Chips

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...

Windows May Get an ARM Twist

Microsoft may unveil a version of its Windows operating system that runs on the ARM chip platform at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas in Jan., according to anonymous sources who said the software will be tailored for battery-powered devices such as tablet computers and other han...

South Korea's LG Electronics on Thursday unveiled the LG Optimus 2X, a smartphone with a dual-core processor. This uses Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor, making for faster, smoother Web browsing and a better multitasking experience, LG said. The Optimus 2X will be released with Android 2.2; it will be upg...

China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, at a high-performance computing conference in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia, whose Tesla M2050 graphics processing units were used in the supercomputer. Linpack i...

Intel the ARM Wrestler

Intel plans to pull out all the stops to conquer the tablet PC market, CEO Paul Otellini announced this week. Intel will use all of the assets at its disposal to win this segment, he said. Intel will offer tablets running Meego, the operating system that's a melding of its and Nokia's technologies.

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