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| Top Stories for June 14, 2001 (details below) | |
| Bloomberg.com | Transmeta to Ship 1-Gigahertz Chip in 3rd Qtr, Executive Says |
| Upside.com | Transmeta says lead in low-power chips widening |
| Semiconductor Business News | Transmeta to roll out first 0.13-micron processors this month, sources say |
| C/Net | Transmeta revs up Crusoe |
| EBN | Intel coaxes Taiwan firms to make motherboards |
| Electronic News Online | National Claims Next-Gen System Architecture For IAs |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
| The Inquirer | Has DDR won battle against Rambus? |
| The Inquirer | $150 bill wrapped round every P4 |
| The Register | Transmeta to launch 1GHz Crusoe on 26 June |
| Microprocessor
Headline News Collected By Robert R. Collins |
Week of June 10, 2001 |
Older News |
| June 14, 2001 | |
Transmeta to Ship 1-Gigahertz Chip in 3rd Qtr, Executive SaysBy Hiroshi Suzuki June 14, 2001 |
Transmeta Corp. will start shipping an upgraded version of its
low-powered chips in the third quarter, the first of its kind
for notebook personal computers with data processing speeds of
as much as 1 gigahertz. The Santa Clara, California-based start-up, which is eating into Intel Corp.'s chip market share with its Crusoe chip, will announce the plans at a business seminar in Tokyo later today, co- founder and vice chairman David Ditzel said in an interview. |
Transmeta says lead in low-power chips wideningEdmund Klamann June 13, 2001 |
Microprocessor design company Transmeta Corp. (TMTA) said
today its lead was widening over industry heavyweight Intel
Corp (INTC) in technology for low-power chips used in
ultralight notebook computers. Transmeta co-founder and vice chairman Dave Ditzel also said he believed his company's "Japan first" strategy targeting Japanese notebook PC makers to use its Crusoe chips had succeeded, and that U.S. manufacturers, none of which has signed on to Crusoe, would eventually follow the Japanese lead. "Right now in Japan the number-one and number-two hottest selling Windows-based notebooks are based on Crusoe. That's something U.S. makers can't ignore," Ditzel said in an interview. |
Transmeta to roll out first 0.13-micron processors this month, sources sayBy Mark LaPedus June 13, 2001 |
Responding to competitive products from Advanced Micro Devices
Inc. and Intel Corp., Transmeta Corp. is readying its first
x86-based microprocessor lines, built around a 0.13-micron
process technology, sources said. The new chips, dubbed the TM5500 and TM5800, are the latest members of the company's Crusoe family of x86-based processors, sources said. The Santa Clara-based company will roll out these chips on June 26. The company declined to comment, however. |
Transmeta revs up CrusoeBy John G. Spooner June 13, 2001 |
Transmeta will release a new Crusoe chip later this month, as
it continues to try to win its first deal with a U.S. notebook
maker. The TM 5800 will offer a 50 percent performance increase over the TM 5600, the upstart chipmaker said Wednesday. The company boasts that the chip offers a faster clock speed, a more efficient version of code-morphing software, and faster double-data rate (DDR) SDRAM. The combination will reduce overall power consumption by 20 percent, Transmeta said. |
Intel coaxes Taiwan firms to make motherboardsBy Jack Robertson June 13, 2001 |
Intel is back to cajoling Taiwan's motherboard vendors to make
lower-cost Pentium 4 Direct Rambus boards. The Taiwanese, who got burned badly with the Intel 820 board redesign several years ago, and again with the 820 memory translator hub recall last year, are leery. But a few of Intel's closest board allies on the island are going to help by making a four-layer Pentium 4 board with the 850 chipset supporting Direct RDRAM. All to run up some chits they hope to collect from the MPU giant. |
National Claims Next-Gen System Architecture For IAsBy Alex Romanelli June 13, 2001 |
At the Embedded Systems Conference being held in San Jose
today, National Semiconductor Corp. will introduce what it
claims is the first system architecture designed specifically
for Internet appliances (IAs). Santa Clara, Calif.-based National (nyse: NSM) said its new Geodelink architecture is the most significant achievement in its three years spent in the IA space. “There are a lot of dedicated solutions available but there are none for IAs,” said Yves Gourvennec, senior marketing manager of National’s set-top box unit. “This is a new, emerging market with diverse and specific needs. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Has DDR won battle against Rambus?By Mike Magee June 13, 2001 |
SOMETIMES WE DROP BY Silicon Investor where you can always
find lively debates by people whose axes are ground more often
than most because many - maybe the majority - put money in IT
company stocks and shares. Because they're gamblers, sorry investors, their sense of what's going on in a firm is often very keen and can be compared to those aficionados of the sport of kings who study nags and their form minutely. |
$150 bill wrapped round every P4By Mike Magee June 13, 2001 |
PC MANUFACTURERS everywhere may be groaning, wheezing,
coughing and shedding jobs, but Intel is continuing to plunge
marketing money into the Pentium 4 platform. According to a source at competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the firm is throwing so much money at its channel partners that it is effectively wrapping each processor in money to the tune of around $150. This figure, claimed the AMD executive, who of course has an axe to grind, is made up of cooperative marketing campaigns such as the Intel Inside effort, bolstered by rebates on Rambus memory - as reported here - and complemented with other incentives to sweeten the Pentium 4 pill. |
Transmeta to launch 1GHz Crusoe on 26 JuneBy Tony Smith June 13, 2001 |
Transmeta will officially launch its two newest Crusoes - the
TM5500 and the TM5800 - at the end of the month at PC Expo. So says the company's CTO, Dave Ditzel, in an interview with Asia BizTech. Both parts will be fabbed at 0.13 micron - as anticipated - cutting the die size from 88sq mm to 55sq mm. Transmeta is reducing the core voltage range, too, from 1.1-1.6V to 0.9-1.3V. The 5500 contains 256KB of on-die L2 cache. The 5800's cache is 512KB. |
| June 13, 2001 | |
AMD sees 30 percent world market share by end 2001By Reuters June 12, 2001 |
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), the world's largest
microchip maker after Intel (INTC), is on track to achieve its
stated goal of a 30 percent global market share by year-end, a
company official said today. Recent launches of products for the mobile computer and workstation/server markets and hopes of a "modest" revenue growth will help AMD meet the target, said Wee Yep Yin, a marketing manager at AMD Far East Ltd in Singapore. "We are on track to meet our corporate objective of market share of 30 percent by the end of this year," he said at the Malaysian launch of its first processor designed for servers and workstations. |
Dual-capability chipset a first for AMDBy Gordon Kelly June 12, 2001 |
AMD has introduced its first multiprocessing-capable chipset
along with processors for one- and two-way servers and
workstations, as the company attempts to penetrate the
commercial market. The AMD-760 MP is the chip maker's first dual Athlon-based chipset to support double data rate memory. It consists of two chips: the AMD-762 system controller (Northbridge), and the AMD-766 peripheral bus controller (Southbridge). The chipset supports up to two AMD Athlon MP processors with independent 266Mhz front side buses and AGP 4x graphics. |
Rambus outlines future memory roapmap to keep up with DDR SDRAMJune 12, 2001 |
In a move to keep up with competitive memory technologies,
Rambus Inc. late today outlined its future roadmap, including
plans to boost the bandwidth of its RDRAM architecture by
five-fold in 2005. At the Rambus Developer Forum in Japan today, Rambus outlined its strategy in order to keep up with competitive next-generation memory technologies, most notably double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM. Intel Corp.--the main backer of Rambus' RDRAM memory architecture--endorsed the roadmap. "Intel supports the steps that Rambus and the RDRAM industry are taking to address the anticipated memory demand," said Louis Burns, vice president of the Desktop Products Group at Intel. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
AMD being bled dryBy Cameron 'Odie' Rogers June 12, 2001 |
THE PROCESS RACE with Intel is taking a deadly toll on
Austin's Advanced Micro Devices, inside sources have revealed.
Although AMD has competed admirably with Intel's frantic fab
and process expansion up to this time, the battle is becoming
more and more costly to wage. AMD's $2 billion Dresden fab is widely regarded as one of the most advanced in the world, and it has allowed AMD to one-up Intel in the race to copper interconnects. Intel, however, is poised to substantially beat AMD to.13 copper process technology, as well as future .10 and .07 micron processes. |
Intel reverses Itanic benchmarksBy Adamson Rust June 12, 2001 |
INDUSTRY NEWSLETTER Shannon knows Compaq is reporting that
Intel has modified the benchmarks on its Itanium 64-bit
processor versus a Sun Blade system. According to editor and publisher Terry Shannon, who describes this as a "A Pentium Pro Moment for Itanium", the benchmarks it originally posted on May the 29th have now been modified. Intel SPECint_base2000 results of 404 on an HP Server rx4610 equipped with an 800MHz Itanium processor with 4MB of L3 cache, says the newsletter. |
Rambus damns fraud trial as a 'miscarriage of justice'By Tony Smith June 12, 2001 |
Rambus has asked the US court to re-try its action against
Infineon on the grounds that the jury's support of the chip
maker's fraud allegations against it was perverse. Rambus' motion a request for "judgement as a matter of law". Essentially, its argument is that "no reasonable jury" would have sided with Infineon's claim that Rambus committed fraud because the chip maker "did not establish the requisite elements of fraud", Rambus' request claims. |
Intel notebooks still Tualatin speakingBy Mike Magee June 11, 2001 |
THE LATEST JUNE roadmaps for Intel's boxed mobile products
indicate that its plans to move wholesale to the Tualatin .13
process in Q3 remain largely intact, despite modifications of
its plans in the desktop space. Intel - as we revealed last month - started to implement a long awaited scheme earlier this year whereby dealers and system integrators can use recommended notebook platforms to create their own brands which they can then sell on. As noted here before, the Tualatin mobile chips launching in Q3 are the 1.13GHz, the 1.06GHz, the 1GHz, the 933MHz and the 866MHz. |
| June 11, 2001 | |
Intergraph pursues Intel case, drops antitrustJune 8, 2001 |
Intergraph said Friday it plans to pursue it's long-running
patent and contract interference suit against chip maker Intel
after hitting a dead-end on its antitrust claims. In a statement, the maker of computer design systems said it did not believe that the antitrust claims filed in a suit begun in 1997 against Intel were necessary for other claims involving business tort and contract claims to succeed. Intergraph said it was responding to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirming the district court's dismissal of antitrust claims, an earlier setback for Intergraph. |
Intel transistor claims speed recordBy The Associated Press June 10, 2001 |
Intel said it has created the world's fastest silicon
transistors, tiny switches that turn on and off nearly 1,000
times more quickly than those that power today's
microprocessors. The technology also shrinks the devices to a width of about 80 atoms, Intel's director of components research, Gerald Marcyk, said Saturday. That would make room for about 25 times more transistors than are packed in today's top-of-the-line Pentium 4. The transistors would not be incorporated into processors until 2007, Marcyk said. |
VIA Hopes to Take Half of Market with DDR ChipsetsJune 11, 2001 |
VIA Technologies Inc.'s Vice President Lee Tsung-jei revealed
at a performance presentation that the company would actively
lay out the value Internet architecture (VIA) to further boost
buying of PCs. That followed a forecast by Chen Wen-chi, president of VIA, that sentiment in the chipmaking industry will improve in the fourth quarter. VIA is the world's second-largest designer of chipsets. An increase in demand for PCs will also benefit VIA itself. |
After Product Recalls, Intel Returned To BasicsJune 8, 2001 |
Intel Corp. went “back to engineering basics” following last
year’s recall of the 1.13GHz Pentium III and Rambus-based
motherboards with a defective memory translator hub (MTH), a
company executive told Electronics Weekly, an e-inSITE
affiliate. “Some things were disappointing. They had their roots—particularly in the motherboard issue—in the difficulty of debugging and ramping up the RDRAM-based platform,” said Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the chipmaker’s (nasdaq: INTC) architecture group. “We’re in the second generation now.” |
Rambus Posts Translated Ruling On Its Web SiteBy Steven Fyffe June 8, 2001 |
Rambus Inc. Wednesday posted on its web site a translation of
the recent court ruling from its SDRAM patent infringement
suit against Micron Technology Inc. in Monzo, Italy. Electronic News previously reported Micron’s take on the case (Micron Claims Court Victory Against Rambus, Electronic News, May 28, 2001), which is that the ruling confirms Micron’s SDRAM and DDR SDRAM products do not infringe on Rambus’ patents, according to Micron. The court documents were still in the process of being translated at that time. Rambus released a formal statement on the matter after Electronic News completed its May 28 article on Micron’s comments. Rambus at the time did not respond to repeated calls asking for comment on Micron’s statements. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Intergraph to hunt Intel downJune 9, 2001 |
INTERGRAPH has decided to drop antitrust claims against Intel
but will pursue the firm for royalties over using its Clipper
technology. That follows a ruling by an appeal court which dismissed antitrust claims Intergraph had made against Intel. But, the company says, just because the antitrust deal had failed, that will not prevent it pursuing the chip giant for royalties - which could run into millions and millions millions - for allegedly forcing it into giving its Clipper technology without charging royalties. |
Intel contradictory on Q2 bizBy Mike Magee June 8, 2001 |
THE GREAT AND THE GOOD from the world of financial analysis
queued up to hear Intel executive Andy Bryant deliver his
firm's mid-quarter shareholders report yesterday evening, UK
time. But although the analysts were asking the right questions, Bryant gave practically nothing away whatever. Indeed, if Intel had decided to use the time saying nothing, it might have produced the same result. Bryant, who is Intel's executive vice president of financial services, made it plain right from the start that his comments would be general, and in fact the blandness of his comments were reflected in a press release issued by INTC some hours before Bryant even spoke. |
Rambus outlines Infineon JMOL caseBy Mike Magee June 10, 2001 |
DISSATISFIED BY JUDGE PAYNE'S treatment and the jury's finding
that Rambus committed fraud, the firm has placed the grounds
that it feels a new trial should be heard on the investor
relations section of its Web site. This is a request for a judgement as a matter of law (a JMOL) and differs from an appeal, apparently. As Rambus' lawyers put it: "This is one of the unusual cases in which a JMOL after verdict is proper and necessary." The platform for the JMOL has three planks: ... |
DDR not mainstream until 2003By Mike Magee June 8, 2001 |
TAIWANESE NEWSPAPER Digitimes said that Infineon forecasts
that double data rate (DDR) memory will not become a
mainstream memory type until 2003 and even then it will hold
only 50 per cent of the market. The newspaper reports that SDRAM will continue to hold the lion's share for this year at 90 per cent, with Rambus RDRAM and DDR each garnering five per cent share. One of the reasons for Infineon's caution about DDR seems to be a lack of products to support the memory type, says Digitimes. But that situation will improve once Intel intros its own Brookdale DDR chipsets -- due in Q1 of next year, as reported here. |
Intel to use MTH on 870 chipsetBy Mike Magee June 8, 2001 |
SOURCES AT INTEL have said the Firm plans to introduce a
memory translator hub (MTH) into its up-and-coming 870 chipset
for McKinley. That - it hopes - will allow the 870 to work with both Rambus and DDR but engineers inside the Firm maintain that it is likely to come a cropper for the same basic reasons that caused two other versions of this technology to fail. The decision to intro an MTH, which cost Intel dearly in terms of both prestige and revenue before, underlines a high degree of internal politics about the future of DDR (double data rate) memory versus Rambus within the firm. |
Intel confirms P4 speed revsBy Mike Magee June 9, 2001 |
WE HAVE NOW SEEN the most recent Intel desktop roadmaps which
confirm speed revs for the Pentium 4 intermediate between
1.5GHz and 2.0GHz, as reported on Akiba Pricewatch earlier
this week. That means Intel has also pushed back the 2GHz to Q3, at least. We believe the changes to the roadmaps are being made, at least in the case of the Pentium 4 family, for marketing rather than technical reasons. |
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