processors

A shadowy surprise announcement at the end of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's press conference at the 2011 CES trade show in Las Vegas on Wednesday teased "Project Denver," Nvidia's first foray into manufacturing a CPU.

Little is known about the project, except that it's a partnership in which Nvidia will manufacture a "high-performance ARM core" for supercomputing and eventually high-end PC use. Collaboration with Microsoft was strongly hinted at, as Huang brought up a slide that displayed a recent BusinessWeek news headline about Microsoft unveiling Windows for ARM chips at CES.

ARM processors … Read more

Intel unveiled its long-awaited new line of desktop and laptop CPUs at its press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show today in a demonstration that positioned them as a way to handle high-quality video and gaming without a separate processor.

The processor lineup known as Sandy Bridge, which the company is now calling 2nd Generation Intel Core, boosts performance by grafting the graphics chip onto the CPU. It means hardware makers, especially for budget PCs, won't have to implant a separate graphics processor from rivals Advanced Micro Devices or Nvidia.

"It's about user experience, but you also … Read more

The official rollout of the first "Sandy Bridge" laptops at the Consumer Electronics Show next month will be a quad-core affair.

The chipmaker is holding an event on January 5 at CES in Las Vegas where it will debut the "Second Generation Intel Core," aka Sandy Bridge, processors. Top laptop vendors, including Lenovo and Acer, are expected to introduce systems at that time.

At a recent investor conference, Intel disclosed that the first Sandy Bridge processors will be quad core, followed by more mainstream dual-core chips.

And that's the message that the PC industry is … Read more

Google launched a mobile Google Docs update recently, enabling the writing and editing of text and spreadsheet documents, but a newly-enabled desktop mode now lets any iPad user get Google Docs on the go, for real.

It's not intuitive, but clicking on "Desktop" mode on the bottom of any document you're editing opens up a Google Docs viewer/editor that matches what you'd see in any normal computer web browser. The interface is a bit slow and reacts oddly to the iPad's on-screen keyboard (text was shifted out of the window's viewing range), … Read more

IBM has achieved a major milestone in making the dream of silicon photonics, in which computer chips send signals of light rather than electricity, into reality.

At the semiconductor industry conference Semicon in Tokyo today, IBM photonics leader Yurii Vlasov is detailing how IBM has created a chip that integrates many of the necessary elements of optical communication between a processor and other devices. Significantly, the design uses conventional rather than exotic chip manufacturing technology, involves very small components, and essentially permits a fiber-optic communication line to be attached directly to a processor.

And more significantly, it's headed for … Read more

Sluggish demand took a bite out of chip sales and shipments toward the end of the summer, says a new study out today from research firm IDC.

For the third quarter, worldwide microprocessor sales rose only 2.5 percent from the second quarter, while shipments inched up just 2.1 percent from the prior quarter. On a year-over-year basis, results were healthier, with chip sales rising 24.1 percent and shipments 8.6 percent over the third quarter of 2009.

Typically, global chip sales jump around 9 percent from the second to the third quarter, while shipments increase 10.6 … Read more

It takes time to find your way about the kitchen. We start off at a young age making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and then progress from there. Before you know it, we graduate to mac and cheese and then with this introduction to the stovetop, the world becomes the limit. Riding tandem to this development is a constantly growing knowledge of kitchen equipment. As we learn what we can do, we learn what our gear can (and cannot) do. When it comes to food processors, it doesn't take long to figure out that the big bowl is sometimes just too big.… Read more

Some kitchen appliances tend to get used quite frequently, whereas others are destined for the back of the cupboard. It's no secret what makes for a popular kitchen gadget: versatility and convenience. When it comes to these factors, few pieces of gear provide more benefit than a food processor does.

The VillaWare Food Processor supplies 500 watts of power and offers a range of attachments for ease of use and the ability to tackle most any chopping, slicing or cutting task. The 12-cup work bowl provides ample room and is easily fitted with one of the three slicing discs … Read more

So, who makes the processor humming under the new BlackBerry PlayBook's hood? That important question was not answered yesterday when RIM announced the 7-inch tablet.

Yesterday, when Research In Motion co-CEO Michael Lazaridis unveiled the BlackBerry PlayBook during the opening keynote event at the DevCon developer conference, the dual-core processor was touted by Lazaridis as a marquee feature. But little else was revealed about what is probably the single most important piece of internal hardware.

Here's what we know about the tablet, due early next year in the U.S.: The PlayBook uses "1 gigahertz dual-core processors that take advantage of built-in symmetric multiprocessing," according to Lazaridis during the keynote speech. In symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), the operating system handles all allocation of threads, or tasks, to the processors. Most current high-level operating systems have built-in support for this mode of operation, according to a description of SMP on ARM's Web site.

That open-ended statement by Lazaridis presents a few possibilities that could fit the bill. Nvidia is shipping a dual-core Tegra processor and Texas Instruments has a dual-core OMAP processor due soon. Both chips--technically referred to as application processors--are based on the ARM Cortex A9 design and support symmetric multiprocessing. And Qualcomm will offer a chipset with a dual-core processor running at up to 1.5GHz next year.

Linely Gwennap, principal analyst, the Linley Group, said the only dual-core 1GHz ARM processor that is in production today is Nvidia's Tegra 2. He also cited TI's OMAP 4, which is due to enter production in Q4 this year as a candidate.

But RIM is a longtime user of application processors from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell Semiconductor.… Read more