chips

Don't be surprised if the other version of Windows 8 -- you know, the one that doesn't run on Intel chips -- stumbles out of the gate.

We got a taste of this on Friday when Hewlett-Packard confirmed that it won't offer a Windows RT tablet this year.

I heard about these issues in May when a little birdie told me about problems with RT and Qualcomm and Texas Instruments at PC makers. And I wrote at the time (May 15) that HP's Qualcomm-chip based tablet "may not happen this year."

(So, just to … Read more

Piggybacking (waka waka) on Jeff's encounter with a candied bacon ice cream sandwich at the Sony E3 press conference last week, we can't help but indulge in Burger King's new bacon-topped sundae.

And even if Jeff's dietitian won't let him have it, we can still stare longingly at the press shots and tell you about our own favorite encounters with the swine.… Read more

A recent report that a Chinese computer chip used by the U.S. military has a hidden backdoor that could allow the manufacturer to disable devices are overblown, one security researcher says.

Researchers at Cambridge University issued a dire warning today about a security bypass they said they had identified in a nonencrypted chip made by Microsemi in China, and used in weapons, nuclear power plants, and even public transportation.

"We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer," security researcher Sergei Skorobogatov wrote in the publication of … Read more

President Obama today made a campaign stop at a major chip research and manufacturing in hub in New York to reemphasize his made-in-America theme.

Obama visited the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany, State University of New York. CNSE is an education and research facility centered on nanotechnology.

The visit was intended to highlight "insourcing" and the connection between education, innovation, and manufacturing in supporting investment and bringing jobs back to the U.S.

The region is home to chipmakers IBM and Globalfoundries, the latter is in the final stages of constructing … Read more

Facebook may venture into the rarified ranks of chip designers, a source told CNET.

Sound crazy? Well, Facebook already makes its own servers.

While designing a chip is a more ambitious undertaking than building a server -- and way outside Facebook's core competency of social networking -- market-leading companies are always looking into alternative businesses opportunities.

"They have chip designers," the source said but admitted that it's not clear what those designers are for. This person also said that it wasn't clear if Facebook was using a design from ARM, referring to the most popular … Read more

A Qualcomm conference call Wednesday, according to Reuters, brought Qualcomm's supply constraint issues to light. CEO Paul Jacobs, addressing analysts on the call, stated, "At this stage we cannot secure enough supply to meet the increasing demand we are experiencing."

That supply constraint could affect many cellphone makers hoping to use Qualcomm's advanced 28-nanometer chips, including Apple. To handle the constraints, Qualcomm is looking for new manufacturing partners, a move that will contribute to raising its operating expenses up to 23 percent, according to Chief Financial Officer Bill Keitel.

"Demand went so far ahead of … Read more

After describing a living, breathing "lung-on-a-chip" in Science back in the summer of 2010, Harvard researchers are now reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip on their latest endeavor: a human gut-on-a-chip.

These bio-inspired micro devices that mimic the structures, behaviors, and environments of human organs could help scientists better understand the inner workings of a variety of diseases and disorders -- in this case intestinal ones such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis -- without resorting to often less reliable animal testing.

The latest so-called "gut-on-a-chip" is a silicon polymer device whose central … Read more

Intel retained its hefty grip on the chip market last year with healthy revenues and a record market share.

Ending 2011 as the top chip supplier, Intel carved out 15.6 percent of the market, a gain of 2.5 points from 2010, research firm IHS said today.

The latest figure proved to the highest at least since 2001 when the company took home a 13.9 percent share. Over the last five years, Intel's share has varied from 11.9 percent to 13.9 percent.

Strong sales growth and a major acquisition both contributed to the surge in … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices is hoping to please Web-hosting providers with a new platform for single socket, dedicated hosting.

The idea is to offer growing businesses more scalability with denser and more power-efficient environments. Customers should also have a seamless, "desktop-like" experience and infrastructure with server-class reliability and security.

Specifically, the new AMD Opteron 3200 Series processor is touted to offer a more efficient bang per buck as the enterprise-class platform is said to offer up to 60 percent better performance per dollar and use up to 19 percent less power per core.

The Opteron 3200 Series also falls … Read more