Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

Everybody’s a bit of a skint these days, we get that. Staples is doing its part to help leave you with a little extra beer money, selling the “fully loaded Core i5 laptops from Dell and Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) are on sale for as little as $649,” according to industry observer Brooke Crothers.

 

“Intel’s (News - Alert) Core i5 mobile processor, based on the latest Nehalem chip architecture, was just rolled out at the beginning of this month,” Crothers reported. “Typically, laptops built around new Intel mainstream mobile processors are priced at least a couple of hundred dollars above the prices Staples is listing.”

 

In September Intel released Lynnfield, the follow-up to its Nehalem architecture. Intel focused the launch campaign around the idea that Lynnfield was “Nehalem for the mainstream.”

 

It was a good choice. As BenchmarkReviews.com noted, “Nehalem, for the first year of its life, was the only choice for those who wanted in on the company’s latest architecture, but thanks to the $300+ price tag (News - Alert), many held off and waited for more budget-conscious models to come along.”

NEI, a Canton, Mass., telecom equipment provider, is deeply invested in Intel’s Nehalem architecture, betting it’ll become more popular with OEMs and other telecom professionals in 2010.

Company officials think there will be “new areas of focus in 2010,” and people will “need architecture that’s flexible and can serve multiple purposes,” Jeff Hudgins, vice president of engineering for NEI, told TMCnet during a recent podcast interview. Hudgins said a big draw to the product is its low cost and the promise of a reduced space footprint by service providers.

“There’s a long list of improvements and enhancements in the Nehalem architecture, like the quick-path interconnect, which eliminates the front-side bus, increased memory capacity, hyperthreading, multi-course processing,” Hudgins told TMCnet.

Nehalem’s done wonders for Intel’s bottom line, too. The Register (News - Alert) has reported that for the full 12 months, “2009 was worse than 2008 on all fronts except process sales, thanks in large part to the Nehalem Xeon 5500 launch last March.”

 

Intel’s overall sales fell by 6.5 percent in 2009, to $32.1 billion, The Register reported, “with PC chip sales down 7.4 percent to $19.9 billion, PC motherboard and chipset sales down 2.9 percent to $6.26 billion, and server chipset and motherboard sales down a stunning 21.7 percent to $1.15 billion.”