Processor

With smartphones packing more and more features and people using them for increasingly processor intensive tasks LG has announced plans to introduce the first Android smartphones to be powered by a dual-core processor. The new phones, which will be part of the company’s new Optimus Series, will feature the second generation NIVIDIA Tegra mobile processor, the Tegra 2.  Read More

IBM has announced details of its most powerful commercial system ever. The core server of the new zEnterprise System mainframe – called zEnterprise 196 – contains 96 z196 processors, which IBM touts as the world’s fastest, most powerful computer chip. IBM is aiming the system at businesses such as banks and retailers dealing with the skyrocketing amounts of data resulting from the ever increasing amount of business transactions carried out in an increasingly inter-connected business world.  Read More

Adopting a new, highly automated and reconfigurable approach to hardware acceleration, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have come up with a way to harness the unused silicon real estate in smartphones – the so-called "dark silicon" – as special-purpose processors dynamically optimized to perform the most common tasks in an efficient way.  Read More

At Computex 2010 AMD gave the first public demonstration of its Fusion processor that combines the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on a single chip. The AMD Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) not only adds another acronym to the computer lexicon, but ushers is what AMD says is a significant shift in processor architecture and capabilities.  Read More

Intel has introduced new ultra-low voltage (ULV) versions of its Intel Core processors. Based on Intel’s 32 nanometer (nm) technology the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors are destined for the insides of ultraportable laptops - which Intel defines as less than an inch thick and weighing just two to five pounds - without sacrificing performance, connectivity and battery life.  Read More

MSI has announced the launch of a Windows-based software tool that puts an end to all that bothersome fiddling around in the BIOS to enable inactive processor cores. The tool lists available cores, and with a few simple clicks on the basic interface and a reboot, a user is able to unleash previously disabled ones.  Read More

HP has boosted its range of laptops quite substantially, with its largest single introduction of AMD-powered notebook PCs to date. Fourteen new machines are on offer in total, pitched towards both business customers and home users. All of the models in HP’s new notebook range include updated AMD multicore processors. Among the new brood is a set of Phenom II Dual-Core N620 systems promising to offer users up to 69 per cent faster performance than previous models.  Read More

The photolithography process used to create the features on computer chips has remained largely unchanged in the last 50 years. But as chip manufacturers continue to cram more and more circuits onto a chip the limitation of this process is rapidly being reached. Potential solutions to keep apace with Moore’s Law include using DNA molecules as scaffolding, replacing copper interconnects with graphene and using plasma beams. Now researchers at MIT are developing a process that could see tiny circuits being created using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns.  Read More

Polyethylene is the most widely used polymer in the world, most commonly used for packaging and plastic shopping bags. And like most polymers it is a very good insulators for both heat and electricity. But now an MIT team has developed a new process that causes the polymer to remain an electrical insulator but conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction, unlike metals, which conduct equally well in all directions. This may make the new material especially useful for applications where it is important to draw heat away from an object, such as a computer processor chip.  Read More