Semiconductors's archive
TI Sees Multicore Phones Coming in 2011
Texas Instruments is betting that a more powerful cell phone, one that uses identical computing cores working in parallel inside the application processor, a setup it calls symmetric multicore processing, will be here as soon as 2011. Such phones, which will be built with multicore ARM-based chips, will allow for faster processing on mobile phones […]
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Intel-Nokia Deal Could Mean Nokia Netbook Is Near
Intel is expected to announce today that will sell its chips to Nokia for use in the Swedish handset maker’s mobile devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. The deal may be a coup for Intel’s low-power Atom chips, which it hopes to provide in small computers, embedded devices and eventually, smartphones. Intel’s Anand Chandrasekher, […]
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New on GigaOM Pro: Opportunities for Semiconductors in LED Lighting
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., like many semiconductor companies, is on the lookout for new markets, and according to some reports, the company thinks it could generate more than $2 billion in revenue from opportunities that include solar and LEDs. The company’s not alone. The semiconductor business is struggling in the face of a long recession […]
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Chip Industry to See Slow Recovery in 2010
The Semiconductor Association has lowered its chip forecast for the year, saying it now expects the sale of semiconductors to fall by 21 percent from 2008 to 2009. The revised numbers shave $53 billion off the previous 2009 forecast, issued by the SIA in November, when it predicted sales would fall by 5.6 percent. […]
Intel Buys Wind River To Put a Computer In Every Toaster
Intel today said it plans to acquire Wind River Systems for $884 million — a deal that gives the world’s largest chipmaker control of development software and operating systems for devices that range from cell phones to routers. Intel last year made a big to-do about getting into the embedded market that supplies chips for […]
Intel’s CULV: New Name for Old Chips
Have you heard about the newly announced computers with the mysterious and non-alluring CULV acronym yet? If you haven’t, get ready for a big dose of them, because they’re about to pop out of the woodwork. They’re exciting! They’re stupendous! That’s what Intel would have you believe anyway, since it created the CULV moniker, which […]
After CDMA, Qualcomm Looks For New Money Machines
Qualcomm's mirasol MEMS
Qualcomm today announced the opening of a factory to make its mirasol displays, and a Wi-Fi chip designed for home networking — both efforts to keep the company a top chipmaker even as carriers migrate from the CDMA technology that provides so much of its profits. CDMA royalties aren’t going to disappear anytime […]
Netlogic to Buy RMI, an Ambitious Network Chip Maker
It was almost five years ago when I first learned about Raza Microelectronics (RMI), which was started by former AMD (and Nexgen) executive Atiq Raza. Raza took three projects from his incubator company, Raza Foundries, and merged them to form RMI. From there, RMI went on to buy Sandcraft, a microprocessor startup, and to […]
Chipmakers Get Tied Up in Home Networking
Wireless networking gets all the love in today’s mobile world, but inside the home, wires will still play a key role in delivering entertainment and other content. Your set-top box may sport an Ethernet port, but it still connects to the wall via coaxial cable. Wires are a secure, fast, cheap and existing network inside […]
SiCortex Co-Founder on Intel and Shutting Down
Even as times get tough for pioneering startups building semiconductors and computing equipment, the chip industry needs to maintain its biodiversity, says Matt Reilly, a co-founder of the recently shuttered SiCortex. I wrote yesterday about the green supercomputing company selling its assets, and Reilly left an excellent comment taking me to task for calling the […]
Qualcomm Turns a Netbook Into a Smartbook
Qualcomm isn’t going to cede the mobile computing market to Intel and its success with netbooks, the CDMA powerhouse made clear today while laying out its vision of mobile computing. The vision consists of what Qualcomm is calling a smartbook. But combining the words smartphone and netbook together may be the only new thing Qualcomm […]
1 in 5 Choosing Netbooks Over Notebooks: Intel
Intel believes the cannibalization of notebooks by netbooks to be at around 20 percent, Reuters reported today. Christian Morales, the European sales chief for Intel, estimated that netbooks currently comprise about 16 percent of worldwide notebook sales, though he put that figure slightly higher for western Europe, and said it could be as high as […]
Unity Seeks to Give Your Digital Toys a Memory Boost
The big chip news this morning is about a 7-year-old company coming out with a completely new technology that it believes has the potential to replace the type of memory used to store data in phones, MP3 players and solid-state hard drives. Unity Semiconductor also said it’s raised $22 million from Morgenthaler, Lightspeed Venture Partners […]
Dell Builds a VIA-Powered Server to Cut Power Costs
Next week Dell plans to announce a server based on the Nano chip from VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese x86 vendor known for its low-power chips for netbooks and other portable computers, according to the New York Times. Putting VIA chips in servers reduces both the cost and power consumption of servers — something important for […]
Can 3D Keep Intel on Top?
Intel this week announced a $12 million investment into a visual computing research program focused on using three-dimensional imaging for entertainment, data analysis, medical imaging and scientific research. The Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, and will receive the $12 million over the next five years. The investment is […]
3 Reasons Nvidia Looks Good Despite Its Loss
Nvidia may have reported a loss of $201.3 million for its fiscal 2010 first quarter after the markets closed yesterday, and a 42 percent drop in revenue from the same period a year ago, but the company still has quite a few things going for it. The trick will be whether it can execute […]
Qualcomm Launches Biz Plan Competition for Startups
Qualcomm Ventures, the strategic capital arm of the wireless chip powerhouse, has unveiled its QPrize competition, which will award up to $550,000 to four startups from around the world. The competition is open to startups with business plans related to wireless technology in areas that include consumer and cleantech. Qualcomm Ventures will select four […]
WiGig Alliance to Push 6 Gbps Wireless in the Home
A group of big-name technology companies including Intel, Dell, Broadcom and Marvell have joined together to promote a new wireless standard that could deliver between 1 gigabit per second to 6 Gbps inside the home. Chipmaking startup Wilocity is also part of the effort.
The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance plans to use the 60 GHz spectrum, […]
Nvidia Touts New GPU Supercomputer
Nvidia today unveiled a system for high-performance computing that uses four graphics processors to provide 1 teraflop of computing power, and multiple units can be easily combined to form a GPU-based computing cluster. The system competes with CPU-based clusters that employ Intel or AMD chips, but offers faster performance on some tasks while using less […]
Stat Shot: Have Chips Sales Hit Bottom?
The Semiconductor Industry Association said today that global chip sales reversed course during the month of March, rising to $14.7 billion from $14.2 billion the month before. But while there are encouraging signs that we may have reached the bottom in some industries — that chip buyers have used up the inventory they had on […]
Qualcomm, Broadcom End Their IP Feud. Broadcom To Get $891 MM
Qualcomm and Broadcom, two of the primary communications chip firms, agreed today to end their long-standing intellectual property feud, with Qualcomm agreeing to pay out $891 million to Broadcom over four years. Qualcomm, which owns the intellectual property related to the CDMA 3G wireless standard, has been defending itself from patent infringement claims made by […]
Broadcom’s Emulex Bid Inspired by Cisco’s Data Center Push
Broadcom made an unsolicited bid of $764 million for Fibre Channel chipmaker Emulex this morning, a deal that offers a 40 percent premium over Emulex’s share price at Monday’s market close. Broadcom, which is an industry leader in Ethernet chips that help connect servers inside the data center, is now trying to get its hands […]
Optics Research Blasts Beyond 150 Gbps
Four research universities say they have reached networking speeds of 170 gigabits per second (Gbps) using a hybrid type of optical semiconductor. The team used a special manufacturing process to create a waveguide that mixes four 42.7 Gbps signals, creating a multiplexed 170.8 Gbps signal. If we want to keep clogging our tubes with HD […]
The Cloud Makes Computers Truly Cheap and Truly Personal
As computing becomes cheaper, smaller and more mobile, our gadgets are morphing from desktops into notebooks and from netbooks into smartphones. But rather than focus on how small or cheap these devices can become, forward-thinking companies should focus on how their constant connection to the Internet changes what they can do with a pile of chips, […]
Is Microsoft Turning Away From Commodity Servers?
This week’s news of a chip designer leaving Sun to work for Microsoft could be a sign that the Redmond giant is trying to build a closer relationship between its software and others’ hardware as a way to boost performance of applications and use the underlying chips more efficiently. It may be trying to optimize […]
Intel Going Mobile With Moorestown, Pushing Nehalem Everywhere
Intel made a series of announcements last night that push its low-power Atom processor closer to the smartphone side of the mobile computing spectrum. It announced more details of its Moorestown platform aimed at mobile Internet devices. The platform is coming in 2010 and includes an Atom processor that consumes 10x less power when idle; […]
The Hunt for a Universal Compiler Gets $16M
Researchers at Rice University have scored $16 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a universal compiler that will run on heterogeneous hardware and multicore platforms, which are found in everything from supercomputers to embedded systems, such as those used in routers or game consoles. If the research succeeds, the result will be […]
Qualcomm May Slow Verizon’s LTE Plans
Verizon has been aggressively pushing its fourth generation wireless network plans, which would bring Long Term Evolution, or LTE, to 20-35 markets by the end of 2010. But in the interconnected world of telecommunications, the desires of a vendor can be waylaid if all the pieces of the puzzle aren’t there in time. And for […]
Intel Promotes Broadband and Itself
Intel released its proxy today, and in it was some blatant self-promotion that caught my eye. The chipmaker said that by making its proxy materials available online for the past two years, it’s saved some $4.5 million in printing and postage costs and avoided generating the equivalent of 8 million pounds of carbon dioxide and […]
Why You Should Care About Intel’s New Server Chip
Intel today unveiled its latest and greatest Nehalem chip for servers (now known as the Xeon 5500 series), setting off a round of announcements and articles comparing technical specifications across server vendors. And at 2.93 GHz (with certain tweaks it can get up to 3.33 Ghz), indeed, the chip is screamingly fast. Which is all […]
GigaOM Spring Cleaning: Motorola and Others Hit the Dustbin
We’re no rating agency here at GigaOM, but Om and I got together this week to figure out our coverage priorities for the coming months — let’s call it a spring cleaning — and decided there are five companies that we’re just not going to spend a lot of time on anymore. Nortel , AMD, […]
UWB Meltdown Continues, WiMedia Alliance Disbands
Technology standards don’t die a quick death in most cases. For years after the market has abandoned a failed standard, it still exists in orphaned products hoping for eventual resurrection. Yesterday, EETimes reported another step in the long road to obsolescence for Ultra-wideband saying the WiMedia Alliance, a standards body promoting UWB, has shut […]
Intel Threatens AMD’s Right to Make Chips
Advanced Micro Devices said in a securities filing today that Intel has threatened its ability to make x86 chips, which includes AMD’s PC and server CPUs but not its ATI graphics chips. AMD licenses the right to the x86 architecture from Intel under a cross licensing agreement, that is a well kept secret.
When AMD announced […]
Hybrid Computers Will Hide in the Cloud
Heterogeneous computing, where hardware vendors mix a variety of processors (graphics processors, CPUs, embedded chips or DSPs) on a server to increase energy efficiency and processing speed, will become a reality in the data center in the next decade, says an IBM executive. Such arrangements increase complexity and can cause headaches for developers and customers, […]
Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?
The way we use computers is changing, as device makers and users emphasize mobility and incredible graphics. I’ve argued that these trends signal the end of x86 computing, but what I’ve ignored is Intel’s drive to bring its brand of x86 computing to these markets, which are traditionally based on other instruction sets. If it […]
Texas Instrument Places a Risky Mobile Bet
Our mobile phones are getting smarter, even as our laptops are getting dumber. Instead of packing fast processors into a notebook, PC makers are stripping them down into netbooks and other devices they can sell for less. Meanwhile, our mobile phones are looking more like mini computers with multicore processors, larger screens and improved graphics. […]
Big Computer Brains Need Big Memory Bandwidth
As semiconductors try to get faster without breaking the laws of physics (not that researchers aren’t trying that, too) multicore processors have become all the rage. Quad-core chips are commonplace in servers nowadays, and six-core chips have been launched this year. But after a certain point adding more processor cores doesn’t improve performance for certain […]
TI Wants to Use DSPs for Low-power Computing
Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to build a software framework that would enable researchers to run […]
Computing+Connectivity+Application=TI’s Formula for MID
As technology companies try to define the slew of devices that are smaller than a laptop or bigger than a smartphone, the mobile Internet device is one of the most vague. Basics such as screen size, whether or not it will have voice and other items are still up for debate. Today I visited Texas […]
Intel Inside Becomes Intel Everywhere
Intel’s low-power Atom processor for mobile devices didn’t just get its name because it’s small, but because Intel wanted it to be the building block for the Internet of Things. In a conference call today, Intel announced four new variations on the Atom processor — including a 1.33 GHz chip and the ability to run […]
Top 10 Tech Companies That Pay Engineers The Most
Before I left for India, I asked folks at Glassdoor.com, a Sausalito, Calif.-based company that that tracks employee satisfaction, to run a custom query for me. I wanted to find out which 10 publicly traded companies had the best pay packages for their engineers. Whenever we have a slump here in Silicon Valley, there is […]
A Tour of Processors From WWII Through the ’70s
Earlier this week I visited Centaur Technology, the guys who design the processor for VIA Technologies’ chipsets. Centaur CEO and Founder Glenn Henry chatted with me about low-power processors and the future of mobile computers. But he also graciously showed me around a room known as the Computer Museum, where he keeps a collection of […]
VIA Technologies Hit By Intel’s Atom Bomb
When Intel announced its low-power Silverthorne chip in 2007 aimed at the mobile computing market, the folks at Centaur Technology, who had been designing low-power x86 chips for mobiles under Taiwanese parent company VIA Technologies, were vindicated. They also suddenly faced direct competition from the giant in the industry.
“Intel has made this a legitimate marketplace […]
How Low Can We Go? Gartner Sees Bigger Drop in Chips
Gartner said today it expects chip sales to drop by 24 percent in 2009 — an unwelcome revision to its previous forecast of a 16 percent drop issued in December. Back in November, when the sky started falling, it had expected (hoped for?) a slim 1 percent growth rate for 2009. Now, the research firm […]
Microsoft Designing Cloud Data Centers From the Silicon Up
Microsoft today is expected to announce a research and development program called Cloud Computing Futures that aims to look at how the data centers underlying cloud computing can operate as efficiently as possible. The idea behind this year-old effort that will emerge from stealth mode at Microsoft’s TechFest event in Redmond, Wash., today is to […]
Smartphones and Netbooks: Closer Than Kissing Cousins
You know how you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover? Well, when it comes to smartphones and netbooks, a semiconductor research firm is predicting that in fact the cover — or rather, the device casing — may soon be one of the only ways to tell the two apart. Portelligent has analyzed […]
The End of x86 Domination: AMD Is Cool With That
The shift to mobile computing emphasizes the split between two distinct markets for the processor vendors that make the brains of computers. There’s the consumer-facing devices, which include everything from smartphone to laptops, and the server side, which offers content to consumer devices through the cloud.
That split is a reaction to how people use their […]
The Rise of the Mega Data Center
Behind popular web services such as Facebook, Google and Amazon’s AWS are racks and racks of computers serving up millions of pages or providing raw computing power. The use of thousands of servers to deliver one application or act as a pool of computing resources has changed the way that chipmakers and computer vendors are […]
Intel/Nvidia Catfight Is About More Than IP
Intel on Monday night filed suit to stop graphics chipmaker Nvidia from tying its graphics chips to certain future Intel CPUs. The suit filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery alleges that Nvidia doesn’t have the right to integrate a Nvida GPU with future Intel processors, such as the high-end Core i7 chip code-named Nehalem, […]
Texas Instruments to Offer a Champion Chipset for Mobile
Texas Instruments is expected to this week release details of its next-generation application processor, the OMAP 4 family of chips, which has made my love for Nvidia’s APX25000 processor grow cold. I’m faithless when a chipmaker shows me the prospect of 1080p video playback, 10 times the web surfing speed, a 20 megapixel camera and […]
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