Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Experts say Intel has been instrumental in driving down PC prices, one of the key indicators of competition and one charge New York's Attorney General cannot easily level against Intel in its antitrust lawsuit.

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against Intel accusing it of paying computer makers rebates to illegally maintain its monopoly power and preventing AMD from gaining business with PC makers.

One of the operative charges in the complaint centers on prices. "Intel launched an illegal campaign to deprive AMD of distribution channels and consumers of product choice and lower prices," the complaint alleges.

Not so fast, say some experts. "Prices are falling, buyers are not complaining about Intel's loyalty discounts, and the lower prices produce obvious and immediate benefit for consumers," said Joshua D. Wright, professor at George Mason University School of Law, and a scholar in residence at the Federal Trade Commission until 2008.

"Given the intuitive and easy to grasp nature of the consumer benefits of discounting contracts in the Intel case, I suspect that judges will be less likely to condemn these practices without real proof of actual consumer harm. I'm skeptical that AMD, (New York), or the (Federal Trade Commission) will be able to produce that here," Wright said.

And prices continue to fall. One of the most recent examples of steep downward PC price pressure is ... Read more

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang seemed unsurprised by allegations made Wednesday by New York's attorney general that Intel has illegally tried to maintain its monopoly.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

(Credit: Nvidia)

"Where there's smoke there's probably fire. It blows my mind that's it's taken this long," Huang said in an interview Thursday, just after the graphics chipmaker posted solid fourth-quarter earnings. Nvidia competes with Intel in the PC graphics chip market.

"Even bribes and kickbacks can't stop somebody from buying our graphics processors," he said, referring to the allegations made in the lawsuit.

When contacted, Intel had no comment.

"Tactics good for AMD are tactics good for Nvidia," he added. "We have far superior products to Intel, that's how we survive by innovating far ahead of (Intel)."

Nvidia is locked in a legal battle with Intel, preventing Nvidia from making chipsets for Intel's "Nehalem" Core i series of chips--the lastest and greatest line of processors from Intel. Nvidia's Ion chipset--used in Apple MacBooks and Hewlett-Packard Netbooks, for example--has been very successful.

Huang also commented on the wave of next-generation tablets and media pads expected to hit the market next year, such as the rumored Apple tablet. Nvidia is already working with device makers who will use its Tegra chip in these designs next year.

"I think that's going to be the next big form factor," he said. "More and more people that use the iPhone would like to have a bigger iPhone. And the fact that 4g is coming--20 megabits per second. What can't you do. I think this (market) space is about to go nuts," he said.

"I really think we're on the cusp of our second personal computer revolution," he said.

An antitrust lawsuit filed Wednesday by the New York attorney general alleges a longstanding symbiotic relationship between Intel and Dell.

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo filed the federal lawsuit against Intel accusing it of paying computer makers rebates to illegally maintain its monopoly power and preventing AMD from gaining business with PC makers.

In a similar case earlier this year, the European Commission fined Intel $1.45 billion, alleging illegal rebates to PC makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard. AMD also made analogous allegations in its case filed against Intel in June 2005 that is slated to come to trial in March 2010.

And this may not be the last major case filed against Intel that makes these allegations. The Federal Trade Commission is also expected bring charges against Intel, according to reports.

"It is the AMD case filed 4.5 years ago. It's the same case the EU brought. There's nothing significant or new here that hasn't been discovered," Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy said about Wednesday's complaint filed by the New York Attorney General. "Neither consumers--who have consistently benefited from lower prices and increased innovation--nor justice are being served by the decision to file this case now," Mulloy said.

Doling to Dell
The complaint singles out Dell as a large recipient of Intel's "largesse," echoing the 2005 AMD lawsuit. Quoting often graphic exchanges between Intel and Dell executives, the suit alleges that Intel gave Dell massive rebates totaling in the billions of dollars over a period of, at least, several years. Hewlett-Packard and IBM, among others, are also cited in the complaint, but Dell is the focus of some of the most egregious Intel behavior, as alleged by the attorney general.

"We use both Intel and AMD chips and we do provide customer choice," Dell spokesman David Frink said Wednesday. Dell used Intel processors exclusively until May of 2006, when it adopted AMD chips for the first time.

"In pure dollar terms, Dell was far and away the leader in receiving Intel's ... Read more

Chip supplier Marvell is hooking up with e-reader companies, hoping to take the lead in silicon design for this nascent market.

Entourage Edge has both a 9.7-inch e-reader display and a 10.1-inch color LCD and runs Google's Android OS on top of Marvell silicon.

(Credit: Entourage)

The market for e-readers, currently led by the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, is poised for growth, according to Weili Dai, a Marvell co-founder and general manager of the consumer and computing business unit. "The timing is right for the e-reader market to take off in volume," Dai said in an interview.

Marvell, though not a household name like Intel, is a major supplier of communications, storage, and wireless chips. Marvell, for example, supplied the Wi-Fi chip in the original iPhone and is a leading supplier of controller chips for solid-state drives.

In the e-reader market, Marvell is hoping to play a leading role in making e-readers a low-cost, mass-market device. "We're targeting a retail price of $150," Dai said. Partners include E Ink, a supplier of electronic paper displays; FirstPaper, an e-reading and advertising start-up; and Plastic Logic, an e-reader maker. Both E Ink and FirstPaper are backed by media company Hearst.

E-reader from Spring Design runs Android and integrates two displays.

(Credit: Spring Design)

The Marvell Armada 166E system-on-a-chip, which will power a number of upcoming e-readers, integrates key features onto a single piece of silicon, such as the main processor--called an application processor--and the display controller. Armada is based on intellectual property from U.K.-based ARM, whose designs power most of the world's cell phones. Marvell ships 1 billion chips per year, two-thirds of which include Marvell processors running the ARM instruction set.

Marvell processors running at 1GHz will be used in many of the initial e-readers, though Marvell has designs that scale up in performance to 2GHz, according to Dai.

One of the first products to use the Marvell chip is the Entourage Edge, which claims to be the first "dualbook"--combining an E Ink EPD (electronic paper display) with an LCD and Netbook, notepad, and audio/video player functions.

Marvell will also power the dual-screen Alex e-reader from Spring Design. Like the Edge, Alex's dual-screen display design combines a monochrome electronic paper display with a color LCD screen.

"Periodicals are the next big frontier in eReading," Gil Fuchsberg, president of FirstPaper, said in a statement. To enable better newspaper and magazine reading experiences, e-reading devices will need richer layouts and more complex content, according to FirstPaper.

Corrected on November 3 at 7:40 a.m. PST: This story initially described FirstPaper incorrectly. It is an e-reading and advertising start-up.

Intel on Monday said it is investigating a glitch that prevents an Apple iPhone from synching with certain PCs that use a new Intel chipset.

"Our leading theory is a BIOS or system configuration issue, but we are still investigating," Intel said Monday. The BIOS, or basic input/output system, is the initial code that runs when a PC is powered on. The BIOS identifies and initializes system devices such as the chipset, graphics card, and hard disk drive. Makers of PC circuit boards, aka motherboards, typically offer their own BIOS.

The problem is thought to be tied to the Intel P55 chipset and desktop motherboards from certain manufacturers, according to a report in The Register.

The Intel P55 Express chipset supports the Intel Core i7-800 and Core i5-700 series processors, according to Intel. The chipset is new and has only been available since summer.

As depicted in an "Apple Discussions" thread, on certain PCs or motherboards with the P55 chipset, Apple iTunes 9 for Windows will recognize the iPhone, but when a sync is attempted, an "error 0xE8000065" is generated, indicating an iPhone connection failure. Windows 7 is also cited as a common problem, particularly the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

"Microsoft has not seen this particular question posed in the Microsoft Answers for Windows 7 community forum, nor in any of our call centers," Microsoft told the The Register on Friday. "If we determine this to be a problem specific to Windows 7, we will post an update on the Microsoft Answers site."

The Apple Discussions thread proposes a number of possible solutions.

Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.

Hector Ruiz, chairman of Advanced Micro Devices spin-off Globalfoundries, will resign from the company in January. The announcement follows the emergence of his name in connection to the Galleon Funds insider trading case.

Ruiz "will take a voluntary leave of absence effective immediately before resigning from the company in January," according to a statement Monday from the Globalfoundries board. Ruiz had submitted his resignation to the board in September with an effective date of January 4, 2010, the statement said.

Hector Ruiz

(Credit: AMD)

The resignation comes after an unnamed executive at AMD--which turned out to be Ruiz, according to a report--was cited repeatedly in a complaint filed last month by the U.S. attorney for New York's Southern District.

The case revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund that manages $7 billion. Federal prosecutors have charged Rajaratnam and five others with securities fraud, alleging they were involved in insider trading of well-known tech companies, including Intel, Google, AMD, and IBM.

All have said they are innocent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Attorney's complaint alleges Rajaratnam and others engaged in insider-trading activity when AMD was trying to reorganize and spin off its manufacturing operations--which eventually became Globalfoundries, which is a joint venture with the Abu Dhabi government.

Ruiz, who is also former CEO and chairman of AMD, has not been charged with a crime, according to The New York Times.

He will be replaced at Globalfoundries by Alan E. "Lanny" Ross, who will serve as interim chairman, effective immediately, until a permanent chairman has been appointed by the board, according to Globalfoundries. Ross, a current member of the Globalfoundries board, was previously president and CEO of communications chip supplier Broadcom.

Ruiz joined AMD in January 2000 as president and chief operating officer, and was named chief executive officer in April 2002. He was appointed chairman of the board in April 2004, and was named executive chairman in June 2008.

Ruiz was appointed chairman of Globalfoundries when it was formed in October of last year.

He spent 22 years at Motorola, and in his last post there, served as president of the firm's Semiconductor Products Sector. Ruiz also worked at Texas Instruments in the company's research laboratories and manufacturing operations.

Though the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone have different chassis, their high-octane engines are similar.

The internal similarities begin with performance: both devices are fast. The iPhone 3GS is already distinguished for its speed. And the Droid is quickly garnering similar accolades.

The Motorola Droid has a radically different exterior compared with the iPhone but uses a speedy Cortex-A8 ARM chip like the Apple phone.

(Credit: CNET Reviews)

"The Droid makes a big leap in internal performance. Compared with its rather sluggish Android predecessors," CNET Reviews said, citing the speed at which the Droid opens applications and menus and scrolls through lists and switches display screens.

"We're really pumped to see all the industry excitement it's created," said Jeff Dougan, the OMAP 3 product marketing manager at Texas Instruments, which supplies the OMAP 3430 processor that powers the Droid. "This is the first handset that truly realizes the full potential of Android," he said, referring to Google's Android 2.0 operating system that runs on the Droid phone.

The TI processor, like the one in the iPhone, is based on an a new architecture called Cortex-A8 from U.K.-based chip design house ARM, whose wide variety of chips populate most of the world's cell phones. Dougan says most smartphones currently on the market use an older, lower-performance ARM architecture than the Cortex-A8--with the exception of the Palm Pre, which opted for the newer TI chip. The Cortex-A8 provides a "two to three times performance boost" over older architectures, according to Dougan.

Max Baron, an analyst at Microprocessor Report, says the chips in the Droid and the iPhone (see not below) are so alike that differences are more dependent on the operating systems the two chips use and how successfully each phone maker optimizes the OS. "With chips that have near-similar specs, the optimum OS and the look-and-feel of the user interface may make or break the product," Baron said.

The core of TI's OMAP3 processor.

(Credit: Texas Instruments)

"The caveat, however, is that even small differences in chips will surface and become important differentiators as soon as the market forces you to increase the screen size or add more pixels per screen, or execute more power-consuming applications," he added.

The raw MHz ratings on the chips are slightly different. The processor in the iPhone 3GS--which is believed to be based on the Samsung S5PC100 processor--runs at 600MHz, according to most accounts. The Motorola Droid's TI chip is rated at 550MHz though theoretically it can be run as fast as 600MHz, according to TI's Dougan.

Both phones also use PowerVR graphics from Imagination Technologies--a company that both Apple and Intel have invested in, testifying to how hot its ultramobile graphics technology is. The PowerVR SGX is renowned for its ability to process several million triangles-per-second--a key indicator of graphics chip performance--blowing away other phones and the previous version of the iPhone.

Other internal specifications are similar between the two phones, including memory capacity (either 16GB or 32GB) and communications chips that offer 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connections.

So, internally the Droid is every bit the iPhone's equal. And future versions of TI OMAP 3 chips that may appear in upcoming Droids will be backed by formidable ecosystems, according to Baron. "Investments in application software may lean more toward the TI components," said Baron, given TI's strong support of the entire chip ecosystem, including auxiliary chips and software development tools.

Note:: Apple's and Samsung's reluctance to release information about the processor used in the iPhone 3GS has made it difficult to determine if the chip is based on the Samsung S5PC100, according to the Microprocessor Report's Baron. Many iPhone 3GS reviews and teardowns, however, state explicitly that the iPhone's processor is essentially the Samsung S5PC100 processor.

A high-ranking IBM executive charged with insider trading connected to the Galleon Group has left the company.

Robert Moffat, a senior vice president who was once thought to be a possible future IBM chief executive candidate, had been placed on leave following charges brought by the U.S. Attorney earlier this month against him and five others.

The case revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund that manages $7 billion in funds. Federal prosecutors charged Rajaratnamm and five others, including Moffat, with securities fraud, alleging they were involved in insider trading of well-known tech companies, including Intel, Google, AMD, and IBM.

The government alleged that Moffat discussed future IBM and Sun Microsystems earnings announcements and the reorganization of Advanced Micro Devices with Danielle Chiesi, an employee of New Castle, a hedge fund.

Moffat "is no longer an employee of IBM," according to a statement by IBM on its internal communications network.

Rod Adkins, who was named acting head of IBM's Systems and Technology Group on October 19, has been appointed senior vice president, STG, according to IBM. Adkins, 51 years old, joined IBM in 1981, and has held a variety of product development, business operations, and general management positions.

Adkins served as general manager of desktop systems at the former IBM PC company. He also was general manager for Unix systems in the Systems and Technology Group.

Kerry Lawrence, Moffat's lawyer has said Moffat was "shocked" by the charges. Alan Kaufman, Chiesi's attorney, said his client would plead innocent to the charges.

If the speculation about a new MacBook Pro is on the money, the step up to Intel's quad-core mobile technology would have a profound impact on this vaunted line of Apple laptops.

Is a Core i series Apple laptop on the way?

(Credit: Apple)

So, why would Apple adopt a Core i processor in a laptop? The short answer is OS X Snow Leopard. The new operating system is designed to be better at wringing more performance out of multicore processors--and the Core i chips pack four cores.

The long answer is the Core "i" chips themselves. The Core i, a.k.a. "Nehalem," is a brand new Intel microarchitecture brimming with performance improvements over the current Core 2 design.

For starters, the recently announced mobile i7-820QM processor integrates a hefty 8MB of cache memory--compared with the 6MB in the fastest Core 2 Duo that Apple currently offers on the MacBook Pro. Generally, the larger the cache memory, the better the performance.

But Intel has done a lot more than just up the transistor count via a larger cache. While the quad-core i7-820QM is rated at 1.73GHz, a single core can be "overclocked" to 3.06 GHz. Intel does this with a technology dubbed Turbo Boost, which speeds up and slows down individual cores to meet processing and power-efficiency needs, respectively.

Need more convincing? The Core i7 also comes with Hyper-Threading, which can double the number of tasks--or threads--a processor can execute. You won't find that in the Core 2 chips.

Digital media creation also gets a boost. Intel claims up to 81 percent faster video encoding.

And the mobile Core i7 is not a power hog--relatively speaking. The i7-820QM is rated at 45 watts, less than a third of the power envelope of the desktop Core i7. With such a powerful processor, heat would be an issue of course but the 45-watt power envelope is manageable.

That said, there are reports that Apple is not bringing out any more products this year. So, along these lines, alternatively, Apple could opt initially for the upcoming "Arrandale" Core i chips--due by the beginning of next year--that are based on a more advanced 32-nanometer manufacturing process. (Current Core i processors use a 45-nanometer process.)

Arrandale integrates graphics silicon into the same chip package as the main processor--a first for Intel. Because of this high level of integration, Arrandale, however, is a dual-core chip.

But probably the closest thing to a rumored MacBook Pro refresh is the iMac, which has the same space-constrained characteristics of a laptop. The quad-core Core i7 in the new iMac "boosts application performance up to 2x over the previous-generation iMac," according to Apple--and that's what consumers can expect with a Core i series laptop.