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THE PEOPLE'S DAILY reports that China has built its first server chip which uses a localised form of Linux, and which it dubs the "Dragon Chip". The CPU was built and developed by the Computer Institution of the Chinese Academy of Science, and is part of its "Soaring Dragon" project to take advantage of the fact that it will be the second biggest semiconductor market in the world by 2010. And indeed, if the US doesn't watch out, it might also be the biggest producer of semiconductors even earlier than that, according to analysts at iSuppli. The semi market is...

Hardware Intel: Where no chip has gone before By Michael Kanellos Special to ZDNet NewsSeptember 12, 2002, 11:50 AM PT SAN JOSE, Calif.--The nanotechnology era is here, and Intel is looking at all the options. News FocusIntel Developer Forum news On Thursday, at its Developer Forum here, The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker disclosed a number of technology changes and avenues of research that will direct the future development of its chips. The company, for instance, confirmed that it is working on a multiple-gate transistor, called the Tri-Gate transistor, that will, if eventually incorporated into commercially released chips, increase the...

Intel Rubbishes AMD's Hybrid Plans DATE: 09/12/2002 The head of Intel Corp's server chip division rubbished AMD's 32/64-bit hybrid processor proposition yesterday, saying that if it's such a good idea, why hasn't anyone done it before? Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's enterprise, speaking after a keynote speech at the vendor's developer forum in San Jose, questioned the logic of supporting both 64-bit and 32-bit computing on the same processor. Advanced Micro Devices Inc is pushing its hybrid approach as a way for corporations to smooth their transition from legacy 32-bit applications to 64-bit computing. Fister...

AMD Announces Technology to Enable Ten-Fold Performance Leap in Future Transistors World's smallest version of innovative design can foster better products and lower manufacturing costs Sunnyvale, CA -- September 10, 2002 --AMD today announced it has fabricated the smallest double-gate transistors reported to date using industry standard technology. These transistors, measuring ten nanometers, or ten billionths of a meter in length (gate), are six times smaller than the smallest transistors currently in production. AMD's research breakthrough could foster the placement of a billion transistors on the same size chip that currently holds 100 million transistors, enabling a vastly richer computing...

Speed limits on P4 could open window for AMD Can Barton scale to high speeds fast? By Mike Magee in San Jose: Sunday 08 September 2002, 23:47 THE MOST RECENT roadmap we saw from the Intel Corporation warns motherboard makers that with the introduction of 3.06GHz Pentium 4 in Q4, the designers are creating a somewhat new die layout for the Northwood process. This new layout might well be related to some significant errata in the processor, which we reported a few weeks ago. But with the introduction of 512K cache "Barton" AMD XP chips, we think that Intel may...

Intel, Rambus wave goodbye on platform as gravy train shunts out SIS left holding PC Rambus babies. Sniff By Mike Magee: Wednesday 04 September 2002, 10:27 IT'S NOW CLEAR from the latest Intel roadmaps we've seen that the 850E, and by definition Rambus RDRAM memory, is not much longer for the PC planet. Unless, that is, SIS comes to the rescue of the memory type during 2003. The RDRAM gravy train is being shunted out of the INTC station. As we reported yesterday, graphics on the roadmap show that the 850E, which will be validated for 1066 RDRAM come early...

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is one of America’s most respected reporters on intelligence and national security matters. His new book, Breakdown—How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11, will be released this week by Regnery Publishing, a sister company of Human Events. (Gertz previously authored the 1999 bestseller, Betrayal—How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, also a Regnery book.) On August 20, Human Events Editor Terence P. Jeffrey interviewed Gertz about some of the many revelations in Breakdown. Human Events: In your reporting, did you discover how many CIA-recruited spies the United States had in Iraq back in...

<p>It's in the air, big changes are afoot. Yeah, tech stocks remain in the toilet, but underdog companies and technologies are beginning to make significant inroads, and the established superpowers are feeling less secure every day. Is this news? Not really, because it's been happening slowly over time, and certainly many ET readers have been closely following and even promoting these changes. Big power shifts are underway. The signs have been subtle and cumulative, but the one that put me over the top was IBM's recent national TV ad pushing their enterprise Linux solutions in a big way (more fervently than any past IBM ads I can remember).</p>

Dell Computer is seeking alliances with mom-and-pop shops to further its growth in the PC market. Dell will begin offering on Friday an unbranded, low-priced desktop PC to distributors that cater to small businesses--typically companies with fewer than 100 employees, the computer maker confirmed Tuesday. The Round Rock, Texas-based company is embarking on the new plan as a way to enter the "white box" market, which it estimates to be worth $3 billion annually. White-box PC sales have grown quietly over the last five years to represent roughly 30 percent of the market, according to a recent report from...

A small group of PC owners has quietly filed a class action lawsuit against Intel, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard alleging the companies misled them into believing the Pentium 4 was a superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon. The complaint--Neubauer et al v. Intel et al--was filed June 3 in the Third Judicial Circuit in Madison County, Illinois. The case is in limbo awaiting a ruling on whether it belongs in a state or federal jurisdiction, and has not yet achieved class action status. It came to light this week after a copy of the complaint was...

As with many rumors about Apple Computer, this one started with a single sentence uttered by Steve Jobs. The setting was an analysts meeting in July, where the Apple chief executive outlined his company's financial condition and discussed future plans. He took a question about the possibility that Apple might one day use chips from Intel instead of the Motorola chips now in its computers. The answer was classic Jobs: careful, noncommittal and just vague enough to keep people guessing. First, he said, Apple would have to complete its transition from using OS 9, its older, "classic" operating system,...

<p>Going where the federal government has stepped aside, Intel Chairman Andy Grove has pledged $5 million to help launch a new embryonic stem-cell program at the University of California-San Francisco.</p> <p>The money, the first step toward an ambitious $20 million fundraising goal for the university, will offer scientists unfettered access to this promising field of investigation -- and give UCSF's stem-cell programs a competitive boost in the hottest new field in biomedicine.</p>

Intel set to announce accounting changes Grove refuses to call stock options an expense By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 08 August 2002, 10:35 REPORTS STATE THAT INTEL is set to buck the trend relating to the reporting of stock options in its accounting procedures. Reuters says Intel will announce today that it will not count stock options as an expense. Instead, the company will seek to provide a different level of detail about its stock-option programmes, which, the chipmaker reckons, will help make executives’ remuneration packages more transparent to shareholders. Company chief Andy Grove reckons that calling stock options an expense...

Intel to start fab plant in China Compelling reasons to shift By Mike Magee: Wednesday 07 August 2002, 11:10 RELIABLE SOURCES TELL the INQUIRER that by the year 2005 there's likely to be an Intel fabrication plant located in mainland China. And the firm is also planning on boosting its presence in Malaysia and another unnamed Asian country, we have learned. Intel already has a Chinese research centre in Beijing, to which it is actively recruiting staff, and a flash memory factory in Shanghai. But a fab in mainland China has obvious advantages. It would give Intel direct access to...

Intel says nothing these days THE EDITOR of the High Tech Strategist claims that AMD's Hammer chips will give the firm as much as a three to four year lead over competing technology from Intel. Fred Hick is quoted in the the August 5th edition of the Wall Street financial weekly, pushed out by Barron's. His argument is that the AMD Hammer family is backward compatible with 32-bit applications as well as having the ability to run specially compiled 64-bit code. Intel's Itanium, by contrast, has a special instruction set and while it will run 32-bit instruction code this is...

AMD's new chip can help it gain on Intel--Barron's Last Updated: August 04, 2002 02:49 PM ET NEW YORK, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N is hailed as having the "next big thing" with its upcoming eighth-generation microprocessor, and this could make the depressed stock a long-term winner, Barron's said. The Aug. 5 edition of the Wall Street financial weekly cites Fred Hick, publisher of the newsletter High-Tech Strategist, as saying AMD's next line of microprocessors, code-named Hammer, can give AMD a multiyear lead on arch-rival Intel Corp. INTC.O . AMD's edge could lie in the move...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - U.S. chip behemoth Intel Corp said on Wednesday China will overtake Japan as the world's second biggest PC market this year, earlier than expected and underscoring the weak demand in Asia's most mature market. Intel is the number one maker of microchip processors, the brains inside a personal computer or PC. But Christian Morales, Intel's vice-president of Asia Pacific, said the outlook for the semiconductor industry remained bleak despite bright spots in emerging markets. "The trend is the same worldwide, with matured markets flat or down and emerging markets still growing," Morales told a news conference...

AMD confirms IBM DB2 Hammer support Corporate migration easier, says IBM By Mike Magee: Tuesday 30 July 2002, 20:58 IBM'S DB2 DATABASE for Linux will be supported on AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors, confirming benchmarks posted on c't magazine a few weeks back. AMD confirmed the story in a release which said a DB2 database using SuSE Linux was successfully ported to X86-64 technology in just a few days. The news is good for AMD and indicates positiive application software support for its Opteron servers, due to be launched next year. The chip firm said that using X86-64 architecture will mean...

Breaking Performance Bottlenecks of SMP Systems with Opteron By Spencer Kittelson Date: July 29, 2002One of the most wonderful performance enhancing features of the forthcoming [AMD] Opteron (Hammer) are the multiple independent direct memory channels that are built into each CPU.  This is a huge, huge difference from the shared memory (actually, shared everything) approach of Intel symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems.  Given the limitations of today's memory technology, this was an exceedingly smart move on the part of AMD and will likely change the way we design some of our applications in the very near future. Intel SMP systems exhibit...

Intel owns Inside (true) By Drew Cullen Posted: 07/30/2002 at 06:03 EST Intel's fearless intellectual property lawyers have wrested the word 'inside' from a rival US firm, after an epic battle. The heroes in suits successfully completed a dawn raid on Town Graphics, a small mapmaker based in Woodinville, Washington state. No casualties are reported. It's a different story at Town Graphics. The company printed a map and stuffed copies into envelopes carrying the legend "map inside". It sent these out in mailshot. So far, so ordinary. Then it tried to trademark the expression 'map inside'. Big mistake. Intel sent...