Chips

Intel has reported a major technological breakthrough in microprocessor development: the world's first 3D transistor. The Tri-Gate transistor will continue the steady delivery of computing products that are ever more powerful, ever cheaper and ever smaller, the company said. What Intel has done is r...

AMD has begun shipping production units of its 32nm quad-core "Llano" A-series accelerated processor units (APUs) with discrete-level graphics, it announced Wednesday. That's well behind Intel, which began working on the 32nm process in 2009 and began shipping 32nm processors in 2010. "Once again, A...

Last week, Oracle FUD-bombed the Itanium processor. Like Oracle's own SPARC chip and PowerPC at one time, Itanium was supposed to be the future for most everything -- but all of these chips ended up on the largest and most fault-tolerant systems each company supports. Announcing the death of any one...

Researchers at the University of Illinois claim to have made a breakthrough in phase-change materials technology that could lengthen battery life by up to two orders of magnitude, or 100 times. The team, led by Professor Eric Pop, used carbon nanotube electrodes, it stated in a paper published in Sc...

CONFERENCE REPORT

Visions of a Future Chock-Full of Chips

Twenty years from now, semiconductor chips will cost a penny apiece and will be in everything -- our clothing, our sunglasses, our contact lenses and even our toilets -- physicist Michio Kaku told an audience Thursday at the RSA 2011 convention. They'll revolutionize warfare, manufacturing and the m...

For more than a decade, polymer memory devices have lingered in the queue of novel organic candidates for "next-generation" computer data-storage-and-retrieval chip technology. The time for PMDs might finally be at hand ... even if the first application is the humble radio-frequency identification t...

OPINION

Is Apple Drifting to the Wrong Path?

History is filled with stories of companies that dominated their segment and then either fell from that high spot or fell off the map. RCA is probably the best example of a firm that went from dominance to obsolescence because, in its case, it played chicken with the U.S. government and lost. A lo...

Plastics, those ubiquitous malleable synthetic polymers so essential to the needs of virtually the entire spectrum of global business, have become the pulsing heart of the high-tech world. The universal insulator for the electrical and electronics industries, plastic materials can also be semi-insu...

Not all polymers are plastics, but all plastics are polymers. And organic polymer plastics, known mostly for being insulators, in some cases make excellent conductors and semiconductors. The term "all-polymer semiconductor" sounds almost like an oxymoron. Plastic is generally considered a poor med...

Nvidia will reportedly ship a Tegra 2 3D processor, to be used in mobile devices, this year. A leaked slide, said to be part of Nvidia's planned presentation at the Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona, Spain, in February, shows the Tegra 2 3D and mentions the Tegra 3, which is a quad-core...

AMD on Wednesday announced what it claims is the world's first accelerated processing unit for embedded systems, the Embedded G-Series. The G-Series is the embedded version of Fusion APUs the company announced earlier this month. It consists of a low-power x86 CPU combined with a DirectX 11 graphics...

This CES was full of surprises -- from Microsoft announcing Windows on ARM, to both AMD and Intel coming up with solutions no one had seen coming, to Nvidia building a Super ARM blended graphics/processor chip. And the TV company making most of the announcements wasn't Panasonic, Sony or Samsung -- ...

LIVE FROM CES

Windows ARMs Itself

Microsoft may have big things in store for the world of tablet computers. However, anyone attending CEO Steve Baller's keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday hoping to see a parade of upcoming Windows tablet devices likely left disappointed. Instead of lining up an array of almos...

LIVE FROM CES

The Bridge That Intel Built

Intel managed to draw a standing-room-only crowd at its Wednesday press event. Even those who were fortunate enough to get a seat had to fight for elbow room. The main event, of course, was Sandy Bridge, the new line of processors Intel broke news with earlier this week. Wednesday's event was a more...

Intel has reportedly revealed details about its new family of laptop and desktop processors, code-named "Sandy Bridge." The processors, which will be demoed at the CES 2011 show in Las Vegas later this week, offer better energy performance, improved 3D and graphics performance, and can overclock whe...

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