Chips

IBM has designed a new $100 million supercomputer, called "Roadrunnner," that's powerful enough to operate at 1 petaflop -- a cool 1 thousand trillion calculations per second. That's twice as fast as the next closest supercomputer -- the IBM Blue Gene system -- and nearly three times as fast as othe...

OPINION

Computex: All Things Non-iPhone

Last week was Computex, but today everyone is focused on the likely launch of the iPhone. Given that some of the announcements at the show will have an impact on the future of devices like this, and that some of you will likely want to read something while standing in line, let's look at Computex vs...

IBM researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, have prototyped a new method for cooling microprocessors stacked on top of each other, creating a 3-D processor that could keep Moore's Law running strong for the next decade. Key to the effort is water, which seems to be the...

AMD has released a new mobile processor platform, its latest contender as it battles for market share with archrival Intel. Codenamed "Puma," the offering includes Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile processors with ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series Graphics and wireless networking hardware from Atheros, Broad...

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia has introduced a new family of processors aimed at the burgeoning industry of mobile Internet devices. "Tegra" is the name of a new line of tiny processors smaller than a dime that Nvidia is calling the world's smallest computer on a chip. More than just small in size, the ...

Taiwanese chipmaker Via Technologies announced its new line of low-powered Nano processors, formerly codenamed "Isaiah," Thursday. The new processor family offers up to four times the performance of Via's C7 processor line while featuring the same power requirements, the company said. Aimed primaril...

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has announced an initiative designed to give gamers a clearer picture of what systems will and will not match their needs when buying a PC. Nearly 66 percent of PCs sold in 2007 included only the bare minimum of functionality, according to findings from Jon Peddie Re...

A trio of semiconductor companies have banded together in a joint effort to push the industry into transitioning to a larger, 450mm-sized wafer by 2012. Led by Intel, Samsung and TSMC, the idea is to line up the industry so that all of the required components and manufacturing needs are developed in...

Researchers at HP Labs have proven the existence of the "memristor," a component of electrical circuits that could lead to computer systems with memories that never forget, the company announced Wednesday. The memristor -- short for "memory resistor" -- was previously only theorized to be the fourth...

AMD has announced the availability of three new triple-core x86 processors in its Phenom X3 lineup. New offerings include the 8750, the 8650 and the 8450, with power levels ranging from 2.4 to 2.1 gigahertz. Appropriately enough, the triple-core X3 lineup seems to play well in the middle ground betw...

Intel on Wednesday unveiled the Centrino Atom family of low-power processors for mobile Internet devices. It also announced a new class of inexpensive, simple Internet-centric computers, called "netbooks," which will hit the market later this year, and new developments in other chip families. The ce...

AMD announced Thursday the release of its triple-core Phenom processors, the X3 8000 series. A first for the PC industry, the triple-core chips are aimed at gamers and digital media enthusiasts for whom performance and price are paramount, the company said. The Phenom X3 processors have been designe...

Sun Microsystems has locked down a $44.29 million research deal with which it could develop a "macrochip" that speeds up ultra-complex computing processes through laser technology. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has finalized a 5 1/2-year contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects A...

Intel this week laid out its lineup of new products, which take dead aim at some of the latest hot buttons in computing. One is the Dunnington CPU, with six cores, which will be introduced in the second half of this year, and will support FlexMigration, a technology that allows live virtual machine ...

Researchers at IBM have moved a step closer toward the creation of an on-chip optical network, the tech giant said Monday. Calling it a "significant advance," IBM announced the development of the world's tiniest nanophotonic switch designed to route optical data between cores on next-generation high...

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