chip

I know that the Green Goosesteppers mean well.

I know that they are saving the world from itself and preserving it for those who currently need to chew gum and smoke pot simultaneously in order to pass from one hour to the next.

However, I am a little concerned that, as we are all increasingly placed under surveillance, we will soon be called out for our supposed moral, as well as legal, deficiencies.

Please, for example, look at Cleveland. I don't know whether the city has decided to climb the Mount of Moral High Ground because of the departure … Read more

Now that news related to the iPhone 4 launch has cooled down, iPad rumors are heating up. The latest suggest a speedier and possibly smaller-screened tablet device from Apple as early as January.

Digitimes claims to have the drop on Apple's first revision to the wildly successful iPad. According to the report, Apple will beef up the speed of the iPad by swapping the Apple-built A4 processor with a Cortex-A9 and replacing the 256MB of RAM with the same 512MB currently found in the iPhone 4.

Interestingly, the report also claims that Apple will release a 7-inch version of … Read more

In early 2010, a research project found a simple swipe of a diagnostic biochip to be 93 percent "specific" in detecting which of 52 patients being studied had malignant oral cancer lesions.

Now, the international research team announces that it has been awarded $2 million from the National Institutes of Health to develop the test, which involves removing cells with a brush, placing them on a chip, and inserting that chip much like a credit card into an analyzer, with results ready in 8 to 10 minutes.

Such a fast turnaround should result in shorter waiting times, fewer … Read more

Rumor has it that Apple is buying millions of CDMA chipsets for a Verizon iPhone launch, according to TechCrunch.

The tech blog published a story Sunday citing unnamed sources that said Apple ordered millions of CDMA chips from Qualcomm in what looks like preparation for a Verizon Wireless iPhone. TechCrunch said that the chipset order is due for December, which could mean a January launch for a Verizon iPhone.

AT&T and all the other carriers around the world that are selling the iPhone use a network technology called GSM. Verizon Wireless uses a competing technology called CDMA. The main supplier of CDMA chips is Qualcomm. So if Apple is indeed buying CDMA chipsets, then it would make sense that it might be developing a Verizon iPhone.

Speculation about a potential Verizon iPhone has popped up periodically since the iPhone's runaway success began in 2007. It's been reported that Verizon originally turned down the exclusive rights to offer the phone due to unappealing demands from Apple. Recently, there's been much talk about Verizon possibly offering the iPhone in January.

Whether Verizon will get an iPhone has never really been in question--rather it's been a question of when. I've said in the past that I believe such an iPhone wouldn't be available until next summer at the earliest, since a Verizon iPhone would likely support Verizon's new 4G technology, LTE.… Read more

Revenue for chipmakers could reach $310 billion this year, helping the industry reach a record in sales growth, according to a report released Tuesday by iSuppli.

Stronger prices and ongoing demand for smartphones and flat-panel TVs will be the two driving forces behind the surge in sales, iSuppli said. The record revenue would represent a gain of 35 percent from 2009, better than expected and higher than iSuppli's May forecast of 31 percent growth.

"The semiconductor market already was in for beefy growth in 2010 because of strong consumer demand for electronic products," Dale Ford, senior vice … Read more

Samsung reported on Friday a record profit for its second quarter, triggered by a rebound in demand for computer memory chips and by rising sales for LCD TVs.

For the quarter ended June 30, the electronics company earned 4.28 trillion Korean won ($3.6 billion), an 83 percent leap from the 2.33 trillion won it earned in the prior year's second quarter. Operating profits, which are sales minus expenses, also reached record levels, rising 88 percent to hit 5.01 trillion won, while sales grew 17 percent to 37.89 trillion won.

Samsung attributed the strong results … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices passed Nvidia in graphics chip shipments in the second quarter, according to a report from a marketing research firm on Wednesday, adding to Nvidia's woes.

AMD's ATI graphics unit took 51 percent of the standalone, or "discrete," graphics chip market compared to Nvidia's share that was just shy of 49 percent, according to Mercury Research, a Cave Creek, Arizona firm that tracks graphics chip shipments. This is a sharp reversal from the same period a year ago when Nvidia had about 59 percent of the market and AMD had just under 41 … Read more

Intel has added a second six-core desktop chip to its roster of high-end processors used to crunch through the most demanding games and multimedia applications.

The Core i7-970, announced Sunday, is priced at $885 and follows the six-core i7 980X ($999) released earlier this year. Like the 980X, it has 12MB of L3 cache memory and is made on Intel's latest 32-nanometer manufacturing process.

Unlike the Extreme Edition 3.33GHz 980X, however, it is rated at 3.2GHz and has a "locked" CPU multiplier, which means it is not marketed as a chip that is officially eligible … Read more

The graphics chip has become one of the big legal battlegrounds for Intel.

To get a better understanding of what all of the legal wrangling is about, I asked an expert to describe the technology underlying the court battle between Intel and the world's largest purveyor of standalone graphics chips, Nvidia.

To date, the antitrust actions against Intel have focused on the sales practices for central processing units, or CPUs, an area where Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have been skirmishing for decades. In December, however, the Federal Trade Commission, in effect, inserted itself into the legal wrangling between Intel and Nvidia when it alleged in a complaint that Intel was engaged in anticompetitive practices in the graphics chip market.

Intel and the FTC are currently trying to negotiate a settlement, with a deadline of July 22. If they don't reach an agreement, the FTC case against Intel will go to trial, slated to begin on Sept. 15. The suit (Intel) and countersuit (Nvidia) are expected to be addressed in some form if there is a settlement, in addition to the longstanding AMD issues.

Nvidia, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based neighbor of Intel, is the world's leading supplier of "discrete," or standalone, graphics chips but takes a distant second place in overall market share to Intel, which supplies "integrated" graphics built into the chipsets that accompany all of its processors.

One of the core contemporaneous issues in the legal squabbling is Intel's Nehalem design. (Nehalem is Intel's latest chip architecture and includes processors such as the Core i3, i5, and i7.) With the introduction of the Nehalem chip architecture, Intel has asserted, via court filings, that Nvidia, in effect, does not have the right to attach chipsets to Intel CPUs anymore--locking Nvidia out of a potentially large market. (Intel claims it has the legal right to do so because the technology has changed.) Before Nehalem-based chip designs emerged, Nvidia had supplied chipsets for Apple's MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, for example. Now, it is prevented from doing so.

And the dynamics of the market are changing quickly as Intel yanks the graphics function out of the chipset (which is a separate piece--or pieces--of silicon) and moves it onto the CPU itself. In other words, what used to be a CPU is now, for Intel, the functional equivalent of both a CPU and GPU, or graphics processing unit.

Via an e-mail exchange, I asked David Kanter about the technology behind the case. Kanter is an editor and analyst at Real World Technologies, which covers chip technology in depth.

The key technological issues in the case are the connection technologies. Can you describe them?… Read more