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Microprocessor
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| Top Stories for January 18, 2002 (details below) | |
| C/Net | Transmeta's loss widens as sales slip |
| Computing Magazine | New Intel chip fires up F1 racing team |
| EE Times | AMD to sign deal with Asian foundry |
| EE Times | Intel cuts capital spending, profits top forecasts |
| EE Times | Otellini named Intel president |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
| The Inquirer | Is AMD slipping on process front? |
| The Inquirer | Transmeta swallows poison pill |
| The Inquirer | Microsoft, Intel wary of Nvidia's power |
| The Inquirer | Intel has PCI bugs in chipsets too |
| The Inquirer | Intel confirms mobile P4s, Celerons |
| Microprocessor
Headline News Collected By Robert R. Collins |
Week of January 13, 2002 |
Older News |
| January 18, 2002 | |
Transmeta's loss widens as sales slipBy Reuters January 17, 2002 |
Transmeta reported a wider fourth-quarter loss Thursday, as
revenue dropped because of manufacturing problems with its
Crusoe line, but the maker of low-power semiconductors said it
expected revenue in this quarter to at least double. Santa Clara, California-based Transmeta posted a loss for the quarter ended Dec. 28 of $49.7 million, or 38 cents per share, compared with a loss of $26.2 million, or 30 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. |
New Intel chip fires up F1 racing teamBy Andy McCue Januar 17, 2002 |
Formula One team Jaguar Racing will be one of the first users
to move over to servers and workstations based on McKinley,
the next version of Intel's Itanium chip, when it launches
later this year. McKinley is the second in a family of 64-bit processors from Intel and closely follows the poorly received Merced, which was released last year. Jaguar Racing, which has a Hewlett Packard (HP) infrastructure for its team of engineers, designers and race support team, said that tests of McKinley have gone well. |
AMD to sign deal with Asian foundryBy David Lammers January 17, 2002 |
Hector Ruiz, chief operating officer at Advanced Micro Devices
Inc., said he expects to announce soon an agreement with an
unnamed Asian foundry that will allow AMD to "take our sweet
spot and fine-tune it for the foundry market." Even as it moves to take advantage of what Ruiz called the "phenomenal levels of investment" by Asian foundries, AMD will ramp its 130-nanometer (0.13-micron) silicon-on-insulator process at its Dresden, Germany, fabrication facility for production of a 64-bit processor, code-named Hammer, that will supplant the Athlon product family. |
Intel cuts capital spending, profits top forecastsBy Duncan Martell January 16, 2002 |
Intel Corp. on Tuesday (Jan. 15) announced plans to cut
capital spending in 2002 by 25 percent from $7.3 billion in
2001, as the company reported a 77 percent drop in
fourth-quarter earnings. Both profits and revenues topped
analysts' forecasts amid a bounce in PC sales over the
holidays. Intel said it does not yet see any signs of an economic recovery and forecast first-quarter sales of $6.4 billion to $7.0 billion, implying revenue either flat or falling as much as 8.3 percent from the fourth quarter. |
Otellini named Intel presidentBy David Lammers January 16, 2002 |
Intel Corp. said Wednesday (Jan. 16) that its board has named
Paul Otellini as company president and chief operating
officer, joining chief executive officer Craig Barrett in a
two-person "executive office." As COO, Otellini will be responsible for Intel's operations, including new product development, while Barrett, as CEO, will continue to oversee corporate strategy and long-range planning. The move is the board of directors' signal that Otellini, 51, a 27-year veteran of Intel, will succeed Barrett, 62, thereby becoming the first person with a non-technical background to take the helm of the world's largest chip producer. His predecessors over the past three decades — Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andrew Grove, and Barrett — were all trained in physics, chemistry, and in Barrett's case, materials sciences. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Is AMD slipping on process front?By Mike Magee January 16, 2002 |
INTEL HAD ITS TURN with its conference call yesterday evening
and tonight our time it's AMD's turn. It will probably be past our bedtime after our late night stint last night, but in any case perhaps analysts calling AMD could ask them a couple of questions for us. First, weren't we already supposed to see .13 micron Athlon processors in Q4 or early Q1 this year. And isn't this early Q1. And if so, could Mr Jerry Sanders please tell us where they are. |
Transmeta swallows poison pillBy Mike Magee January 16, 2002 |
RUMOURS WERE RIFE over much of the second half of last year
that firms from A to V were interested in buying up Transmeta
for the undoubtedly interesting patent portfolio and engineers
it has. But yesterday the board of Transmeta kyboshed any future plans firms might have to creep up behind it and buy loads of shares for $2.49, so taking it over by stealth. The board said that it had implemented the so-called "poison pill" regulation, preventing any outside company from making "unsolicited acquisition attempts". |
Microsoft, Intel wary of Nvidia's powerBy Eva Glass January 16, 2002 |
SOURCES CLOSE TO THE MATTER tell the INQUIRER of political
machinations by PC giants Intel and Microsoft to ensure Nvidia
doesn't get any more powerful than it already is. But the situation is complicated by political infighting at chip giant Intel. Intel views Nvidia as a threat although there are factions at the chip giant who wish to deal with the company and give it a licence to use the Pentium 4 front side bus. |
Intel has PCI bugs in chipsets tooBy Mike Magee January 17, 2002 |
IT AIN'T JUST VIA that's got problems with getting its
chipsets to work properly with PCI. Both the Intel 850 and the 860 chipsets have bugs that affect IDE drives which means, for example, your ATA 100+ drive only manages around 80Mb burst rate and no higher This is what Intel calls an erratum and the rest of us who try not to choke over Latin words call a bug, and never a sighting nor a pretzel. Error five in the "erratum" sheet on Intel's own site says that both the 850 and the 860 chipsets have problems with PCI. |
Intel confirms mobile P4s, CeleronsBy Mike Magee January 16, 2002 |
CHIP GIANT INTEL has now confirmed that it will move its
Pentium 4 platform to both "value" (Celeron) segments and
notebooks, as revealed here last August. Paul Otellini, general manager of Intel's architecture group, and tipped by some as the successor to CEO Craig Barrett, was speaking at the earnings conference call the firm held yesterday evening after Wall Street closed. The introduction of the mobile processors is likely to be in the cusp between the first and second quarter, while roadmaps the INQUIRER have seen suggest that Intel will start to displace the .13 micron Tualatin Celerons based on the Pentium III architecture, with Pentium 4 equivalents. |
| January 14, 2002 | |
"Extreme" price declines hit RambusBy Reuters January 10, 2002 |
Rambus, a developer of technology that speeds the performance
of computer-memory chips, on Thursday reported fiscal
first-quarter net income that fell from a year ago amid a
steep decline in memory-chip prices throughout the industry. For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Los Altos, Calif.-based Rambus said net income fell to $6.17 million, or 6 cents a share, from $13 million, or 12 cents on a diluted basis a year ago. Revenues dropped 28 percent, to $24.9 million. |
AMD's Athlons Keep PaceBy Tom Murphy January 14, 2002 |
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) made another attempt to stay
in the race for highest-performing processor by releasing a
1.67GHz version of its Athlon XP line on the same day that
rival Intel Corp. introduced its 2.2GHz Pentium 4. AMD will be marketing its latest processor as the Athlon XP 2000+, under the company's branding scheme. That initiative was launched last fall as AMD's way of saying that pure megahertz wasn't the truest indicator of processor performance. Even though the processor's top clock speed is 1.67GHz, the "2000" indicates that the chip's performance surpasses that traditional perception. |
Via to launch KT-333 this weekJanuary 13, 2002 |
Via, will announce its KT-333 chipset, taking a lead from its
KT266A based boards. While SIS was quite loud with its new 745 chipset, with support for DDR 333 in Q4, we still haven't seen one single review of those boards. Via, on the other hand, right at the beginning of Q4 told us it would be on time and would match its DDR 333 products to meet the schedule of DDR 333. So Q1 has started and VIA will introduce its new Athlon based chipset, likely to lead in this area, although we're still watching and waiting to see how Via holds out against the SiS 745. |
Intel ships Prestonia server microprocessorBy Jack Robertson January 11, 2002 |
Intel Corp. has started shipping sample quantities of its
next-generation Prestonia server chip made on its 0.13-micron
process, a spokesman confirmed Friday. The server version with 512-kilobyte on-chip cache is the first quad-pumped architecture slated for the server market. The Intel spokesman said a workstation version of Prestonia is now in full production and will be introduced by OEM customers next week. The server version will be unveiled officially later this quarter. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Via issues patch for PCI bugBy Mike Magee January 11, 2002 |
THE LADS at HardOCP have noticed that there's a patch for the
PCI bugs Tech-Report noticed, up there at Via Arena, an
official Via web site. Hexus Net plugs an Intel 2GHz chip into a Via board and delivers its verdict here. The chief boffin at bouncy chip company Nvidia -- David Kirk - has granted an interview to Gamespot. And you can find it here. |
AMD tells of Screaming Sindy plansJanuary 11, 2002 |
WE'RE GRATEFUL to our friends at tecchannel for giving us some
information from AMD about what it's going to do about SSE II
in instructions. According to the piece, while AMD has confirmed the use of SSE II in its up-and-coming Hammer K8 family, Intel is being a little reluctant to give it a licence during this year. Whether that's true or not, we don't know - in some ways it helps Intel when people use SSE II - anything to push those extra instructions and create good software including games is very welcome. |
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