Chipsets

"The Future is Fusion." So Advanced Micro Devices would like you to believe.

AMD is turning to a new branding strategy with the hope of infusing new life into its processor platform and the company as a whole.

The chipmaker on Thursday is expected to introduce a "smaller proof point" of the larger Fusion strategy dubbed "AMD Fusion for gaming," which is software that optimizes PCs for faster gaming.

Confused yet? Wait, there's more. To date, AMD has used the term to describe its future silicon graphics strategy that proposes to fuse the … Read more

Ask Sean Maloney about Intel's biggest challenges and biggest opportunities for growth and he'll mention the same thing: WiMax, the company's chosen broadband technology.

Maloney, an executive vice president of Intel and the chipmaker's chief sales and marketing officer, has seen waves of technology come and go since joining the company back in 1982. Recently, he got the additional responsibility of coordinating company strategy, which he said has "a good deal to do with the rapid pace of our global development."

I had the chance to talk with him last week. Maloney initially touched … Read more

IBM has added NEC to its growing list of allied companies doing research on next-generation chip manufacturing technology.

On Thursday, IBM and NEC Electronics signed an agreement for joint development of next-generation semiconductor manufacturing process technology, which includes participation in an IBM-led effort focused on 32-nanometer chips and, later, 22-nanometer chips. Currently, companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are bringing 45-nanometer chips to market.

Generally, as geometries get smaller, chips get faster and more power-efficient.

IBM has accumulated a large, eclectic group of chipmakers at its semiconductor fabrication facility in East Fishkill, N.Y., and the College of Nanoscale … Read more

The cutting-edge MacBook Air is not so cutting-edge these days. The high-profile, ultraslim notebook still comes with the same hardware that was offered initially by Apple nine months ago.

The sleek silver 3-pound notebook was announced with great fanfare back on January 15 with configurations that sported older Merom-class Intel low-voltage processors and a 64GB Samsung solid-state drive.

"I think everyone had widely anticipated that there would be some other product announcements in Steve Jobs' address (on Monday) on the notebook or computing side," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a … Read more

Update at 6:45 .p.m. with additional information about QPI licensing.

Nvidia's last-minute conference announcement has turned into a bit of shocker.

Despite all the chest thumping at its gaming conference this week, the high drama of Nvision reached its denouement with a waving of the white flag. The world's largest graphics chip supplier announced support for high-end gaming graphics using Intel silicon. This has raised doubts about its clout in the gaming PC industry, based on the reaction at many hardware enthusiast Web sites and at least one PC maker.

Representative of the shock expressed after … Read more

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not… Read more

Update on August 28 at 3:30 p.m. with comments on SLI and AMD-ATI

Nvidia is extending its support for Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors while it prepares to announce next-generation integrated graphics silicon.

The announcement marks an effort to expand Nvidia offerings on Intel's next high-end desktop platform, which had previously been referred to as "Bloomfield." Intel branded it Core i7 prior to the company's developer forum last week. Nvidia has already said that it has no intention to build a chipset for Intel's next-generation interconnect technology called QuickPath Interconnect or QPI, … Read more

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more

Update with Dunnington and Core i7 photos, text.

The latest and greatest silicon and derivative products is what the Intel Developer Forum is all about. Moorestown, Tolapai, and Canmore are just a few of the chips detailed at IDF this week, while UrbanMax, new netbooks, and the first laptops based on the quad-core mobile processor were among showcased products.

Intel Chairman Barrett brought out Carnegie Mellon University's Johnny Chung Lee, who demonstrated how cheap, off-the-shelf technology--in this case a makeshift whiteboard--can go a long way. "To be interesting today, technology has to be the fastest, the best, the brightest, the lightest, but here you can see if you sacrifice a little bit of capability and performance for dramatic savings in cost, you can have a pretty dramatic impact," Chung said.

One of the more novel devices demonstrated was the 10-inch Intel UrbanMax a computer that can switch between a laptop and tablet. This by itself isn't groundbreaking because tablet PCs from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba already do this. The novelty is the size and design: it is smaller than an ultraportable--like the Toshiba Portege--yet is designed like an oversize mobile Internet device such as Compal JAX 10. When configured as a tablet, the keyboard is hidden but can morph into a laptop by sliding out the keyboard, which tilts the screen.

An Intel official demonstrating the device said that "UrbanMax is an innovation platform from Intel. This is a product-ready concept." UrbanMax uses "Montevina" Centrino 2 small form-factor (SSF) silicon. SSF chip packaging is used in the MacBook Air and results in lower voltage and smaller size than typical Intel low-power mobile processors.

It is interesting to note that major PC makers have adopted Intel concept designs in the past. Last year, Intel offered a ultra-thin laptop concept design that was eventually adopted by HP for its Voodoo Envy 133 notebook. … Read more