Collected By Robert R. Collins

Week of December 9, 2001

Older News

Itanium sales off to a slow start

By Michael Kanellos

December 11, 2001
C/Net

Intel spent nearly 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop Itanium, but the first version of the chip has faced slow sales so far.

In the third quarter--the first full quarter of Itanium sales--manufacturers sold just $13.7 million worth of servers containing the chip, which comes to less than 500 servers, according to market researcher IDC.

Via launches low-power embedded platform

By Faith Hung

December 11, 2001
EBN

Dubbed “Eden,” the platform offers high performance and consumes about 6 watts of power, the least among rival products, according to the core-logic chipset designer. Eden will compete with the Geode line of National Semiconductor Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., and the SiS550 family of Silicon Integrated Systems, Hsinchu, Taiwan, among others, some analysts said.

Intel quietly releasing new P4 chipset

By John G. Spooner

December 11, 2001
C/Net

Intel will allow PC makers to quietly begin taking orders for computers fitted with a new version of its 845 chipset Dec. 17, CNET News.com has learned. The official announcement of the chipset and the corresponding fanfare won't come until early January.

AMD prepares for SOI processing in Dresden fab

By Jack Robertson

December 11, 2001
EBN

In fact, AMD claims that its pioneering ramp-up of copper processing and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers at its Fab 30 here will benefit archrival Intel, which can now get mature and lower cost equipment as it moves into the new technologies.

Intel, Sun sketch multiprocessor chip plans

By Rick Merritt

December 10, 2001
EE Times

Intel is working on a unique implementation of SMT to address the memory access issues that crop up in multiprocessors. Sun will go further, designing one or more new Sparc processor cores that will be optimized for multiprocessing chips with four or more cores on a die.

Transmeta puzzled by TSMC document

By Eva Glass

December 11, 2001
The Inquirer

Sharing a ciggie a good 500 yards from HQ, she told me that TSMC is telling its customers that TMTA has passed its .13µ qualification and is already shipping parts.

Phew, she said. You shoulda seen the faces of the boys when they read this back in the office. They went livid.

Dramurai licks its lips over Intella's DDR chipset

By Paul Hales

December 11, 2001
The Inquirer

But with the Dramurai gearing up for the boost in demand by ramping up production of the much-vaunted memory chips, oversupply is once again a possibility in the coming months – once the shortage is overcome…

Hyperthreading gets more Linux support

By Mike Magee

December 10, 2001
The Inquirer

Intel told the INQUIRER back in August that hyperthreading would be introduced on server versions of its processors in 2002, but as we have reported here earlier, there appears no real obstacle for the introduction in the desktop chip too.

A bigger obstacle is a running row going on between Microsoft and Intel as to how hyperthreading and SMT affects licence fees.

Hypertransport out in the open

By Paul Hales

December 11, 2001
The Inquirer

Hypertransport is the interconnect technology embraced by AMD to build scalable multi-processor systems. A leading member of the Hypertransport Consortium, AMD has long trumpeted the benefits of the interconnect over the Intel-sponsored 3GIO. The Consortium says the interconnect is, "designed to enable the chips inside of PCs, servers, networking and communications devices to communicate with each other up to 48 times faster than existing bus technologies".

nVidia was first to commercially implement Hypertransport in its AMD-only nForce 'platform'.

Judge rules against Intel in Via case, one claim left

By Douglas F. Gray

December 6, 2001
Infoworld

A judge in the U.S. District Court of Northern California Wednesday granted Via a summary judgment in a lawsuit Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel filed in 1999. In making the ruling, the judge said that Via demonstrated to the court that it had modified the chip set enough so that it doesn't violate Intel's patent, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

Via Technologies Thumbs Its Nose at Intel

By Chris Hall

December 10, 2001
Electronic News

Currently embroiled in a legal wrangle with Intel Corp. in which both sides are suing the other for patent infringement—not to mention the impact of a severe downturn in the semiconductor industry—Via is making a bold move. The formation of VPSD allows the fabless design company to simultaneously optimize board designs using Via chipsets while specifically offering motherboards fitted with its P4X266 chipset, which is designed to support systems based on the Intel Pentium 4 processor.

Taiwan's Via rolls out new I/O device to boost PC systems

December 6, 2001
Semiconductor Business News

Via's new so-called VPX Modular I/O Expansion Technology consists of a new 64-bit PCI controller. Dubbed the VPX-64, the device allows Via's double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM-based chip sets to support 64-bit PCI in both the 33-MHz and 66-MHz modes.

The device enables Via's VIA Apollo chip sets to offer up to 533-megabytes of PCI data throughput for high-bandwidth applications, like Gigabit Ethernet and Ultra SCSI/320.

DDR i845 ready, steady. Go!

By Mike Magee

December 7, 2001
The Inquirer

The Japanese site Akiba Hotline has pictures of a number of boards which use the chipset, which Intel doesn't want to tell the press - that is us - about until January 2002.

Intel has shortage and factories are full full

By Mike Magee

December 7, 2001
The Inquirer

Gross margins for INTC will be around the 47 per cent mark, which would be a yield many companies would kill for, but revenues are not that significantly higher than the firm predicted.