Samsung is warning today that its coming financial results will be disappointing as prices for chips and LCDs have fallen as smartphone sales continue to slow. Samsung and Apple have both experienced sales slowdowns as they continue to push prices of smartphones higher in the face of lengthening upgrade...Read more...
Everyone wants some of what TSMC is cooking with its new 7nm process that will be used for chips from multiple companies. TSMC's 7nm production lines will be used by NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Sony, and Apple. To meet the crushing demand for the parts, TSMC is reportedly accelerating its production schedule.
Sources are...Read more...
If you needed concrete proof that we should all be amazed at just how quickly things change in the technology world, look no further. In 2009, Intel proudly boasted that it would spend around $7 billion to build a massive fabrication facility in Arizona. In the years since, the PC market has essentially been told that it's dying (and soon),...Read more...
Remember the peak of the megapixel war, where every single camera manufacturer was popping out a new point-and-shoot model with a slightly higher MP rating? It feels like we may be entering a similar leapfrog battle in the silicon world, as the race to produce chips with "more cores than the other guys" hits full...Read more...
Google's Chromecast has made a fairly impressive splash in the TV market, as well as the streaming market. Unlike Google TV, which felt cost prohibitive for most, the $35 Chromecast is well within the impulse buy range for most of its target market. Early reviews on the product have been fairly positive, and you may...Read more...
Eager for a bit of microprocessor news from someone other than AMD and Intel? Get ready, because ARM and TSMC are today announcing the first tape-out of an ARM Cortex-A57 processor on FinFET process technology. The Cortex-A57 processor is ARM's highest performing processor, designed to further extend the capabilities...Read more...
You have to wonder: how many companies have to do the same thing before it officially becomes a trend? With Samsung, Apple and select mega-corporations all mulling the idea (or moving forward with plans) to construct their own silicon, it shouldn't come as a major surprise to hear that Lenovo is considering the same. Of course, Lenovo makes...Read more...
It's not often that you hear a CEO of a rival company give tips to the very company that many consider to be its archrival, and that's not exactly what's happening here. But it's close. The former CEO of AMD, Hector Ruiz, has penned a piece over at Bloomberg Businessweek, offering up a few words of wisdom for the person who will be taking...Read more...
While the latest and greatest always piques our interest, not every device necessarily has to be a flagship product. At CES this year, Qualcomm introduced two hyper-powered Snapdragon chips for mobile devices. Now, the company is ushering in two more, albeit for lower-end products. Slotting in beneath the Snapdragon...Read more...
It's most certainly a holiday season, and a quiet one at that, but is it also a season of change? For one Michael Goddard, the answer is "yes." While that name may not be a household one, anyone who has followed AMD in recent decades would recognize it. But soon, it'll be a name that's associated with Samsung. Advanced Micro Devices is still...Read more...
At this rate, one has to wonder if die sizes won't be infinitesimal in 10 years. As process technology improvements continue to enable SoC makers to create smaller and smaller chips with more and more power, Samsung has been at the forefront of the push. Now, Synopsys has announced that its multi-year collaboration...Read more...
What if there was a power-efficient GPU with brains as powerful as a power-sucking desktop chip? We may be on the brink of finding out. ARM has this week submitted the Mali-T604 GPU for full profile OpenCL conformance, and if all plays out, this thing could really knock some socks off in the months ahead. According to the company, it's the...Read more...
ARM may have a new wave of customers coming its way thanks to Windows RT, but it surely won't turn down a bit of assistance from the folks at TSMC. This week, the two tech giants announced plans to collaborate with one another in order to "optimize next-gen 64-bit ARM processors for FinFET Process Technology." Wordy? Sure, but the potential...Read more...
The ultramobile landscape just gets more and more interesting by the week. Samsung's next-generation Galaxy smartphone is widely expected to launch next week, but what's a new smartphone without a new CPU? Not much, as it turns out. The famed Galaxy S II will likely see an upgrade, with the Galaxy S III taking the...Read more...
ARM's been in the news quite a bit lately, most recently in dealing with Windows RT, but now they're making some waves of their own. They've just announced the new Cortex-A15 quad-core Hard Macro, a power-optimized implementation of quad-core hard macro on 28nm process. In other words, it's a juiced-up version of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor....Read more...
Looks like there will be one less player in the semiconductor market meant to shape up 4G LTE chips. With LTE becoming more and more important from a global perspective, companies that craft LTE radio chips will undoubtedly make loads of money if they can land deals with phone OEMs. But it sounds like one that was destined to work at the end...Read more...
New silicon? Yep, AMD's got it. The company this week announced the new Opteron 3200 Series CPU family, a revised outlay of chips that are sure to be useful for enterprise and cloud-based applications. AMD claims that it offers 38% better price performance and up to 19% less power per core than the competition, and that folks running rack...Read more...
The world's most energy-efficient processor from ARM? Yep, it's here, and it's the Cortex-M0+, aimed at low-cost MCU, sensor and control markets but destined to shake up way more than that. The company is calling it the "world's most energy-efficient microprocessor." In other words, it has been optimized to deliver...Read more...
Rambus. Heard of 'em? Sure you have, and now they're making the news again, but it's a positive thing -- don't worry. The company just signed a patent licensing deal with Broadcom, resolving all previous claims related to its technology. The two were previously geared up for a court room showdown, which seems to be the norm in the tech world...Read more...
ARM's breakout might be just a step ahead. While ARM chips have always been vital, they've become even more so with the proliferation of mobile products. And now that Microsoft has committed to making Windows on ARM a reality, the sky's the limit. Now, ARM's detailing and disclosing the inner specs behind the next version of the ARM architecture....Read more...
While the management shake-up over at HP is obviously the largest of the past week, a fellow California-based company is making some moves of their own. AMD recently announced that Rick Bergman is leaving AMD. President and CEO Rory Read will serve as interim general manager of AMD’s Products Group, and the company also announced that...Read more...
Two companies that you don't hear too much about are joining hands, but just because they stay out of the consumer spotlight, that doesn't mean that they aren't monumentally important. Texas Instruments, the company that made your college-era graphing calculator as well as a processor in some sort of mobile or...Read more...