ARM

A cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England, tomorrow will try to perform the world's first heart procedure using a robotic arm paired with advanced 3D mapping to treat a 63-year-old patient with atrial fibrillation (or AF, the most common arrhythmia).

The procedure, which will incorporate use of the CARTO-3 mapping software, comes just six months after Dr. André Ng became the first to perform a remote catheter ablation using the hospital's Amigo Robotic Catheter System, and just eight years after the hospital began performing ablation to treat AF.

In the procedure, a surgeon (or bot) inserts … Read more

An upcoming Intel Atom chip may blunt the growth of tablets based on the widely used ARM processor--with the possible exception of Apple, according to an analyst at UBS Investment Research.

Uche Orji of UBS made the comments today in a research note upgrading Intel's stock to a "buy."

Windows tablets based on Intel's "Oak Trail" Atom chips could have a larger market impact than expected, Orji wrote. "While tablet forecasts for 2011 in excess of 50m (50 million) are not unreasonable (our Atmel touch controller forecasts infers a tablet market size of 56m), none of these forecasts are likely to fully incorporate the scenario of a significant counter-attack from a new generation of notebooks and x86-based tablets that could ultimately limit the growth of ARM-based tablets (at least those that are non-Apple)," Orji wrote.

Apple's A4 processor, used in the iPad, is based on an ARM design. Orji is referring to future ARM-based tablets that use, for example, Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon chip and Nvidia's dual-core Tegra processor.

Ashok Kumar, managing director and analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, took a different tack… Read more

Will small, powerful, connected-to-everything devices running on non-Intel silicon become the personal computer? The CEO of graphics-chip supplier Nvidia thinks so.

The sentiment, voiced at the company's annual conference this week by chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, has been expressed before. And like any strong strategy statement from a Silicon Valley CEO, it's self-serving. Nvidia is staking a good chunk of its future--as much as half of its business--on chips based on the ARM design.

But that doesn't mean Huang has got it all wrong, either. Indeed, ARM-based devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPad, Motorola's Droid, Research In Motion's BlackBerry, and countless future smartphones and tablets from Motorola, RIM, Apple, and others will use the ARM chip design. "ARM is the fastest-growing CPU (processor) in the world today. It's the instruction set architecture of choice of mobile computing," Huang said. "It is very clear now that mobile computing will be a completely disruptive force to all of computing."

Huang continued. "This (smartphone) is the first computer that is equipped with all kinds of sensors, cameras, microphones, GPSs, and accelerometers. This is the first computer that's context aware. Situation aware. Who knows, someday it may be self-aware," he said.

Huang raises interesting questions about the future. Will a future PC be a powerful, multi-core-CPU handheld device that wirelessly connects to large displays and a host of other devices--so the PC is carried around in your pocket or small satchel and then connects on the fly to larger devices and/or peripherals?

But the ARM-based vision also presumes that the largest chipmaker in the world, Intel, is standing still. Which it isn't.… Read more

No, you are not reading The Onion. A computer program created at the University of Central Florida that directs a robotic arm to grab objects with just one touch was deemed by many participants in a pilot study to be "too easy" to use--a finding the designers had not anticipated.

"We focused so much on getting the technology right...We didn't expect this," says developer Aman Behal, an assistant professor of engineering and computer science at UCF.

The computer program directs the robotic arm into action based on voice command, touch screen, computer mouse, or … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel Executive Vice President David "Dadi" Perlmutter sat down for an exclusive interview with CNET Monday at the Intel Developer Forum here to discuss the technologies that will define the world's largest chipmaker over the next 12 months. Permlmutter hit on the company's Sandy Bridge chip, tablets, and competition from the satellite of ARM processor makers.

Q: What are the marquee features that differentiate Sandy Bridge from its predecessors? (Sandy Bridge is Intel's new microarchitecture that will eventually span its laptop, desktop, and server processors and is due to appear in chips and systems … Read more

ARM has released some details of its forthcoming 2.5GHz Cortex A15 processor, at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The chip, previously code-named Eagle, will be built in 32nm and 28nm processes by IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung. The core is superscalar, capable of running multiple instructions through a pipeline, and ARM says that it will perform up to five times faster than the current ARM 9 architecture.

The company said it would be used in "superphones" (high-performance smartphones), home entertainment, small servers, and wireless infrastructure, in one- to eight-core configurations and beyond.

Read more of "… Read more

Silicon start-up Smooth-Stone has received $48 million from a syndicate of investors including ARM, Texas Instruments, and Highland Capital Ventures.

Smooth-Stone's goal is to bring the virtues of low-power cell phone technology to servers and, as a result, bring down the staggering power consumption at large data centers. Mega data centers can house tens of thousands of servers and the largest can use between 5 and 20 megawatts of power. One megawatt, equal to 1 million watts, can power about 1,000 homes.

Smooth-Stone joins other start-ups such as U.S. Department of Energy-backed SeaMicro, which is using Intel'… Read more

Nvidia's chief executive officer is emphatic that his company has a strategy for building processors beyond its mainstay graphics chips.

During an interview with CNET, Jen-Hsun Huang addressed an issue with the company's chips and spoke about ongoing Intel litigation.

On Thursday, Nvidia reported a second-quarter net loss of $141 million, or 25 cents per share, worse than the net loss of $105.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. The graphics processing unit (GPU) supplier--whose chips are found in PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba--cited muted demand for consumer graphics chips and economic weakness in Europe and China, which drove consumers to lower-priced products. Nvidia products typically are targeted at the upper end of the market.

In the earnings announcement, the company addressed a longstanding issue--and ongoing financial burden--centered on a defect in some of its earlier GPUs and chipsets. The problem was first cited by Nvidia in July 2008 when it announced a charge ranging from $150 million to $200 million to cover costs to repair and replace GPUs and chipsets due to "weak die/packaging material" in older laptop products. "Die/packaging" essentially describes the chip. Nvidia also announced additional charges after July 2008.

On Thursday, Nvidia said it recorded an "additional net charge" of $193.9 million related to the same problem. "The charge includes additional remediation costs as well as the estimated costs of a pending settlement of a class action lawsuit related to this matter," the company said in a statement. Combined with the $282 million of net charges announced previously, the total net charge related to the issue comes to $475.9 million, the company said.

I asked Huang Thursday if he thought the problem was now largely… Read more