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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Monday unveiled three models in the dual-core Opteron chip family, as the company tries to stay ahead of rival Intel Corp. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company's Model 880 for up to eight-way, 16-core servers and Model 280 for dual-processor workstations and servers are available immediately. The Model 180 for one-processor, two-core servers and workstations is scheduled for release within 30 days. The new models are for the x86 platform.

THE CEO OF Intel said that an advert AMD took out today challenging it to a dual core dual quite spoilt his cup of coffee. The advert, in broadsheet the San Francisco Chronicle, challenges Intel to match it on performance for dual core chips. But Paul Otellini, CEO pf Intel turned down the challenge with some disdain, refusing to pick up the gauntlet the chipsters threw down. We’ve often noted the resemblance of both Intel and AMD to the Tweedledee and Tweedledum characters in Alice through the Looking Glass. These brave warriors were forced to live a sort of mock...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Press freedom advocates normally direct their wrath toward countries where harassment or abuse of journalists is the norm. Lately they have come up with a new target: the United States. On Wednesday, a delegation from the Inter-American Press Association, a Western Hemisphere watchdog group, was making a pilgrimage to Washington to show solidarity with Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been jailed since July 6. An evening meeting with Miller was planned at the Alexandria (Va.) Detention Center, where she was being held for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating the leak...

Dubbed a "supercomputer on a chip," the Cell microprocessor has until now been long on ambition but short on specifics. At a technical conference in San Francisco, the three electronics giants described a chip that could provide ten times the performance of the latest PC chips and churn through many tasks at once. Aimed squarely at the "digital home" market highly sought-after by Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), the Cell initiative, which has been in development since 2001, is viewed by some as a formidable, if fledgling, competitor to the world's largest chip maker. While IBM showed off prototypes of...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Recent trademark filings from Intel Corp. (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) are raising speculation that the world's largest chip maker may be preparing to create a new global brand. The question is, what does VIIV mean? "Intel Inside VIIV" and "Intel VIIV" were filed as U.S. trademarks last month by the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker, known for its Pentium and Centrino brands. A square graphic, resembling an inkblot or a starfield, was also filed around the same time. Intel watchers have a few hypotheses on the meaning of VIIV. One is that the letters are Roman...

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - For decades, computer performance has been driven largely by the increasing numbers of ever-smaller transistors squeezed into the machines' silicon brains. With each generation, speeds jumped and prices dropped. hough the tiny switches built in silicon are the heart of the digital revolution, they can't shrink forever. And in recent years, chip companies have struggled to keep a lid on power and heat — the result of some transistor components getting as thin as a few atoms across. Now, the world's leading semiconductor companies have unveiled a remarkably similar strategy for working around the problem: In...

OK, I have a computer that's about 3 years old and I'm very attached to it. I've done lots of upgrades and improvements over the past year or so and instead of getting a new one, I'd like to do one more upgrade.Having put in a Network Interface Card, doubled the RAM to 256K, installed a CD-RW drive and replaced the hard drive in my IBM Aptiva, I'm giving serious thought to updating the processor from a Pentium III 600 MHz to something like a P4 2G or something, and I have a few questions: 1) Do I need a...