chip

Hewlett-Packard launched a lawsuit against Oracle over Oracle’s decision to terminate developing software for Intel's Itanium processor, the chip used by HP in its high-end servers.

In its filing HP alleges that Oracle's March 22 decision to discontinue all future software development for Itanium violates "legally binding commitments" that Oracle made to HP and the companies' 140,000 joint customers.

Advanced Micro Devices is introducing its new processors that will aim personal computers and challenge Intel and Nvidia. New Llano chips will include both central and graphics processors meant for mid- to high-end laptops and desktop computers.

Part of AMD’s Fusion family the new chips significantly improve battery life and will go on sale very soon.

This week at the Computex technology exhibition in Taipei Asus will show its first new PC in the "Ultrabook" class on Intel chips. Intel says it will include the best features of tablets and will go on sale by Christmas and cost under $1,000.

The Ultrabooks will be slim and lightweight but still pack high-performance processors. They should account for 40 percent of laptop sales to consumers by the end of next year, Tom Kilroy, a senior vice president at Intel, told Reuters in an interview.

Microsoft disclaimed comments made by Intel software chief Renée James at Intel's Investor Meeting 2011 at the company's Santa Clara, California, headquarters this week. The Redmond firm said that James’ comments on the next version of Windows were "factually inaccurate and unfortunately misleading."

Intel announced its plans to launch mass production of the world’s first 3-D microprocessor transistor.

“This transition to 3-D devices will help us continue Moore’s Law,” said Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr at the news conference Wednesday. “Clearly you can pack more things into a small space if you go vertical with 3-D.”

According to the forecast made by market research firm HIS iSuppli, half of the notebooks and a growing number of PCs shipped in 2011 will feature graphics-enabled microprocessors as designers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) increase competition for the units that raise multimedia speeds without additional hardware.

HIS says that the processors with built-in graphics capabilities will be installed this year on 115 million notebooks, half of total shipments, and 63 million desktop PCs, or 45 percent of the total.

The world’s largest chip maker Intel plans to “win” the tablet market, as stated by the company CEO Paul Otellini.

"At Intel," he told reporters and analysts on a conference call announcing Chipzilla's third-quarter financial performance, "we're going to utilize all the assets at our disposal to win this segment: the world's best silicon process technology, the best compute architecture, and our global scale."

While Intel confirmed that its HDCP master key indeed leaked to the Internet the chip maker is not worried over the possible pirate use of the key. The company says it will sue anyone who does it.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

Motorola plans to launch the fastest Android device on a 2-GHz processor. Such a device will have twice as much the processing power that is available today in the smartphones industry.

With the fastest processor in the world Motorola’s device would be able to provide higher quality graphics, games and better video chat.

Yet! It is unclear where the phone maker plans to get a processor with a kind of efficiency because none of the major chip makers are offering anything close to it.

Last week a counterfeit version of Intel Core i7-920 processor appeared at the US markets. Intel confirmed the fact on Monday. Now the chip maker is trying to determine how many more are out there.

HardOCP hardware website reported on Friday that one of its forum members bought a fake processor from Newegg, an online seller of computers and components. The user reported that instead of a processor he had found a bogus processor and a plastic mold of a heat sink and fan.

Contract chip manufacturers will start producing a line of chips with transistors and other components as small as 28nm around the middle of this year for Xilinx and other companies that have announced plans to make such advanced chips, including Altera and STMicroelectronics.

There is a wide range of benefits coming with 28nm size chips. Xilinx estimates its 28nm chips will reduce total power use by 50% as compared with the previous models. Besides, a number of other enhancements can bring power consumption and lower system costs by 33%.

Next year IBM wants to release its new chip that will be deployed in the University of Illinois supercomputer which is believed to become the world’s fastest.

The IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer will be able to perform complex calculations instantly and it will be housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today.