Daily News : CPUs

The Cray XT5, which comes in at number one in the 500 top supercomputers in the world, is getting a performance bump. The supercomputer's 37,376 processors are being upgraded from quad-core to six-core AMD Istanbul processors. The $20 million upgrade resulted in performance of 1.759 petaflops, or the equivalent of 1,759 trillion calculations per second.

"The most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that they have actually upgraded an existing supercomputer," says John Fruehe, director of Opteron product marketing for AMD. "And they have managed to double its speed."

Intel has agreed to pay Advanced Micro Devices $1.25 billion to settle several anti-trust lawsuits pending in Delaware and Japan. The lawsuits alleged Intel had paid several companies to limit their use of AMD processors in the companies' products. As a result of the deal, previous disputes of processor patent rights will be resolved by an extended, five-year cross-licensing agreement, and AMD will drop any litigation against Intel.

Intel has already been ordered to pay a €1.06bn fine over its anti-competitive practices this year, when the European Commission found the chipmaker had illegally tried to dissuade PC manufacturers and retailers from using AMD's rival products.

PC World gives us an in-depth look at Intel's latest processors. The new entry-level and mid-range processors appear to be neutered versions of the Core i7-900 series, which was launched last fall. Improvements include an additional boost to "Turbo Boost," which will automatically bump your CPU up either four or five processor steps during heavy lifting, and an obvious help to your wallet.

Intel's full processor breakdown--including the axing of its Core i7 940 processor--includes some potentially confusing differences between the chips. So here's what you need to know.