Bigger Wafers, Smaller Dies, New Technologies Some PC users view a desktop or notebook as a mysterious black box. Some know a good deal about the processor inside, or even picked out a particular brand and model of CPU before buying or building the rest of the PC. But not many pay attention to how Read more…
Small Scale, Big Business In the wake of the dot-bomb crash, tech investors are turning to nanotechnology as the next big thing, with huge advances in materials science, manufacturing, and medical treatments on the horizon. But while the headlines predict a sci-fi future of microscopic robots clearing clogged arteries or wind-blown “smart dust” surveying enemy Read more…
Double-Barreled Memory Controllers Boost PC Performance Speedy CPUs grab most of the headlines, but as processors get faster, they put more pressure on other, less prominent parts of PC architecture to keep pace. That’s why perhaps this year’s biggest desktop technology trend is the move to higher-bandwidth memory architectures — specifically, to system chipsets with Read more…
Balancing Performance and Power Consumption Once 98-pound weaklings compared to their desktop siblings, mobile processors — CPUs designed for notebook PCs, where power, cooling, and physical space are all at a premium — have steadily narrowed the performance gap over time. And while mobile chips command higher prices (just as LCD screens do over CRT Read more…
Power to the Pocket With PC sales flatter than an interstate in Iowa, chip vendors are turning to handhelds for a hand up. Intel Corp. has supplemented its Pentium, Celeron, Xeon, and Itanium with a processor product line for PDAs and smart phones, dubbed XScale, to carry its dominance into this emerging market. AMD has Read more…
Sorting Out the Opteron, Athlon 64, and Athlon 64 FX In October 1999, AMD announced a bold alternative to the proprietary EPIC or Itanium 64-bit processor architecture chosen by Intel: The CPU underdog promised to extend the industry-standard x86 architecture to 64 bits, keeping native compatibility with existing 32-bit software while adding a 64-bit mode Read more…
The Latest Thing, or the Last Hurrah? Latest and greatest PC technologies are often touted as some kind of Second Coming, but the latest example is a third coming — AGP 3.0, the standard behind the new AGP 8X graphics cards. This new version of the Intel-created, royalty-free-licensed specification improves on AGP 4X, promising unprecedented Read more…
You Can’t Tell the AMD and Intel Players Without a Scorecard Let’s face it, keeping track of CPU trademarks is hard enough — you’re a serious geek if you can tell the difference between Xeon and Itanium. (The first is what Intel calls its 32-bit server CPUs, relatives of the desktop Pentium III and 4; Read more…
Chip Giant Gambles on CPU Optimized for Multitasking The standard practice with processor marketing has been to introduce a new CPU, then ratchet up the clock speed with future models. There are usually incremental benefits along the way, such as larger cache sizes or smaller cores, but for the most part, speed is king. That’s Read more…
Shifting the Balance of Power Between AMD and Intel? In the first quarter of 2004, says PathScale Inc., it’s going to make AMD’s Opteron the preferred processor choice for high-performance, 64-bit Linux clusters — not by helping AMD engineers get more megahertz than Intel’s, but by shipping a suite of software compilers that increase Opteron-based Read more…