processors

So why is Intel having so much trouble competing in the smartphone market? Blame it on LTE.

Intel Executive Vice President of Sales Tom Kilroy said this week at the Computex trade show in Taiwan that his company's troubles in the U.S. have everything to do with its processors' lack of LTE support.

"Absence of LTE is the reason," Kilroy said, according to Engadget, which attended the event. "We can't get ranged by U.S. carriers without LTE, so once we have multi-mode LTE coming to market later this year, we have an opportunity … Read more

In what has become an annual ritual, the higher-end segment of Intel's new generation of processors has been launched at the Computex trade show in Taipei. This includes the quad-core versions of what Intel calls the fourth-generation Core i-series, which was until recently known by the code name Haswell, and was extensively previewed at CES 2013.

Quad-core CPUs are generally found in higher-end desktops and laptops, and are part of Intel's i7 CPU line. Most mainstream PCs use Core i3 and i5 dual-core CPUs -- the Haswell versions of those are coming later.

For laptop and desktop shoppers, … Read more

How serious is Intel about battery life on its next processor? Very.

On Thursday, the world's largest chipmaker hauled out two chip experts to brief journalists on the ways Intel's fourth-generation core processor, aka Haswell, reduces power consumption and boosts battery life.

Intel is claiming a 50 percent improvement in battery life for devices using Haswell compared to the current Ivy Bridge silicon.

The chip will be officially introduced on June 3 and is expected to power future Windows, Apple, and Chrome OS computers.

The information below was provided by Rani N. Borkar, general manager, Intel Architecture Development … Read more

The European Commission announced plans to spend 5 billion euros ($6.4 million) over the next seven years to try to spur microprocessor manufacturing in the European Union.

The funds, which the EC said will be matched by the same amount coming from the private sector, are designed to enable Europe to double its share of chip manufacturing and thereby help other industrial sectors that are embracing electronics.

"I want to double our chip production to around 20 percent of global production. I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically," said … Read more

Xerox has a different view on the future than most.

The company recently gave The New York Times the opportunity to see a new technology it's working on at its Palo Alto, Calif., research center. Referred to as Xerographic microassembly, the technology is based on the idea of laser printing and could one day become the most efficient way to bring circuitry to electronics products, Xerox claims.

According to the Times, Xerographic microassembly breaks traditional silicon wafers into thousands of "chiplets" and then bottles them up as a physical "ink." Once that ink is produced … Read more

As a lifelong gamer, 3D performance (and by "3D" I mean polygonal, not stereoscopic) in tablets is something of particular interest to me. Over the last couple of years, I've watched mobile devices increase in performance, getting closer and closer to the capabilities of PCs and consoles. Judging by their performance histories, tablet and smartphone 3D performance is likely to exponentially increase over the next few years and we may soon be carrying around devices that are as powerful as an Xbox 360 (or more powerful) right in our pockets.

Futuremark's latest version of its long-running … Read more

A kitchen appliance or gadget that does anything and everything is only useful if it actually gets used. Sure, the device in question may chop, slice, and dice with the best of them, but if for one reason or another it is uncomfortable to the user, then it will end up not being used. Through no fault of its own, the kitchen tool gets shunned and ignored, doomed to live out an unproductive life tucked away in the back of the cupboard. It doesn't have to be this way.

The food processor is a tried-and-true addition to any kitchen … Read more

IBM has come up with a new technique for making the tiny switches and memory cells at the heart of computer chips: a drop of ionic liquid.

The technique converts a metal oxide on a computer chip from a conducting to an insulating state and back again, a transition that, using a different approach, is at the heart of conventional semiconductor chips today. Insulators don't conduct electricity and conductors do, so changing a material's state is instrumental to how it performs the logical operations of computer processing.

Today's semiconductor chips work by applying electrical voltage to a &… Read more