD antenna hooked up yet so I use those cards for my security cameras.

The whole thing was easy to build and set up and it integrates into my home theater very nicely.

But I suspect the wikipedia entry might be wrong.

Intel announced both desktop (Conroe) and laptop (Merom) processors on July 27, 2006,and said in their recent earnings release that

The Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo processor for desktop PCs began shipping during the quarter ahead of its formal launch July 27 and has already set performance records across dozens of industry-standard PC performance tests. The mobile PC version of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is also shipping now, one month ahead of schedule.

But I suspect the wikipedia entry might be wrong.

Intel announced both desktop (Conroe) and laptop (Merom) processors on July 27, 2006,and said in their recent earnings release that

The Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo processor for desktop PCs began shipping during the quarter ahead of its formal launch July 27 and has already set performance records across dozens of industry-standard PC performance tests. The mobile PC version of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is also shipping now, one month ahead of schedule.

Try only "pxhjpa64". There's only some links to a forum, but it looks like it turns up in the context of DVD burners. Not very enlightening.

If you look up only "PXH", there's alot of fluff to sort through (it's an acronym used for many things, apparently), but it is mentioned in the context of bridges between PCI Express and regular PCI interfaces. One type is Intel's PXH, where the acronym apparently means "PCI-X hub".

So, if that matches your hardware, I'd guess there might be something screwy with Vista's PCI Express / PCI-X / PCI support, or the behaviour of one or more of the devices on those buses, for your particular hardware setup.

Anyway, some guesses.

Infoworld newsclipping on Intel releasing the patches...
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/02/HNintelw irelesspatches_1.html

For the impatient, new drivers are here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ cs-010623.htm

And you can double-check what adapter you've got, as long as it's an intel anyway, with the utility here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ cs-005905.htm

Infoworld newsclipping on Intel releasing the patches...
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/02/HNintelw irelesspatches_1.html

For the impatient, new drivers are here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ cs-010623.htm

And you can double-check what adapter you've got, as long as it's an intel anyway, with the utility here...
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ cs-005905.htm

http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/ CS-023065.htm is the actual link.

Wasn't the card used in the demonstration Atheros-based? Wouldn't that mean about half of the WLAN population is affected? And since Intel's Centrino seems to be affected as well, that's the other half right there. And maybe the third vulnerable manufacturer is Broadcom..?

Some of these look pretty serious, although there's not exploit circulating yet:

Intel information about affected drivers

Fixes can be found here

Some of these look pretty serious, although there's not exploit circulating yet:

Intel information about affected drivers

Fixes can be found here

Except I was thinking that even if Intel chucked their whole x86 line, they still make a boatload of other chips. Like XScale, for instance. Their previous line of ARM processors (the SA-1100 family) are freaking *everywhere*.

Until Intel competes on price, AMD will continue to take market share.

See my comment in 2000 to Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap List at:
    http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html
From there [with some outdated links removed]:

I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics) "Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000"

US $149.00 The Cybiko system combines instant messaging, interactive gaming, email and personal information manager (PIM) capabilities in an all-in-one device. ... Available in four translucent colors, Cybiko has a full QWERTY keyboard to compose messages, LCD display, .5 MB memory (expandable to 16MB), a high frequency transmitter and Vibration Alert feature. The unit measures 4.8 x 2.8-inches and weighs under four ounces making it light, thin and small enough to carry in a book bag, purse or shirt pocket. ... With Cybiko, kids and teens can communicate instantly with others within a radius of 150 to 300 feet, depending on the environment, creating their very own virtual community.

Wow!

Imagine what we could have for $1000 by the end of this year by integrating technology that already exists:

Develop a beefed up version supporting a distributed file system like Freenet...
    http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

Using technology like this 6GB in 14 ounces $500 portable audio player/recorder: [nomad Jukebox]:

And a two mile radio range: [Motorola walky talky]

Maybe with a next generation StrongARM 600Mhz processor:
    http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/em 050399.htm
Like a faster version of: [BossaNova mobile processor]

Running Squeak (and maybe Linux) as an open source OS/Development environment:
    http://www.squeak.org/

Using Bootstrap OHS/DKR type ideas for the interface...

Powered by solar energy and/or Baygen radio windup technology and/or fuel cells.

And with a digital camera for fun and creation of educational how-to tutorials... (And on the spot news reporting...)

And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each.

As an alternative, this could be a set of HandSpring modules instead: [Springboard]

Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000 African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one shut down nuclear plant.)

Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...)

This is like a system I wanted to develop and deploy pre-Y2K just in case... But it still has much value in preparing for any potential (natural, political, economic, biological) disaster, as well as aiding the development of democracy.

It's somewhat like the wearable crystals described in The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix), although the one thing it lacks is easy self-repliaction...

Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball). But luckily, there is hope from toymakers!

====

Anyway, glad to see six years later this is going ahead at that $100 price point (and developed by other than toymakers). My hat goes off to the dedicated people making this happen.

The main thing missing from the Laptop market is Modularity. He addresses this slightly by showing a model that has a detachable keyboard. What is really needed are inter-operable components that can be mixed and matched to fit both budget and requirements.

This is clearly the next step, but Laptop creators aren't getting the hint that desktop creators learned a long time ago.

Consider that my (currently outdated) iPAQ H2210 has a 400MHz Xscale processor (PXA255) and a 240x320 transflective TFT display, CD quality audio, etc etc cost me $180 (refurb) with an extended battery (~22 hours of heavy use, like playing music and reading, or playing games) and a 128MB SD card... and it's got bluetooth. If you poke around you can find one with wifi as well for about $200, but without the added battery or memory card. They could probably make them $400 with a VGA-resolution display, and just barely big enough to have a usable keyboard.

Ahem...

ATI Linux Page
nVidia Linux Page
IBM Linux Drivers (for a random chipset)
VIA Linux Drivers (for a random chipset)

...and your point was?

BASF Research
Batelle
BBC Research & Development
General Electric Global Research

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Motorola Labs
Microsoft Research
HP Labs
IBM Research
Intel Research
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Philips Research
Corporate Research
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Toshiba Research Europa
Toyota Central R&D Labs
Viewpoints Research Institute

"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."

I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.

Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.

And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!

Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.

And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.

There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.

"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."

I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.

Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.

And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!

Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.

And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.

There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.

I wonder if Intel OEMs can get away with calling an Intel® Core Duo T2400 an "Intel Pentium M Dual Core T2400 1.83GHz Processor"

If I were Intel, I'd set the Bunny People on 'em. And nix their allocation for Merom too. OEMs, especially small ones without that bastard Jobs in charge need to learn some damn Respect.

Intel did.

http://www.intel.com/homepage/nav/pix/logo.gif

Really?

and thus you can't play most Linux games, including Second Life. The graphics memory is also shared with main memory, which means it's going to be slower than anything dedicated. Those two alone is worth ditching the laptop for.

You're absolutely correct. Games are all that matter. Any system that doesn't play games well enough for you is garbage that should never have been produced.

In short, you're wrong. And even if you had been right, it would have been irrelevant because gaming (especially on laptops) is a niche.

This laptop? Not worth it.

At least you're correct here. Throw enough darts and even monkeys pick the right stocks.

Just an interesting side-note is that Intel has been filling it's low-end motherboard lineup with ATI chipset-based systems.
Check out the D101GGC: http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d101ggc/ index.htm
I find it odd for Intel to use a third-party's chipset in their mobos, but it would be double-weird if that third-party was AMD.

Chief Executive Paul Otellini vowed to spend the next 90 days identifying underperforming business groups and cost inefficiencies in an effort to save the company $1 billion a year. He said he planned to make changes as his analysis progressed, rather than waiting until the end of his review.

Now my problem is that I have worked in large multi-division companies, when someone does an 'analysis' they start looking at numbers from either the top down or the bottom up. If he's going to take 90 days to map & evaluate every department in Intel, and make changes as his analysis progresses, what happens when he hits that first 'bad' set of numbers? Chances are, he's going to start making changes right there --- the problem is, he has only discovered a problem, he may or may not have found the cause.
From WebCowboy:

Translation: Responsive, strategic action is always better than "Analysis Paralysis".

So...you're on a boat. It's slowly sinking. You begin to analyze the situation, and you discover what appears to be a large hole below the water line, which is taking on water at a pretty high rate. Do you: A) Plug the hole as fast as you can, or B) Make note of it, and any other holes you may find, but simply continue your analysis until you are sure you know everything there is (or was, before it sank) to know about the ship?

I'm well aware that some of our management are worthless sponges, sucking up a paycheck while adding zero value to the company. I plan on kicking these people out as soon as I can, while looking at the rest of the bunch to see who else needs to stay, and who needs to go.

For Webbie: Only if your strategic action is, in fact, a correction to a cause of a problem. Removing Bob as manager from the FUD dept for poor results, doesn't solve the problem if Alice insists on telling the truth all the time & Bob is documenting things so he can fire her next week.

More in keeping with Intel, if you examine chip production from the bottom up:

1. Shipping - organized & ready to go when ship dates come 90%
2. Packaging - designed & orders placed - waiting on delivery 90%
3. Production - Achieve production goals 90% & retooling time down 10%
4. Marketing - Always perfect - ask them
5. Integration - 30% behind schedule and still working to get NSA Backdoor to work with the Integrated Trust Shafter.

• NSA Backdoor - finished design specifications 20% behind, Interface specs 30% behind, and prototype 40% behind.
• Integrated Trust Shafter - delivered Interface Specs 15% ahead, but prototype 30% behind.

Intel is moderatly huge w/ 90,000 Employees. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there are at least 450 departments [number chosen for easy numbers w/ 90 days] in the whole company. At that rate - they are going to average 5 depts a day (450/90). At that rate they are going to be looking at numbers and not causal relationships.

For Odin, looking at the production example, it doesn't do me any net gain to patch the hole in the bottom of the boat if I don't pay enough attention to notice that Alice has a shotgun & is trying to kill the minnow in the bottom of the boat with it.

For King, you may be correct, if they have been looking at pruning the management tree for a while, but the wording in the artical pushed me to the understanding that this was a dept based cleanup not an individual one.

No, what I see coming is a vast CYA-fest with chaos to follow.

As the GMA 950 lacks support for things like T&L and vertex shaders

Have you bothered to research your little assertion at all ? The 950 supports Shader Model 2.0 and most of DX9 in hardware. It also supports Shader Model 3.0 and T&L in software through some special uber-code.

Of course, delegating some stuff to the CPU isn't the best solution. Nonetheless, you're still completely wrong.