Even though Nokia and Intel were both relatively tight-lipped yesterday about the actual hardware products that’ll spring forth from their new joint-venture, rumors are already circulating that Nokia has placed orders with Quanta and Compal, Taiwan’s number one and two netbook/smartbook manufacturers, respectively.

Looks like Intel is about to break into the mobile phone arena in a big way. According to Bloomberg, Intel and Nokia have struck a deal to include Intel CPUs in future Nokia handsets.

In my youth, all those long years ago, I kept up with hardware — specifically CPUs — a lot more than I do now. Of course, it was easy when there was only the 486, 486DX, 486SX and 486SLC CPUs to keep track of. Now we have a mind numbing array of CPUs and codenames: Core, Core 2, Core 2 Duo, Celeron, Atom, Xeon, Conroe, Kentsfield, Yorkfield, Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my! Intel recognizes that they’re confusing customers with all of these nonsense words, and they’re working to streamline the product line.

Up and at them! Guess what’s coming this Rocktober? New Atom CPU. The N450 will replace the N270, according to DigiTimes. The N270 will still be available to manufacturers until the first half of next year but the N450 will start appearing later this year for a nice, technological cross-fade, if you will.

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer recently revealed that his “company is currently developing a platform that features lower-power, smaller-sizes, more complete functionality, and a cheaper price than Intel’s Atom for netbooks,” according to DigiTimes. Sounds great. The fact that AMD owns ATI should make for an awesome mish-mash of processors and graphics. So let’s start rolling these things out, eh?

Whoops, not so fast. The platform won’t be ready until next year.

Late last year we reported that a company named Psion was gearing up for some legal action in order to defend products it had called the “Netbook” and “Netbook Pro” back in the early part of the decade.

Psion initially sent out cease and decist letters to various websites in the UK, demanding that references to “netbook” or “netbooks” be removed, and then later got into a legal scuffle with Dell, Intel, and others who had been using the term “netbook” in marketing literature.

It looks like this whole situation may finally be behind us now, as an “amicable agreement” has been reached between Psion and Intel:

Intel just held a teleconference outlining some information on its next Atom platform, code-named “Pine Trail” and introduced a new beta version of its “Moblin” user interface for upcoming Atom-based netbooks, nettops, MIDs, embedded systems, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. Here are some notes from the call…

AMD launched the Break Free Page: a collection of articles and quotes ramming about Intel’s bad behavior. I understand that Intel was a bad boy and revenge is sweet but making a website about it seems a little cheap. Maybe the time and effort put in slapping Intel should go to making processors.

Bad news for Intel for two days in a row. Fujitsu yesterday took the wraps off a new CPU made for supercomputers that can perform 128 billion computations per second, which is 2.5 times faster than the super processor of the current record holder Intel.

The European Commission today announced that it has fined Intel a record €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) for abusing its dominance in the market for computer chips to exclude its biggest (and frankly, the only serious) rival AMD by paying computer manufacturers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and NEC as well as retailers to postpone, cancel or downright avoid using or selling the latter’s products.

That’s one hell of a fine, considering the previous record for similar abuses in the EU was ‘only’ €497 million (Microsoft, back in 2004).

The European Commission has ordered Intel to stop the exclusion practices immediately, and said it would closely and actively monitor Intel’s compliance with its decision. E.U. regulators first began investigating Intel in 2001, after AMD filed a complaint in Brussels the year before.

The 9-year-long antitrust battle between Intel and the European Union (the European Commission, to be exact) ended today and there is a clear loser: Intel. The company faces a $1.45 billion fine for abusing its No. 1 position in the market for computer chips. This is the highest fine the European Commission has ever imposed on a company.

So XP Mode is a major bullet point in the list of Windows 7 features. Yay! Except that the way it works — by using Microsoft Virtual PC and a legit copy of Windows XP SP3 — requires that your CPU have Intel VT virtualization support. Whoops, not all CPUs have that!

What’s the matter with AMD? The number two chip maker in the whole world just posted some numbers that don’t reflect too kindly on its performance over the last few months. The big, bad Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corp lost $416 million last quarter; about $195 million of that was related to a corporate spinoff (see: GlobalFoundries). When put into scary percentages, AMD’s sales fell off 21 percent. Meanwhile, Intel, what with its Core 2 Duo and, more importantly, its Atom, continues to hum along nicely, expecting sales to rise for this same quarter. So what gives, AMD?

The Intel Atom had a great first year. There probably wasn’t a day on CrunchGear where we didn’t announce or talk about a random gadget powered by the the Intel CPU. The new models keep on rolling too, with two new options announced today. One, bumps the CPU into previously unavailable speeds, and the other should find its way into MIDs.

Case badges are getting out of control. Every manufacture simply must have a shiny sticker on the front of a tower; laptops are worse too. Thankfully, Intel is launching a new campaign to not only update its badges, but also educated consumers on what said badges mean.

Expect to see less processor brands as Intel moves into the Core age headed by the Core i7 CPU. Hopefully this rebranding and simplifaction will take some of the confusion out buying a computer and back to the simple days of just the Pentium, Celeron, and K.I.S.S.

Intel’s new Nehalem chipset allows for hugenormous amounts of high-speed RAM, a selling point companies like Dell and Cisco are now touting in their latest high-end server systems. Microsoft Vista flavors can support up to 128GB of RAM.

If you’ve been computerizing a long time, you’ll probably remember the days of putting together systems with 4MB of RAM, freaking out about the Turbo button, and you may remember a few of these motherboards. During a tour of Intel’s mobo-designing facility, Tom’s Hardware encountered a hallway filled with framed motherboards, the way you might find platinum records displayed in Atlantic Records or whatnot. Being slightly nerdy, they decided to stop and take a trip down random access memory lane. (See what I did there?)

According to some, Intel is trying to focus its future business on their Atom processor, vying to get it included in anything that needs a CPU. Not servers, of course: Intel will keep pushing its Xeon CPUs for servers. Except for those instances where an Atom processor actually makes sense in a server…