European Commission Authorizes Intel, ST Flash JV

Under the European Union Merger Regulation, the the European Commission today authorized the proposed joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel Corp., concluding that the transaction "would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area or any substantial part of it."

ST and Intel announced in late May plans to create a joint venture for NOR and NAND flash memory.

Last month, the companies said they would name the JV, "Numonyx."

The Commission noted that it found strong competitors present for NOR and NAND flash and that customers would be able to continue sourcing their needs from a sufficient number of alternative vendors.

More information on the case will be available, here.

In other Intel news, the chip giant announced two quad-core server-focused Xeon processors, with performance and energy efficiency features, along with a pricing strategy meant to encourage the enterprise servers to multi-core systems.

The new Xeon processors X5365 and L5335 also contain new virtualization capabilities, Intel noted.

Designed for performance-critical server and workstation applications, Intel claims the Xeon X5365 is the industry's first 3GHz quad-core processor to fit inside a standard 120W power envelope. The X5365 also features front-side bus (FSB) speed of 1.33GHz.

The Xeon L5335 is aimed at servers that require optimal space and power utilization. The processor includes a 2GHz clock speed and 1.33GHz FSB within a 50W power envelope—or just 12.5W per processing core.

Kirk Skaugen, VP of Intel's digital enterprise group, and General Manager of the server platforms group explained that Moore's Law, Intel's silicon design and process technology and the Core microarchitecture are allowing the delivery of even greater levels of end-user value by allowing price parity between dual and quad-core Intel Xeon processors at a given clock frequency, further accelerating quad-core market adoption.

Intel also said the processors are suitable for simultaneous design and analysis transactions, improving rendering performance and managing faster analytics for industries such as financial services.

Also, both processors are drop-in compatible with select existing Intel server platforms. Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, SGI, SuperMicro, Rackable Systems, Verari and more than 40 others are supporting the new processors.

To streamline virtualization and further improve energy efficiency, Intel said it integrated advanced technology capabilities into the Intel Xeon Processors X5365 and L5335 including its virtualization technology, which increases the efficiency of virtualization solutions and allows 64-bit guest operating system support. The processors also contain new Intel virtualization technology processor extensions for improved interrupt handling in virtualization of 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Finally, as part of its efforts to ensure that system builders can meet energy efficiency requirements, and end-users can continue to manage their overall energy consumption, Intel included new system-transparent energy smart technology to reduce idle power usage by up to 50 percent. In addition to including this technology on the new quad-core processors, Intel said it is driving its entire volume server processor line to take advantage of this new lower idle power utilization.