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Oil drops
London: U.S. crude was down US$1.15 to US$62.05 by Wednesday afternoon, after losses of US$1.16 on Tuesday. London Brent crude was down 79 cents at US$58.49.

Prices reversed slim gains after weekly U.S. government data showed crude stocks rising by 5.6 million barrels, sharply up on a forecast build of two million barrels.

The U.S. government's Energy Information Administration said that high prices had reduced demand, which was down 3.2 percent from a year ago.
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Intel reinvents the Pentium
San Francisco: The Pentium family is getting revamped for a high-speed, low-power future, with Intel changing direction in chip design and targeting mobile computer users.

Intel's chief executive, Paul Ottelini, recently unveiled the company's new road map for processors at the Intel Developer Forum at the Moscone Conference Centre, San Francisco.

He said the future depends on a new micro-architecture that will support everything from laptops to servers, along with a new class of devices that Intel calls "handtops".

Intel is promising that notebook PCs next year, will use no more than 5W, desktops at 65W and servers at 80W. By the end of the decade, it's hoping for portable PCs that consume just half a watt. These "handtops" will weigh less than a pound and have 5in screens and an all-day battery life.

Although not much bigger than PDAs, handtops will be full PCs, running Windows XP. Intel expects the first handtops to appear by the second half of next year, though these won't be all-day low-power systems.
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China's third quarter GDP grows at 9.4 per cent
Beijing: China's economy grew 9.4 percent in the third quarter as rising wages spurred consumer spending and the government invested more in coal, mines and railways.

Gross domestic product grew faster than the median 9.2 percent gain forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 17 economists, following a 9.5 percent expansion in the second quarter from a year earlier. Growth will be at least 9 percent this quarter, Zheng Jingping, a National Bureau of Statistics spokesman said at a press briefing in Beijing.

The Chinese economy, which accounted for a 10th of global growth in 2004, has defied expectations for a slowdown as consumers spent more on goods, such as cell phones, and services, including flights. Premier Wen Jiabao is seeking to channel more investment into power and transport networks, where capacity hasn't kept pace with demand.

Premier Wen last year announced measures to cool investment in industries including steel, cement and real estate after soaring commodity prices and blackouts threatened to disrupt growth in the world's seventh-largest economy.
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