chips

Intel retained its hefty grip on the chip market last year with healthy revenues and a record market share.

Ending 2011 as the top chip supplier, Intel carved out 15.6 percent of the market, a gain of 2.5 points from 2010, research firm IHS said today.

The latest figure proved to the highest at least since 2001 when the company took home a 13.9 percent share. Over the last five years, Intel's share has varied from 11.9 percent to 13.9 percent.

Strong sales growth and a major acquisition both contributed to the surge in … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices is hoping to please Web-hosting providers with a new platform for single socket, dedicated hosting.

The idea is to offer growing businesses more scalability with denser and more power-efficient environments. Customers should also have a seamless, "desktop-like" experience and infrastructure with server-class reliability and security.

Specifically, the new AMD Opteron 3200 Series processor is touted to offer a more efficient bang per buck as the enterprise-class platform is said to offer up to 60 percent better performance per dollar and use up to 19 percent less power per core.

The Opteron 3200 Series also falls … Read more

Brian Tong and Molly Wood give you blow-by-blow analysis on the new iPad announcement, including rewriting the lyrics to John Mayer's "Your Body is a Wonderland," specifically to accommodate the new iPad. Which, in case you haven't guessed by now, is just called "the new iPad."

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Even with a big boost in display resolution, the latest iPad will still have 10 hours of battery life and nine hours on the 4G LTE cellular network, Apple claims.

During the launch of the new iPad today, Apple said the tablet will include a high-definition "retina display" powered by a quad-core A5X chip and other features such as an improved camera and high-definition video recording.

The enhanced graphics put a substantial new processing load on the iPad--and a greater demand for power, Apple executives said during the launch. But the new iPad will continue to have 10 … Read more

Researchers in Canada say they've built a device that will help them study changes in red blood cells caused by the most common species of malaria parasites, plasmodium falciparum, which causes the most lethal form of a disease that claims almost a million lives every year.

The microfluidic device, which is just 1 x 2 inches, is not a diagnostic tool but rather a way to test potential treatments--a crucial step in the fight against malaria, which is constantly evolving to develop resistance to drugs.

Typically, human red blood cells squeeze through capillaries that are narrower than the cells … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Intel has unveiled a number of new partnerships and chips as the company, which is dominant in the PC business, attempts to find the same success with mobile devices.

Intel said today it is working with ZTE, Lava International, and Orange on handsets, and with Visa on a multiyear partnership to build a mobile-payment service together. It also unveiled a trio of new Atom chips to fill out its mobile-centric product portfolio.

"We're not a stranger to the mobile market," CEO Paul Otellini said during a press conference at the Mobile World Congress trade show. He … Read more

The popularity of Apple's iPad and iPhone is driving the shift of chip spending to wireless from computers, according to IHS-iSuppli.

Global spending by the world's top device makers on chips for wireless products amounted to $58.6 billion in 2011, up 14.5 percent from $51.2 billion in 2010, according to IHS iSuppli. As a result, spending for computers was topped by wireless, which became the world's largest semiconductor spending segment for device makers--aka, OEMs or original equipment manufacturers--in 2011.

Though this is not the first time wireless spending has exceeded that of computer-related spending (… Read more

ARM can thank the booming smartphone and tablet market for its solid fourth-quarter performance.

With its chips popping up in the iPhone and an array of other mobile devices, the U.K.-based company saw its pretax profit surge 45 percent to 69 million pounds ($108 million), while its sales rose 21 percent to $217 million.

But it's actually the royalties that provided the biggest boost. The company takes home a royalty for every ARM-based product sold along with a license to use its technology, notes the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

As a result, fourth-quarter royalty sales grew … Read more

Boosted by the iPad 3, Apple's popular tablet could see sales of more than 48 million this year, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu believes.

In an investor's note released yesterday, Wu attributed his forecast to recent speculation that the iPad 3 would be a "significant update" over the existing model and will reach customers in March.

Reports have also popped up that Apple's next tablet would be powered by a quad-core chip and support 4G LTE. Though Wu didn't weigh in on the likelihood of those features surfacing, he did say that such improvements … Read more