Chips

AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.

The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the SC07 supercomputing show, and executives spoke this week about the promise of "stream computing." The 9170 is designed to let high-performance computing applications take advantage of the excellent parallel performance of a graphics chip.

The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast … Read more

As rival AMD was preparing to snap up graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies, Intel was considering topping AMD's offer or going after Nvidia, according to one of the company's top executives.

In an interview with The Inquirer, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said Intel looked "pretty closely" at making a play for Nvidia or ATI, the two largest graphics chip companies in the world. Obviously, that never happened, as AMD closed its acquisition of ATI last year and Nvidia continues on as a standalone company.

Intel had some … Read more

Phone makers aren't the only ones interested in Google's Android software.

Of the 34 companies that agreed to join Google's Open Handset Alliance, Intel's decision to participate is yet another sign that the chipmaker is looking for alternative software to run on its Mobile Internet Device (MID) project. Most of the attention around Android focused on the mobile-phone market, and with good reason, as that area will be the first to get a sense of whether Google and its partners can actually make headway in this area.

But the world's largest chipmaker would still like … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--If you're not exactly sure what you want in a mobile computer, don't worry: the folks who are building them aren't entirely sure themselves.

The consensus among five panelists gathered here at the ARM Developers Conference was that this is a very interesting and confusing time to be thinking about the future of mobile computing, because the playing field is so wide open and because consumers haven't decided exactly what they want.

"It's sort of like Darwin," said Tony Milbourn, director of mobile devices at Motorola. "We don't … Read more

Two weeks after Intel signaled its future low-power intentions, ARM has unveiled its latest mobile chip design for smart phones and consumer devices that will arrive around 2010.

The Cortex A9 is an extension of the Cortex family of applications processor cores that ARM unveiled two years ago with the Cortex A8. It combines the multiprocessor support of older ARM cores with the Cortex design, ARM's highest-performance implementation to date. Several ARM partners, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Nvidia and NEC Electronics also announced plans to use the Cortex A9 in future chips for smart phones and consumer … Read more

It appears that Intel still has some work to do in getting its act together on PC graphics.

New drivers for the company's 965GM chipset, found in many notebooks and midrange desktops, still don't deliver the uniform performance increases promised earlier this year, according to testing by CNET Labs. My colleague Julie Rivera benchmarked three games on a PC with both the older drivers and the newer ones, and concluded that while some improvements could be detected, the new drivers don't do nearly enough to improve performance across multiple games.

Integrated graphics are the budget-friendly way of … Read more

It's true: You can't run software developed for PCs on ARM-based smart phones. The company's all right with that.

"In (this) category, it's still fundamentally about low power and battery life, and our ecosystem understands that and knows how to optimize for that," said Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances for mobile computing for ARM, the chip designer that dominates the mobile phone industry. "The power footprint associated with those PC apps will really drain your battery."

Lines are being drawn for the next big battle in the computer industry, and ARM … Read more

The ongoing tussle between Intel and AMD has dominated the news in recent weeks, but there's another potential battleground shaping up for Intel that could have a huge impact on personal computing.

A major topic I want to cover over the next several months is the looming showdown as the smart phone industry tries to develop more powerful computers, and the PC industry tries to build smaller and smaller computers. This week has provided a decent glimpse of Intel's vision of where it thinks the industry needs to go with its Silverthorne processor, designed for a new concept … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel's a big company, with lots of money and smart people. It will need both to take over two separate industries.

The company's official search for the next big thing is settling quite definitively on mobile computers. But this is actually two big things: not only does Intel want to create an entire new category of handheld computers called Mobile Internet Devices, it wants to set up a whole new network to service those devices.

Intel executives Dadi Perlmutter and Anand Chandrasekher laid out the company's mobile strategy Wednesday here at the Intel Developer Forum during … Read more