From DailyTech: Microsoft and Intel senior executives met with members of the press in San Francisco to co-promote their flagship products. At the event Intel pushed the fact that it had extensively tweaked and designed its latest Wintel offerings, which are shipping this fall, to offer better performance in Windows 7 (Wintel, an amalgamation of Windows and Intel is often used to refer to PCs running the Microsoft OS's on Intel processors). Both companies hope that these efforts will help them continue their joint dominance of the PC market. Stephen Smith, VP and general manger of the digital enterprise division of Intel, states, "We have our single biggest engagement here with Microsoft." Intel showcased its upcoming 32-nm die shrink of the Nehalem architecture, dubbed Westmere. The desktop version of Westmere, Clarkdale, and its laptop variant, Arrandale, will release later this year. The running Clarkdale machine showcased impressive performance, encrypting and decrypting the contents of a hard drive 11 times faster in Windows 7 than on an identical Windows Vista PC, according to Intel. This is largely thanks to hardware acceleration of the AES encryption algorithm, something Windows 7 supports. AMD will also be offering similar AES acceleration on its upcoming CPUs. View: Article @ Source Site |