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Can Qualcomm Compete As Smartphones Become Computers?

Our mobile devices are getting smarter, faster and mimicking the functionality of a full-fledged PC. As the top wireless chipmaker, Qualcomm has long been the “Intel inside” for mobile phones. But can it compete against a host of new processors with better graphics and more performance? Read More »

FTC Makes Graphic Claim Against Intel

The Federal Trade Commission today sued Intel, claiming it abused its market power and cut competitors out of the marketplace — not merely with regard to rival AMD, but also as the graphics market heats up. Nvidia must be thrilled. Read More »

 
 

Has Intel Reached the Limits of x86?

Intel will rethink the market for its Larrabee chip, once destined to be a graphics processor. Does its failure to make an x86-based GPU mean that it’s reaching the limits of x86 computing as we take our devices to extremes on the low and high end? Read More »

Intel and AMD Kiss and Make Up

Intel and AMD today settled all of their various patent and antitrust disputes, with the top chipmaker paying out $1.25 billion to settle more than two decades of litigation. The two companies will also cross-license their technology over the next five years. The move … Read More »

Technology Vendors Go to Hollywood

It seems technology vendors just love the movies. Nvidia today said its graphics chips played a role in compiling and restoring footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing — a feat of image processing. Also today, Analog Devices, a maker of micro … Read More »

Can 3D Keep Intel on Top?

Intel this week announced a $12 million investment into a visual computing research program focused on using three-dimensional imaging for entertainment, data analysis, medical imaging and scientific research. The Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, and will receive the … Read More »

3 Reasons Nvidia Looks Good Despite Its Loss

Nvidia may have reported a loss of $201.3 million for its fiscal 2010 first quarter after the markets closed yesterday, and a 42 percent drop in revenue from the same period a year ago, but the company still has quite a few things going … Read More »

Nvidia Touts New GPU Supercomputer

Nvidia today unveiled a system for high-performance computing that uses four graphics processors to provide 1 teraflop of computing power, and multiple units can be easily combined to form a GPU-based computing cluster. The system competes with CPU-based clusters that employ Intel or AMD chips, but … 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 »

Hybrid Computers Will Hide in the Cloud

Heterogeneous computing, where hardware vendors mix a variety of processors (graphics processors, CPUs, embedded chips or DSPs) on a server to increase energy efficiency and processing speed, will become a reality in the data center in the next decade, says an IBM executive. Such arrangements … Read More »

Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?

Updated at the end: The way we use computers is changing, as device makers and users emphasize mobility and incredible graphics. I’ve argued that these trends signal the end of x86 computing, but what I’ve ignored is Intel’s drive to bring its brand of x86 … Read More »

TI Wants to Use DSPs for Low-power Computing

Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to … Read More »

More Must Reads

You know how you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover? Well, when it comes to smartphones and netbooks, a semiconductor research firm is predicting that in fact the cover — or rather, the device casing — may soon be one of the only … Read More »

At the Mobile World Congress trade show that wrapped up yesterday in Barcelona, the mobile and the PC world may have collided, but carriers still have the upper hand. Nvidia, for example, said it will use its Tegra chipset and Windows CE to … Read More »

Intel on Monday night filed suit to stop graphics chipmaker Nvidia from tying its graphics chips to certain future Intel CPUs. The suit filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery alleges that Nvidia doesn’t have the right to integrate a Nvida GPU with future Intel processors, … Read More »

Next week, while most Americans are lounging about in honor of President’s Day, the people responsible for your mobile phones, netbooks and cellular networks will converge on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show. Check back on Monday for clues as to what type … Read More »

Updated: Intel has started shipping a new Atom processor aimed at netbooks a bit earlier than anticipated, PCWorld reported last night. The latest Atom (dubbed N280 for those who like that sort of thing) is notable because it also contains a graphics core chipset … Read More »

A few days months ago, Stacey reported on the rumors that Microsoft is building a Microsoft-branded smartphone based on Nvidia’s Tegra chipset. It seems those rumors might be true. Doug Freedman, chip analyst with research firm Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note to his … Read More »

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 »

The desktop computer is in decline, hurt by netbooks and a grim economy. But as demand for desktops and even notebooks falls, so do Nvidia’s revenues. To keep growing sales, Nvidia is counting on scientific computing, mobility and visual computing. It’s proven it can grow … Read More »

I just got back from Nvidia’s Austin office, where I saw a demo PC running the ION platform that marries a GeForce 9400 GPU with the more powerful of the Intel Atom processors. ION seemed like a sweet deal when Nvidia launched it in December, and seems … Read More »

The drop-off in demand for personal computers is hitting the graphics chip market hard. Jon Peddie Research has issued a report showing that total GPU shipments fell to 72.4 million in the fourth quarter — down 2 percent year-over-year and 35 percent from the … Read More »

Qualcomm said today it has purchased AMD’s handheld graphics unit (acquired during AMD’s $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies) for $65 million. The deal shows that AMD is betting big on full-performance machines, from servers to laptops — rejecting its rival Intel’s  move … Read More »

Today, graphics chipmaker Nvidia said it expects its fourth-quarter sales to come in 40-50 percent lower than the $897.7 million it posted in the third quarter. That puts its revenue estimate between $448.9 million and $538.6 million — a huge drop from last year’s Read More »

Yesterday’s news that notebooks had overtaken PCs in the number of units sold last quarter owes a huge debt to Wi-Fi and a smaller one to 3G cellular networks. Without those Intel unwired commercials and images of folks surfing the web at … Read More »

Another report came out today that sees the competition between Intel, with its Atom processor, and ARM chipmakers for the lion’s share of the mobile device market as the fight of the decade. So far, Intel is winning, with its Atom processor in several … Read More »

When I read an Inquirer piece about Microsoft launching its own branded phone with a Tegra chipset by Nvidia, it struck me that this would truly be putting lipstick on a pig. The Tegra chipset and the demos shown by Nvidia of it in … Read More »

The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving … Read More »

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., in a speech at the SC08 Conference in Austin, Texas, today highlighted the democratization of supercomputing thanks to the use of standards and off-the-shelf parts. That democratization, he noted, blurs the line between high-performance computing and corporate … Read More »

For the first time ever, a supercomputer using Nvidia chips has achieved a spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released late Friday. The Nvidia-containing machine is ranked 29 and is a cluster built by NEC and Sun that uses chips from … Read More »

Two almost contradictory pieces of news came out today that prove that the next wave of computing is visual. Good graphics were once a mainstay of heavy industry for 3-D or seismic modeling, but in today’s world of digital everything and the coming 3-D web, … Read More »

Many people use their MacBooks to organize photos, watch movies or online video, and maybe transfer files to their iPod, which is why Apple’s new line of MacBooks, unveiled today, include Nvidia’s graphics processors. Read More »

A new report from ABI Research on ultra-mobile devices will warm Intel’s heart. The report estimates that the sale of all ultra-mobile devices including mobile Internet devices,  ultra-portable PCs, netbooks and basically anything larger than a phone and smaller than laptop will move from $3.5 billion … Read More »

After more than two years of pushing its scientific computing efforts, Nvidia’s graphics processors will be offered as an option in the newest line of Cray desktop supercomputers. The chipmaker plans to announce next week that its Tesla chips can be used in the … Read More »

Nvidia’s Nvision conference and celebration of all-things-graphics-processor starts today. As part of the brouhaha, the chipmaker is showcasing about 60 startups building businesses on the back of its GPU, and it’s interesting to see how many of these firms have nothing to do with gaming. … Read More »

Despite reporting a second-quarter loss last night, due in part to costs associated with the faulty packaging on some of its chips placed in thousands of laptops, Nvidia still has a plan for semiconductor domination through the GPU. But if it wants to … Read More »

Om has complained about his frustration with the 3G iPhone, which has poor reception and forces him to spend more time on the 2.5G EDGE network than he thought, but the issue may be with Infineon’s 3G chip, according to Richard Windsor, an analyst with … Read More »

This may not come as a surprise to anyone who owns an iPhone or tests set-top boxes, but wireless and consumer technologies are driving the growth of many of the largest chip vendors. According to the latest rankings released for the first half of … Read More »

Last week, Intel offered up a sneak peak of its Larrabee graphics processor, due out in 2009 or 2010 and guaranteed to raise the competitive pressure on graphics chip makers Nvidia and AMD. Unlike its existing integrated graphics chips, Larrabee will be a standalone … Read More »

Computerworld has done a nice job of encapsulating a corporate IT trend we’ve been writing about for the last couple of months with our focus on accelerator chips — among them graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD and Cell (which was designed originally for … Read More »

Elemental Technologies, a startup focused on faster transcoding, has raised $7.1 million from General Catalyst Partners and Voyager Capital. The company’s software uses the graphics processor rather than the CPU inside a computer to handle the work of ripping a DVD or video file to … Read More »

As semiconductor firms get around the limitations of making individual processors faster by putting more cores onto a single chip, the mindset of today’s software developers and engineers mindset needs to adapt. Here are five startups that have the potential to stretch multicore processors to their … 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 »

For a while there, covering the chip industry was like covering a race run by a rabbit and a cheetah. AMD was the rabbit, while Intel — with its much larger market cap and greater profits — was the cheetah. Evey now and then the Read More »

OK, so AMD refuses to comment on rumors that it plans to introduce a low-power chip aimed at the mobile Internet device market, where it would compete with Intel’s Atom chipset and offerings from several other rivals. And it refuses to claim a block diagram floated … Read More »

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