Items tagged with semiconductors
Advanced Micro Device's tally for its fiscal third quarter reached just $1.3 billion. That represents a jump of 23 percent from the same quarter a year prior on strong demand for its semiconductors used in game consoles, and it beat out what analysts were expecting. That's the good news. The bad news is that it wasn't...
Read more...
Shrinking semiconductors to 10-nanometers is no easy task—just ask Intel, which pushed back the release of its 10nm Cannonlake architecture until 2017. Samsung, however, is having better luck with it. The South Korean outfit announced on Monday that it has begun mass product of system-on-chip (SoC) products based on...
Read more...
It's a pretty remarkable thing that, for the most part, Moore's Law has been accurate for over 50 years, helping to set the pace for processor design for several decades. However, Moore's Law is in serious trouble of being broken if, as a group of researchers predict, transistors stop shrinking within the next five...
Read more...
Samsung could use a financial boost after a decline in mobile profit led to the company posting an overall loss last year. It has a new boss in charge of mobile, and to keep the cash flowing (and investors happy), Samsung will produce 14nm CPU and GPU semiconductors for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) starting in 2016.
AMD currently has all
Read more...
Samsung's been in somewhat of a sales funk ever since the launch of its Galaxy S5. Consumers had grown bored with the recycled design of the Galaxy series, and though the premium overhaul of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge sparked renewed interest in the company's flagship phone line, manufacturing troubles prevented...
Read more...
IBM Research on Thursday announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry's first 7-nanometer node test chips with functioning transistors. The accomplishment was a joint effort with partners GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.
It's also...
Read more...
Three atoms thick. According to a paper published this week in the science journal Nature by a group of researchers from Cornell University, that is the breadth of the transistors that can now be produced using an experimental — and highly conductive — material called transition metal dichalcogenide (also called a...
Read more...
Intel is reportedly attempting to negotiate a deal to acquire Altera, an American company that designs and manufacturers FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays. The figure that's out there is $10 billion, and if it happens, it would be Intel's largest acquisition ever. It would also help Intel expand its presence in...
Read more...
It was a mixed set of announcements from AMD last night, with some positive news for the chip manufacturer, but some long-term projections that sent investors skittering. This was Lisa Su's first quarterly announcement after taking over the CEO position barely a week ago, and she opened with good news -- not only did...
Read more...
The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005...
Read more...
The big news of the day, based on a leaked Intel roadmap, is that Broadwell won't launch in 2014. Instead, we'll see a Haswell refresh with unknown performance characteristics (slightly higher clocks are the best bet) and, late in the year, a "Haswell-E" server part on the X99 chipset. Ivy Bridge-E, the six-core...
Read more...
Global semiconductor revenue saw a downswing in 2012 compared to one year prior, dropping 3 percent to $298 billion, according to preliminary results by market research firm Gartner. The top 25 players were collectively hit the hardest, as their revenue dropped 4.2 percent, surpassing the industry average and accounting for a smaller portion...
Read more...
You can certainly make the argument that tablets didn't catch AMD or Intel "flat-footed" (and we in fact did make that argument), but at the same time, you have to give companies like Qualcomm credit for being well prepared for the mobile boom that we now find ourselves in. To wit, Qualcomm is now the world's third largest semiconductor player,...
Read more...
Samsung, the world's most active memory chip maker, announced today that it's begun constructing a new facility in Xi'an, China that will make use of advanced 10-nanometer class technology in producing NAND flash memory chips. The South Korean company said it's investing $2.3 billion in the new fab, marking the single largest investment by...
Read more...
Texas Instruments, maker of the popular OMAP processor line and those pricey calculators high school math teachers insist their students bring to class, announced fourth quarter revenue of $3.42 billion, net income of $298 billion, and earnings per share of 25 cents, all of which exceeded the company's expectations...
Read more...