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Motorola Betting Billions on New Handset Spinoff

After several years of bleeding money, Motorola’s handset division is finally stemming losses thanks to co-CEO, Dr. Sanjay Jha, betting on Android. Jha will now head up the soon-to-be-spun-off division, to be called Motorola Mobility, in which the carrier will sink $3-$4 billion of cash. Read More »

Things are looking dire for dead tree media of all sorts as the consumer electronics industry takes aim at newspapers, magazines, and the humble mass of paper known as a book. But between iPhones, dedicated e-readers and the much anticipated tablet, what does the consumer … Read More »

 
 

Intel Buys Wind River To Put a Computer In Every Toaster

Intel today said it plans to acquire Wind River Systems for $884 million — a deal that gives the world’s largest chipmaker control of development software and operating systems for devices that range from cell phones to routers. Intel last year made a big … Read More »

As Devices Converge, Chip Vendors Girding For a Fight

The computing world is undergoing a significant shift as consumers and businesses access and store more of their information in web-based applications, get their software delivered as a service or even download music and movies to their PCs on demand. This trend is enabled by better … Read More »

Intel Going Mobile With Moorestown, Pushing Nehalem Everywhere

Intel made a series of announcements last night that push its low-power Atom processor closer to the smartphone side of the mobile computing spectrum. It announced more details of its Moorestown platform aimed at mobile Internet devices. The platform is coming in 2010 and includes … Read More »

Big Computer Brains Need Big Memory Bandwidth

As semiconductors try to get faster without breaking the laws of physics (not that researchers aren’t trying that, too) multicore processors have become all the rage. Quad-core chips are commonplace in servers nowadays, and six-core chips have been launched this year. But after a certain point … Read More »

Intel Follows the Crowd With Integrated Chips

Today Intel detailed its plans to stop focusing on horsepower and think about the whole car. The chipmaker has decided to stop pushing Gigahertz (basically, how fast your computer can think), and start integrating radios in one package, or on a single chip — a … Read More »

Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing

Freescale said Monday it would offer an ARM-based chip that could lead to a $200 Linux-based netbook, offering about twice the amount of usage on a single battery charge as Intel’s Atom processor allows. Freescale’s efforts are nothing new (only AMD has so far stayed … Read More »

Samsung Snubs Qualcomm, Builds 4G Chips

Samsung Electronics is making its own WiMAX and LTE baseband chips for wireless handsets, according to an article in EETimes. The move by the Korean electronics maker shows how much opportunity it sees as the wireless industry transitions to 4G, and the fortunes of the … Read More »

Cisco's New Router Shows Need for New Processors

Cisco today announced a new edge router capable of moving 6.4 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 200 full length movies — per second. Om anticipated the product last week, pointing out that the influx of data traveling over the Web requires … Read More »

Nokia Siemens Networks Makes Deeper Cuts

Nokia Siemens Networks plans to cut an additional 1,300 employees as part of an overall restructuring. The telecommunications equipment maker has cut about 6,000 workers and plans to lay off a total of about 9,000 before its restructuring is complete. Read More »

Sun Microsystems to Lay Off 350

Sun Microsystems plans to lay off about 350 employees in January. The computer systems maker said in a WARN letter that it would lay off 352 people between January 5 and January 25 across the U.S. citing a “need to reduce overall spending in its fiscal … Read More »

More Must Reads

Texas Instruments said today on its earnings call that it plans to sell its merchant baseband processor business — the division that makes off-the-shelf wireless chips for handsets. The company plans to keeps its OMAP applications processor business and will continue to make custom-radios for … Read More »

Alcoa, the world’s largest aluminum company, this week slashed its growth forecast and suspended its stock repurchasing program, battening down the hatches as the global credit crunch continues to hurt demand. My feeling is that aluminum is the canary in the coal mine and is foretelling … Read More »

Freescale Semiconductor said this afternoon that it will consider strategic options for its wireless chip business, including its possible sale. Anyone looking at the varied business units of the former in-house chip division of Motorola would have seen this coming. Read More »

A study out today from research firm iSuppli shows that operating margins in the chip industry have declined from the upper teens to the single digits, making the industry more cutthroat than ever. The numbers paint a grim picture for AMD, Freescale and NXP, all … Read More »

AMD sells digital TV chip division to Broadcom for $193 million in cash. It is part of companies desire to be an asset-lite company. Read More »

Dr. Sanjay Jha has left his position as COO of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) to become the Co-CEO of Motorola Inc. and the CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices, the new handset division. The handset division, which has struggled … Read More »

The iPhones have been unboxed and torn down, so now it’s the Wall Street watchers’ turn to tally up who won and who lost among the companies that provide chips for the envy-inducing device. The big winner is Infineon with … Read More »

The move to 4G will not be cheap. Carriers must consider network upgrade costs and a refresh of their handsets, not to mention the issue of backhaul. Will they attempt wireless backhaul? Wait for fiber? One way or another, by 2013 carriers worldwide will … Read More »

Parallel processing isn’t just for supercomputers or GPUs anymore. Computer makers are throwing multiple cores at everything from servers to your printer. But the focus on horsepower misses a crucial problem associated with adding more processors. To really take advantage of them, you have to rewrite … Read More »

Freescale should get ready for change. I visited the Austin-based chip maker yesterday to talk about wireless and networking chips as well as broad trends in the industry, and walked away realizing that the firm needs to split itself up in order to survive. The company has … Read More »

Between the laptop and the mobile phone lies…something. Intel and Qualcomm may differ on what that something is, but both firms have determined to tap into growth — real or imagined — in the ultramobile PC space, following on the heels of device makers ranging … Read More »

Don’t you just hate it when you spend $1 billion building something, only to find out it’s obsolete within a decade? That’s the fate of semiconductor managers who have old manufacturing facilities filled with old equipment. The question is how to make the best of a … Read More »

I spent my morning in a lecture hall here in Austin, Texas, listening to the heads of manufacturing at three different semiconductor fabrication plants talk about the future of their aging facilities. (Solar isn’t the only thing an older fab can be used for, but I’ll … Read More »

Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, have been around for a while, measuring everything from the air pressure in tires to the moisture in clothes dryers. But each new innovation leads to the possibility of selling millions of chips into popular consumer devices — and when it comes … Read More »

Futurometer, which tracks popular phrases online and in media, takes a gander at Google vs Microsoft. Results are well, like the stock market.. (via) Read More »

If all the apps for Skype are going to be as interesting as Qzoxy, then we got something. Stuart has an elaborate post which outlines the benefits of Qzoxy. Read More »

PalmOne announced Treo 650, and the whole world has gone into a bit of a froth. Playing me pre-ordained role of the unofficial hype-buster, I will try to add some sense and sensibility to this madness. Treo 650, is not going to be in … Read More »

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