Hello. So, to qualify deservedly for the semi-finals, England need to beat Ind… eh? Oh. They’re out apparently, thanks to «sport.guardian.co.uk» earlier today. In all honesty, this is probably a good thing. Imagine if the Kiwis had won, England went on to beat India, who then beat South Africa tomorrow - imagine if all that happened and England had qualified for the last four. We would then have been able to sweep their ineptitude under the carpet, at least until they were mauled in the semi-finals by Australia/Pakistan/Sri Lanka. As things stand, we now get to do what the English do best: beat ourselves up and wonder where it all went wrong. I don’t know about you, but I feel much more comfortable that way. Expect a wonderfully comprehensive, gloriously meaningless victory over India.

Hang On! Isn’t There Another Team Playing Here Dept? Of course, we mustn’t forget that India are still very much involved in this tournament. If they win today and beat South Africa tomorrow, they will be involved in a three-way tie at the top of Group E (honestly, does anyone know the group letters without being prompted by Charles Colvile?). And that means New Zealand could miss out after winning their first two matches. You couldn’t make it up!

For those of you who keep little black books, England have dropped Chris Schofield and brought in Chris Tremlett. Oh, and Andrew Flintoff is playing. Hmm. The team in full: Darren Maddy, Vikram Solanki (wk), Kevin Pietersen, Paul Collingwood (capt), Owais Shah, Andrew Flintoff, Luke Wright, Dimitri Mascarenhas, Chris Tremlett, Stuart Broad, James Anderson.

The toss Mahendra Singh Dhoni wins it and India will bat first. Unless you are an Indian fan, this is not good news: England are dreadful chasers under lights. They’re fairly hopeless at setting targets too. Paul Collingwood insists England would have bowled first anyway, then churns out the usual guff about playing with pride and passion. Well, that’s a relief!

“Hello,” begins David Holmes, promisingly. “Given that Scott Styris reckons “[it doesn’t] matter what sport it is, everyone likes to see England going home early” should we be surprised that NZ managed to lose today?” We shouldn’t be surprised, Dave, but not because the result was some kind of anti-English, southern-hemisphere carve-up. No, what we saw earlier today was the Law of Sod in all its glory.

Almost forgot! Here’s the India team: Virendar Sehwag, Gautham Gambhir, Robin Uthappa, Yuvraj Singh, Mahendra Singh Dhoni (wk), Irfan Pathan, Harbhajan Singh, Sreesanth, RP Singh, Joginder Sharma, Rohit Sharma. The very best of luck to one and all.

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel gave the first public demonstration of a new generation of computer processors that significantly increase performance without consuming more power.

Paul Otellini, the companys chief executive, told developers at its semiannual technology conference Tuesday that Intel expected to finish the new family of chips in the second half of 2008, in keeping with its promise of a new chip architecture every other year. The new family of chips, code-named Nehalem, will use as many as eight processing cores and will offer better graphics and memory-control processing.

Intel had been late to respond to technological challenges in energy efficiency and heat consumption, and it has spent the better part of two years racing to catch up with its smaller but feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices.

A year ago, Intel announced a corporate overhaul that included reducing the work force by 10 percent and trimming $5 billion in expenses. Since then, the company has begun to regain lost market share, and last week raised its sales forecast for this quarter.

As part of the corporate revamping, Intel executives outlined what they called a tick-tock strategy, referring to the development of a new chip architecture every other year and to a new manufacturing technology in the alternate years. Otellini said the strategy would accelerate the pace of innovation.

The manufacturing-technology innovation, a new silicon technology component, is almost ready. Intels Penryn family of processors, to be introduced on Nov. 12, will be the industrys first high-volume 45-nanometer processors. (The current standard is 65 nanometers.)

Otellini said the company planned to introduce 15 new 45-nanometer processors by the end of the year and 20 more in the first quarter of 2008. Advanced Micro Devices has said it will move to 45-nanometer technology in mid-2008.

“We expect our Penryn processors to provide up to a 20 percent performance increase while improving energy efficiency,” Otellini said.

He said that 32-nanometer technology, which is on track to begin production in 2009, would offer even greater performance. The 32-nanometer chips use transistors so small that more than four million of them could fit on the head of a pin.

“Smaller is better, smaller is cheaper,” Otellini said.

The company also disclosed plans for a new graphics-oriented product, called Larrabee, which will compete with products from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia and Advanced Micros ATI graphics unit. Larrabee will include 12 cores, or computing brains.

On Monday, AMD unveiled its own strategic change: a desktop chip with three cores, unusual in an industry that tends to grow in even numbers, routinely doubling performance. The announcement came as a surprise to analysts, as the company had promoted the advantages of four processors only last week.

AMD executives, referring to a recent survey by Mercury Research, said that quad-core processors accounted for only 2 percent of all desktop computer systems, suggesting that the quad-core chips had been slower to catch on than expected.

The figures are in and the result appears quite clear-cut: Kanye West tops the US album charts with first week sales of 957,000 copies for third album Graduation, the highest for two years.

That the last album to exceed that total was The Massacre by 50 Cent will come as no consolation to the rapper and Kanye’s rival. 50’s latest album, Curtis, sold 691,000 copies in the US since its release on September 11, according to Billboard. This means it’s number two in the album charts, a position that 50 had insisted would force him to retire from recording albums.

50, real name Curtis Jackson, appears to have rolled back on this promise since it appeared likely he might have to fulfill it and has insisted any retirement from performance (not writing or producing) would be contigent on second-week sales too. He might as well have drawn up a contract.

One thing 50 definitely won’t be doing, however, is playing at tonight’s MOBO awards after he cancelled a brief tour of Europe scheduled to begin tonight. It has been suggested that this decision was also influenced by a poor chart performance, this time in the UK.

As for West, there is as yet silence. Though such has been the blur of publicity the producer turned rapper has generated in his bid to win this week’s duel, it seems unlikely he won’t have something to say as the days go by.