Chip maker not concerned about Nvidia’s in-house Tegra 4 benchmark results
TSMC's 2012 chip sales were nearly four times higher than that of Globalfoundries.
Globalfoundries and ARM have inked a multi-year agreement to jointly develop optimized system-on-chip (SoC) solutions using 20-nanometer and FinFET process technologies, the two company's announced today. The new agreement is really an extension of a long-standing collaboration between these two firms, and it also includes work on graphics processors, which are becoming ever more important in the mobile space.
As we’ve already told you, Intel’s finally – after what seems like ages – making the leap into smartphones and tablets with their Atom Z2460 processors. (Not familiar with Atom Z2460? The line previously went by the code-name “Medfield.”) Thanks to deals with Motorola and Lenovo, we may be bombarded with Atom-powered smartphones later in the year, but to hear ARM CEO Warren East tell it, we’ll be getting bombarded with, well, smartphones with crappy mobile processors.
They say the grass is always greener on the other side, and a pair of announcements from CES seem to give that old cliché some credence. Qualcomm, a major player in the mobile chip market, wants to break into PCs by stocking thin-and-light Ultrabook-style notebooks with its Snapdragon processor, while Intel’s CEO spent part of his keynote address boasting than the company has inked deals with Lenovo and Motorola to power future generations of smartphones with Atom chips.
Most of the hot new products you hear about this early in a new year come out of the desert at the CES electronics convention – which takes place next week – but Broadcom decided to kick things off early and unveil its new line of “5G Wi-Fi” chips based on the still-in-development 802.11ac standard. Yes, they push Wi-Fi faster and farther than before, and no, “5G” has nothing to do with cellular networks. It’s just Broadcom’s catchphrase for the fifth generation of Wi-Fi. But hey, marketing tricks aside, how do up to 1.3Gbps wireless speeds sound?
Flood waters may have receded in Thailand, but the hard drive industry is still reeling under the effects of the disaster. The impact hasn’t been restricted to the hard drive industry alone, though. The ensuing hard drive shortage has lead to serious supply chain disruptions in the PC industry, impacting everyone from PC vendors to chip makers.
Time to start firing the PR guys! As is the case with all technical products these days, AMD used a lot of lofty-sounding numbers and specs to make its new 8-core Bulldozer chips sound friggin’ awesome in the company’s press releases. Eight cores, four modules, a 315mm die area, two billion transistors – actually, scratch that last one. Over the past weekend, AMD contacted several publications and said that, um, somebody screwed up. Eight-core Bulldozer chips actually only have 1.2 billion transistors. Oops.
In what has to be arguably one of its most interesting revelations, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has revealed that the late Apple CEO wanted the iPad to be powered by an Intel chip. If Jobs had had his way, Intel would have found itself in the driver’s seat in the burgeoning tablet market, something the chip maker is unlikely to achieve in the coming years according to a new report by DisplaySearch.
The Terminator movies are entertaining and all, but they forget to point out one important fact in the midst of all the cybernetic shotgunning; if Skynet is ever going to actually become self-aware, it'll probably require a drastic change in the way computers process information. Hey, James Cameron – don't sweat it. IBM has your back. The company just announced it's created a series of prototype "chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition." We suspect they'll also be the key to the eventual robot revolution.
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