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Chip designer Transmeta said Thursday it lined up Piper Jaffray to help it weigh an unsolicited buyout offer from investor Riley Investment Management.

"Transmeta's board is focused on enhancing shareholder value," Les Crudele, Transmeta chief executive, said in a statement. "As part of that mission, we have been engaged in a process to expand our advisory resources and we are pleased to have Piper Jaffray & Co. join our team."

Last Friday, Transmeta disclosed Riley Investment Management made an unsolicited cash offer of $15.50 per share--a move that built on its previous demands in … Read more

Intel is getting ready to launch the full-sized SUV of desktop motherboards. Expected later this quarter, the Skulltrail board packs two quad-core 130-watt QX9775 processors--which Legit Reviews said sucked up to a whopping 351 watts. In short, this is not the MacBook Air. The tiny processor in that power-stingy computer sips a mere 20 watts.

Skulltrail pulls out all the stops. It has dual 1600-MHz front side-buses connected to dual Xeon sockets and four full PCIe x16 slots, with planned support for up to four high-end graphics boards. And Xeon processors running on Skulltrail boards have been demonstrated by Intel … Read more

Intel filled in some of the missing details on its Silverthorne mobile processor Tuesday, helping explain how it managed to get the power consumption of this chip down under a couple of watts.

Gianfranco Gerosa of Intel presented the company's paper on Silverthorne, its low-power mobile processor destined for the next generation of mobile Internet devices later this quarter, during the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner had already discussed Silverthorne in some detail last week, but the wonky details were laid bare for a roomful of people who are way, … Read more

Intel and ST Microelectronics have come up with a way to put multiple bits of data in a single memory cell in phase change memory, a breakthrough that effectively doubles the technology's density.

Now if they could only get the stuff to market.

Phase change memory is a type of memory made out of materials similar to those used to make CDs and DVDs. A tiny laser rapidly heats up a small bit, and in the process transforms the structure of the bit from crystalline to amorphous. Reversing the process can change the bit from having an amorphous character … Read more

Dell will begin offering Intel's "Penryn" processor as an option on several notebooks within a week or so, according to sources close to the computer giant.

Although the 45-nanometer generation of Penryn processors targeted at laptops was announced back in early January, the chips haven't exactly leaped into laptop lineups.

So far, Hewlett-Packard is the biggest taker of one Penryn chip: the Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.5GHz, 6MB L2 cache). The HP Pavilion dv6700t, dv9700t, and dv2700t series all use the T9300. The massive 20-inch Pavilion HDX also offers the T9500 (2.6GHz, 6MB cache) … Read more

Intel let a variety of tech enthusiast sites run wild with benchmarks today showing off its forthcoming eight-core desktop platform, code-named Skulltrail. You can get eight-core computing already in the form of Apple's Mac Pro or a pair of Intel Xeon 5400 processors, but Skulltrail marks the first eight-core platform we've seen aimed at high-end workstation computing and PC gaming. The Skulltrail motherboard not only supports two CPUs, but it also supports both Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire multigraphics card standards. The problem is that for all of Skulltrail's power, PC gaming isn't quite … Read more

Intel is expected to shed light on its processor of the future this week as it plugs along with another design that was once supposed to be its processor of the future.

The chip industry's finest minds will be descending on San Francisco this week for the International Solid State Circuits Conference, and Intel plans to present 14 papers highlighting some of its recent work, said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer and head of Intel Labs. Chief among them will be its low-power Silverthorne processor, Intel's latest plan to infiltrate the world of handheld devices.

"… Read more

Transmeta, the erstwhile x86 chip competitor, is coming under attack from shareholders.

The fact that the company posted revenue of only $44,000 in the third quarter, "which included $43,000 of services revenue and $1,000 of license revenue for royalty payments" may or may not have anything to do with Friday's proposed buyout by Riley Investment Management, which owns over 6 percent of Transmeta shares.

The investment firm does have serious questions about the business model based on the LongRun2 technology--described by Transmeta as a suite of technologies for advanced power management and "… Read more

The hard drive will not die. Let's get this on the record now, at the beginning of 2008, because readers may see a fair number of stories proclaiming its demise. Though Friday's Intel-Micron high-speed flash memory announcement points to increasing use of solid state drives (SSDs) in digital products, flash is chasing prey that has eluded imminent death for years. SSDs are gaining acceptance selectively not broadly. SSDs in standard notebooks? No. And even if you're, for instance, a PC vendor trying to compete in the ultra-thin notebook market, chances are you will still opt in most … Read more