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Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental

Elemental Technologies has raised $13 million to expand internationally, but the cool story behind this company is that it is selling its GPU-transcoding servers to everyone from HBO Go to Comcast. This makes Elemental an arms dealer in the war over the future of TV. Read More »

Qualcomm can’t find enough capacity to manufacture chips designed for mobile phones. These troubles will become more common as the physics that govern how we make semiconductors buckles under the demands of our increasingly mobile lives, where we demand low power and high performance. Read More »

 
 

Japan's K supercomputer is the fastest in the world.

In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read More »

Intel is very serious about low power chips, although it won’t have them until 2013. The company showed off the long-rumored Haswell chips at its developer forum on Tuesday, which it says can can run all day and offer a 20x reduction in power. Read More »

Microsoft and Intel unveiled initiatives Tuesday that show how the Wintel partners are trying to separately navigate a new post-PC world. Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, which will work on ARM-based tablets and computers while Intel announced a partnership with Google to optimize its chips for Android. … Read More »

Mobile phone manufacturer HTC has purchased VIA Semiconductor’s graphics business. The deal is indicative of the need for compelling graphics on mobiles as well as an admission that mobile device makers may get an edge if they can bring some silicon capabilities in house. Read More »

Mobile video is here to stay whether it’s chatting with friends via Skype or streaming movies from Netflix. Even Adobe’s Flash player has a place in the Apple-definedpost-PC era judging by several announcements showing application providers and chipmakers marrying various video codecs to their silicon. Read More »

If you didn’t think computing’s future was both visual and mobile, then Nvidia’s decision to buy wireless radio startup Icera clinches it. The $367 million cash deal is setting Nvidia up for a competitive battle with Qualcomm in the mobile application processor market. Read More »

Nvidia said today Intel will pay the graphics chipmaker $1.5 billion as part of a legal settlement. The agreement shows how fast things are changing for Intel and the computing industry as power efficiency is trumping performance, and entertainment is winning out over productivity. Read More »

Although smartphones and tablets with dual-core CPUs are on tap for next year, LG will offer one this year. The company announced the Optimus 2X with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip, which will boost overall performance, bring faster webpage loads and offer 1080p video recording and playback. Read More »

After trying get its chips in mobile devices for some time, Nvidia appears to be on the verge of success in both the hot smartphone and tablet markets; its capable Tegra 2 chip will reportedly power the LG Star smartphone and Motorola’s anticipated Motopad tablet. Read More »

After showing off its Tegra line of mobile processors for two years, Nvidia may finally have a big product win as LG Electronics will use a Tegra applications processor in a number of smartphones this year. Is this the first of many Nvidia-powered products to come? Read More »

More Must Reads

Growth in tech areas like mobile and cloud computing has been a start contrast from other areas of the U.S. economy, but IT spending, Cisco’s stock, PC buying habits and other indicators show that tech is not immune from the larger bear market. Read More »

Just as general purpose computing paved the way for specialized machines, general purpose clouds are going to evolve into specialized clouds. Like the Nvidia GPU-based cloud, launched today. It uses Tesla GPUs and 3D web services software and is targeting entertainment centric companies and services Read More »

With its new accelerated processor unit AMD is following its rival Intel down a path to keep x86 chips both powerful and power efficient as computing goes mobile for consumers and requires millions of processor cores running a “cloud” on the server side. Read More »

Nvidia today said its graphics processors will be in a new IBM server used for high-performance computing and webscale deployments. IBM’s iDataPlex servers will combine CPUs with GPUs for faster compute using less energy. As ARM eyes the data center, Nvidia’s success should be a lesson. Read More »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

Nvidia is moving further into the business of selling hardware, rather than just chips, with its new reality server that uses its graphics processors to offer photo-realistic 3-D images. The server uses an array of GPUs and Nvidia’s iray software to serve up the realistic … Read More »

Netbooks, as they were originally envisioned, may already be a dying breed. It’s all thanks to the PC industry, which, instead of innovating on what seemed like a promising form factor, has turned it into the all-too familiar notebook, except cheaper. The problem with PC makers … Read More »

Ask a netbook owner why he or she bought one of the small laptops and you’re sure to get a number of reasonable answers. However, the response likely won’t be, “For the killer graphics performance!” Intel’s GMA 950 core has been the bread-and-butter hardware solution for … Read More »

Without the Universal Serial Bus standard we’d live in a world that Apple, with its infinite variations of specialized port formats and cable changes, would love to make possible. Think of the margins! But even the design-centric Apple has succumbed to the lure of … Read More »

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 »

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 »

When it comes to the way people interact with technology, the lines between business and personal have been erased, according to Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. Speaking on his third-quarter earnings conference call yesterday, Chambers said: I carry the same two devices in my business life … Read More »

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

You know that saying –- if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Same goes for portable personal computers — whether you call them netbooks or laptops. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia agrees. “Netbooks are not a … 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 »

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