Always the friends of progress, those folks over at Intel can never seem to leave well enough alone. The latest news is that the chip-maker is shaking things up in its Xeon lineup again by dropping two new quad-core chips with 50-watt thermal envelopes. According to the company, these chips will suck up 60 percent less power than the first-generation chips, which sported 120W envelopes. The company has stressed, however, that this is just a stopgap product, on the road to 3.0 Ghz Xeons and chips sporting a 1600MHz FSB (Front Side Bus), both of which are expected later this year.

In other Intel news, the company has decided to enter the extremely competitive flash drive market, aiming for the low-end with two Solid State Drives (SSDs). Unlike the much-talked about HHDs of late, these puppies use USB 1.0/2.0--not serial ATA--to interface with your machine. While these aren't actually hard drives per se, the company is hoping that they're cheap enough to be hard drive replacements for low-end laptops. While pricing hasn't been announced yet, we do have this to go on: "Current price projections place Intel's 4GB value SSD on par with 1.8-inch HDDs, but Intel expects costs to fall as it ramps up volume production. Intel predicts that its 4GB product will be priced below comparable 1.8-inch drives by the second half of this year, with it surpassing 2.5-inch drives by 2008."

For info on the new Xeons:
- see this eWeek article

For more on the flash drives:
- see this ZDnet piece