Free Republic

HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) -- Communist-run Vietnam handed Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, a license to treble its investment there to $1 billion, a week before President Bush is due to visit. In February the California-based firm announced it would put $300 million in Vietnam to assemble and test microchips that power computers and mobile phones, the biggest investment in the country by a U.S. company. The World Trade Organization formally invited Vietnam to become the 150th member. CNN's Anjali Rao reports (November 7) Next week, Vietnam's thriving economy will be on show when Hanoi hosts the Asia-Pacific...

For the past decade, Germans have watched in dismay as swaths of their vaunted industrial might migrated to lower-cost regions such as Central Europe or Asia. So it's all the more surprising that one U.S. high-tech company has concentrated almost all its manufacturing in Germany -- home of intransigent unions, coddled workers, and high wages. Sunnyvale (Calif.)-based semiconductor maker AMD (NYSE:AMD - News) has made the east German city of Dresden its manufacturing capital. Except for a small number of chips produced by a Singapore contractor, all of AMD's microprocessors for PCs, laptops, and servers come from two plants there,...

Democrats say the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee had no grounds to suspend a staff member who's come under scrutiny for the leak of a secret intelligence assessment. The unidentified staff member, a Democrat, was suspended this week by Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., and is being denied access to classified information pending the outcome of a review, Hoekstra's spokesman, Jamal Ware, said Thursday. The Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Jane Harman of California, wrote to Hoekstra that she was "appalled" by his action, which was "without basis." The leak to The New York Times of a National Intelligence Estimate...

European Union investigators believe they have enough evidence to pursue formal antitrust charges against Intel Corp., a critical step in their five-year probe of the computer-chip maker, according to two people with knowledge of the case. Investigators for the European Commission in Brussels have prepared a written draft of charges against Intel... After that process, a report will be sent to European antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, who will make a final decision, likely before the end of the year, on whether to issue formal charges against the Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker... Intel would then get two months to issue...

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is trying to see if millions of tiny robots can work together to create a coffee cup, or a model of a truck. Intel's lab in Pittsburgh, affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, is showing off a technology concept at the Intel Developer Forum here this week called Dynamic Physical Rendering, which could ultimately lead to a shape-shifting fabric.Apply the right voltage and software program and the flat piece of fabric turns into a 3D model of a car. Change those parameters and it transforms into a cube. Dynamic Physical Rendering has grown out of the ongoing Claytronics project...

Some sentences in the Key Judgments contradict themselves, and some are trite (“We judge that groups of all stripes will continue to use the Internet…..”). Others are classic examples of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” syndrome. And still others are simply unintelligible – they are neither right nor wrong, but written in a way to make them subject to whatever interpretation the reader wishes to make. No issue is more important to our country’s security than the future of terrorism, and nothing could be more helpful to the President than a clear and accurate projection of...

Right about now, Dell has to be wondering: "Intel, was it something we said?" If Dell actually gives voice to the question, though, I expect Intel would confide, "Nah. It was something you did -- building boring computers. But it's not just you. Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo pretty much bore users to tears, too." Recognizing that the EBA ("Everybody But Apple") computer makers have gotten stuck in a decades-long rut of churning out plain beige, or occasionally grey, boxes as their primary form of desktop computing power, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced a new contest on Tuesday. Intel will pay...

The report notes that the intelligence disseminated from 1998 on "encompassed, for example, indications of plots for attacks within the United States," including "attacks on civil aviation; assassinations of U.S. public officials; use of high explosives; attacks on Washington, D.C., New York City, and cities on the West Coast; crashing aircraft into buildings as weapons; and using weapons of mass destruction." [emphasis added] As with the August 6, 2001 PDB, "the intelligence that was acquired and shared by the Intelligence Community was not specific as to time and place." Nonetheless, it "should have been sufficient to prompt action to insure...

Intel is pulling out all stops to turn up the heat on its smaller but more nimble rival AMD. The latest salvo comes with the announcement that the new quad-core Core 2 Extreme chips for the high performance games market will be available in November sporting a whopping 70% performance hike. AMD has tried to gain a lot of political capital from the fact that Intel's new quad-core package is not really a quad-core chip but in fact two dual-core chips "stitched together". However, Intel CEO Paul Otellini has a point when he says that consumers don't care whether they're...

A federal judge dismissed a major portion of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s antitrust lawsuit against archrival Intel Corp., ruling that AMD cannot sue in the U.S. for Intel's alleged monopolistic tactics overseas. The judge also set a trial date of April 27, 2009 for AMD to argue that Intel forced major customers into exclusive deals and offered secret rebates to undercut AMD in the market for microprocessors that act as the brains of computers. U.S. District Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr. set the 2009 trial date Wednesday, a day after stripping a key component from AMD's lawsuit, which alleges anticompetitive...

Intel third horseman Andy Grove has chastised HP for its recent management shakeup. The printing, imaging and spying company should not have elevated CEO Mark Hurd to the Chairmanship, according to Intel's ex-top dog. "Every time I see that a company that has departed from the ... combined chairman-chief executive role go back . . . I'm sorry to see that," Grove told the AP in an interview. HP took the unusual step of rewarding Hurd for presiding over the company's spy scandal by promoting him to the Chairman role. The top spot will be vacated when current Chairman Patricia...

For the performance of Clovertown you'll have to wait a bit longer as we're not allowed to disclose it just yet, but we wanted to let you know that so far it's looking like you'll be able to upgrade your Mac Pro to 8 cores in the not too distant future.

LOS ANGELES--Today saw the second of the big three console makers announce its next-generation platform. At its pre-E3 press conference, Sony Computer Entertainment gave the world its first look at the PlayStation 3, as it is now officially called. While the device's price has not yet been set, its release window--spring 2006--has. Flanked by Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Kaz Hirai, SCE head Ken Kutaragi introduced it as a "supercomputer for computer entertainment." The name was not unexpected, since Sony had been running an extensive teaser-ad campaign prepping the public for the PlayStation 3. The company had laid...

PlayStation 3 tackles world ills The PlayStation 3 is released in November The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH). The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease. FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers. With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do...

Macinteltosh is small beer compared with the PS3 WHILE THE PRESS brouhaha happily follows Apple about and co-conspirator Intel looks on, smugly hoping its tie-up with the much-loved computer maker will bring it some added kudos in its assault on the consumer electronics market, IBM, the giant ousted from the party, is getting on with business. Big Blue may have been dumped by Apple but its compensation is plentiful. Its Power chips form the heart of upcoming console offerings from Sony and Nintendo as well as the XBox from Microsoft. And let's face it, the press might like Apple and...

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has led to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project. Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony’s PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new...

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.****************************Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November...

Mercury Computer is sampling a PCI-Express add-in card powered by a Cell processor running Yellow Dog Linux. The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) targets rendering, ray tracing, video/image processing, and signal processing applications, and is said to deliver 180 GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second). (Click for larger view of Mercury CAB) Mercury claims the CAB will be the first Cell-based system for the "workstation" market, when it ships early next year. Mercury also claims to have shipped the first Cell-based computer in general, a 470 pound blade chassis that shipped in January. The CAB runs a Yellow Dog Linux BSP...

FINALLY! We’ve all waited 4 years to see a good report on what happened to Saddam’s WMD, and yesterday the last investigative report was released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The only problem is…I searched the entire 400 pages of this “Phase II report” (or rather both reports that make up the Phase II report), and I couldn’t find those two words: “Bush lied.” I can’t even find, “Bush mislead” in the 400 pages. What I did find was 400 pages of evidence showing that the intelligence community used small amounts of weak intelligence from a decrepit litany...

Chip-maker Intel Corp. said Tuesday a total of 10,500 jobs will be eliminated over the next year through layoffs, attrition and the sale of underperforming business groups as part of a massive restructuring. The Santa Clara-based company said most of the job cuts this year will come from the management, marketing and information technology ranks. The world's largest chip maker is fighting to reverse sinking profits and regain market share stolen by smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The cuts come amid intense pressure for Intel to unload money-losing divisions and halt the encroachment of AMD on its lucrative core...