We are in receipt of no fewer than four separate emails inviting us to join in on an Intel teleconference today between 1600 and 1700 GMT.

Imagine, then, our surprise to discover on dialling in that the conference has just finished because Intel's world-class PR bunny warren, Hill & Knowlton, doesn't know the difference between Greenwich Mean Time and British Summertime.

We remember the good old days when Intel retained PR outfits that knew which way up they were, but the unstoppable onslaught of globablisation means that faceless mega-consultancies have now replaced smaller technical specialists such as Catalysis who not only understood the technology, but actually understood outmoded and old-fashioned concepts such as being able to tell the time.

When we called H&K to complain, someone had obviously pointed out their error as they'd all cleared off down the pub.

As a result of H&K's cockup, both my good self and our California-based graphics expert missed the call, although we are still in possession of all the background info on 10-core Larrabee chips and so forth, so we wonder if we might come over all Hill & Knowlton and get the embargo time of 0500 PST next Monday wrong as well.

It would be a terrible shame if we were to publish ahead of schedule, but with H&K's tenuous grip on temporal reality, could we be blamed were we to reveal that Intel Corporation is presenting a paper at the Siggraph 2008 industry conference in Los Angeles on Aug 12 that describes features and capabilities of its first-ever forthcoming manycore blueprint or architecture codenamed Larrabee?

No court in the land would convict. X