Living A Country Life

And what kind of computers are we talking about exactly? (It would strain credulity, I think, to cue in a Jack Bauer narration–”The following takes place between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m”–here.) The SEC letter offers this:

Now, there’s an idea for a future “24″ episode.

For the record, an excerpt from the Intel response is as follows: “Intel has no business contacts with the Subject Countries, either directly or indirectly through tacit agreement with its customers. Intel does not provide products or technology to the Subject Countries….”

“The Cuban PCs have Intel Celeron processors with 80 gigabytes of memory (sic) and 512 RAM and are equipped with Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. Both could be violations of a U.S. trade embargo, but not something Washington can do anything about in the absence of diplomatic relations with Havana. Clerks said the PCs were assembled by Cuban companies using parts imported from China.”

A more productive line of inquiry–by another U.S. government agency–might be: Where on the world market might these countries be buying sophisticated multiprocessor computer hardware based on, for instance, the newest high-end Intel Nehalem Core i7 processors?

Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye but a lowly Celeron chip (one of Intel’s bottom-of-the-performance-barrel processors) is hardly the chip to designate as a threat to national security. In short, data-crunching server farms–assuming they exist–in Cuba are not built with Celeron processors.

The letter continues. “We note that your Form 10-K does not include disclosure regarding contacts with Cuba, Iran, Sudan,men’s timberland boots, and Syria. Please describe to us the nature and extent of any past, current, and anticipated contacts with the referenced countries,ghd styler, whether through distributors, resellers, licensees, or other direct or indirect arrangements.”

The June 4, 2009 letter (originally marked “confidential”) to Intel from the SEC states: “We are aware of a May 2008 news report that PCs in Cuba contain your Celeron processors. Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria are identified by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism, and are subject to U.S. economic sanctions and export controls.”

Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones’ Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly,mbt walking shoes, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times’ Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec.

OMG! Intel Celeron chips in terrorists' hands