Mark Hachman

Smaller is better, certainly for notebook computers and their processors. However, the bane of low-power chips has been “current leakage,” a problem that drains away much of the energy-savings on smaller processors. Intel Corp. engineers on Thursday will announce a “breakthrough” aimed at minimizing this current leakage at the International Workshop on Gate Insulator 2003 […]

Intel Corp. officials confirmed that a software update designed to improve the performance of 32-bit Windows programs on its 64-bit Itanium processors has been pushed back until the second half of 2004. Intels IA-32 Execution Layer (IA-32 EL) software was tied to the official release of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, which Microsoft in […]

Although the U.S. Army has used radio-frequency identification tags for nearly a decade, it was the recent Gulf War that prompted the Department of Defenses recent decision to adopt them, a senior official said. The Defense Department said last week that it will require its suppliers to deploy RFID tags by January 2005, the same […]

Intel Corp. this week offered a demonstration of a forthcoming self-healing, wireless sensor technology. The sensor grid could improve the monitoring and analysis of environmental conditions and Intel said it will deploy the technology in its own manufacturing plants. Part passive sensor, part tiny computing device, Intels sensor “motes” will replace arrays of traditional wired […]

While still in its infancy, radio frequency identification technology is gaining momentum in business and now with the federal government. One thing is certain, the tags will be arriving on shipments in a couple of years. The Department of Defense last week instituted a policy to require its suppliers to install radio frequency identification (RFID) […]

Apples iBook notebooks entered the G4 generation on Wednesday, the company announced. Separately, the company also lowered prices for its eMac education line. While previous iBook models simply allowed users to play back CDs, the new models allow them to burn CDs on a slot-loaded combination DVD and CD-RW drive. Apple also included the ATI […]

Advanced Micro Devices was unable to turn a profit for the third quarter, as its flash business dragged the company down into the red. Although rival Intel Corp. reported its strongest third-quarter sequential growth in 25 years, AMD reported a small loss of $31 million on revenue of $954 million. Third-quarter sales increased by 88 […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s chief technologist Fred Weber argued Wednesday that all of the different microarchitectures in the industry should be given up in favor of X86 processors. Webers speech, delivered at The Microprocessor Forum here, preceded a number of presentations by embedded processor designers known for their balkanized instruction sets—one of which, […]

One day after Transmeta Corp. announced its latest lines of processors, the company reported that it continued to bleed red ink. Transmeta Wednesday said it lost $23.7 million on revenue of $2.7 million in the third quarter. The companys revenues were about half of the $5.1 million Transmeta reported in the second quarter, and about […]

Startup ClearSpeed Technology on Tuesday is expected to announce a coprocessor for x86-based servers that the company said could help shrink massive clustered systems down into a server chassis or two. ClearSpeeds 32-bit CS301 coprocessor runs at only 200MHz but outputs up to 25.6 gigaflops per processor. The companys chief designers envision the chip perched […]