chip

U.S. Supreme Court hands Rambus a win

The U.S. Supreme Court handed chip designer Rambus a victory Monday, when it refused to hear an appeal by the Federal Trade Commission that alleged the chip designer violated antitrust laws under the Sherman Act.

For Rambus, it ends a seven-year battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its Sherman Act litigation, which alleged in 2002 that the chipmaker intentionally withheld its patent plans from a standards body, which later gave the green light to some of its technology that is now found in the vast majority of PCs and servers around the world.

"It's a good … Read more

Intel takes chipset dispute with Nvidia to court

Updated at 9:15 a.m. PST with official comment from Intel.

Bit-tech.net tipped us off Wednesday morning that Intel has sued Nvidia over the latter's right to create and sell motherboard chipsets that support Intel's Nehalem (aka Core i7) class of desktop processors.

We haven't heard much about this fight since May 2008, although since that time Nehalem has come to market and Intel remains the only manufacturer with a supporting chipset.

We spoke to Derek Perez, Nvidia's head of public relations, Wednesday morning, and he provided some clarity on the nature of the court filing, as well as Nvidia's take on the filing, which he says is actually a request for an injunction to prevent Nvidia from manufacturing a Nehalem chipset.

"We have a cross-licensing agreement with Intel, entered into about four and a half years ago. Intel is now basically saying the cross-license agreement doesn't apply to future bus interfaces, specifically DMI, (the direct media interface Intel uses to link the Nehalem CPU to a system's memory, a new feature for Nehalem chipsets). Intel has now filed an injunction against us, basically trying to stop us from innovating on DMI.… Read more

Toshiba buys Fujitsu hard disk drive business

Japanese electronics manufacturer Toshiba has agreed to buy over Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) business, in a move aimed at expanding its footprint in the enterprise storage market.

In a statement released Tuesday, Fujitsu did not reveal how much the deal is worth but said the transaction is targeted to be completed in the first quarter of its fiscal 2009, ending June 30 this year.

Under the agreement, Fujitsu will transfer all its HDD-related businesses and functions to the new company, including HDD design, development, manufacturing and sales. It will retain a 20 percent share for "a certain … Read more

Nvidia's sinking sales spur $150M charge, cost cutting

Updated at 12:20 p.m. PST with additional information about salary cuts.

Nvidia is buying up underwater stock options from employees and cutting salaries across the company amid a steep revenue falloff.

On Tuesday, the graphics chip supplier posted a fourth-quarter loss of just under $148 million and a 60 percent drop in revenue as demand for its graphics chips dried up.

"November fell off a cliff," said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, addressing the decrease in demand, during an earnings conference call Tuesday. Chief Financial Officer Marvin Burkett added that "December was worse."

In the aftermath … Read more

Nvidia sales slump 60 percent as demand dries up

Correction, 2:44 p.m. PST: This story initially misstated the day Nvidia slashed its revenue guidance by up to 50 percent. It was January 13.

Nvidia posted a fourth-quarter loss of just under $148 million and a 60 percent drop in revenue as demand plummeted.

On Tuesday, the largest graphics chip supplier reported a loss of $147.7 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with a profit of $257 million, or 42 cents a share, in the year-earlier period.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company posted revenue of $481.1 million, down 60 percent from the $1.2 … Read more

Intel moves up rollout of new chips

Despite being slammed by the financial crisis, Intel is not slowing down. It made this crystal clear in a chip technology briefing on Tuesday, putting rivals on notice that the competition will only get more intense.

The world's largest chipmaker is accelerating introduction of new chips, particularly silicon targeted at laptop computers. Intel is achieving this by moving quickly to processors based on next-generation 32-nanometer manufacturing process technology and investing heavily to keep its most advanced chip factories humming, as CEO Paul Otellini pointed out in a speech in Washington, D.C., earlier today.

In a nutshell, this means … Read more

CSR absorbs GPS chip company SiRF

CSR, formerly Cambridge Silicon Radio, has bought SiRF, an American GPS chip company, in a share transaction valued at 91 million British pounds ($132.7 million), giving SiRF shareholders 27 percent of the new, enlarged CSR. Two SiRF directors will get seats on the board.

SiRF is best known for its SiRFstar range of GPS chips, which are used by TomTom, Garmin, Palm, and others. CSR has traditionally specialized in Bluetooth chips, more recently concentrating on highly integrated all-in-one circuits that combine Bluetooth with other radio functions like Wi-Fi and FM reception. Lately, it has been promoting 802.11n for … Read more

Intel at chip conference: More wireless, less GHz

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel will present 15 papers, with a renewed emphasis on integrating more functions into one chip--and less focus on gigahertz. Intel is especially focusing on squeezing more sophisticated wireless silicon into small devices.

"The trend of using smaller transistors to build larger microprocessor cores with higher operating frequency is coming to an end," Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow, said Wednesday.

The chipmaker will highlight research on what it is proclaiming as the "new system-on-a-chip (SoC) era," which it describes as requiring "a fundamental shift in the way semiconductor … Read more

After chipmaker's collapse, memory prices rise

Memory chip prices shot up on Monday--a welcome bit of news for beleaguered chipmakers, who have been caught in a relentless downward price spiral.

Prices for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), the main memory in PCs, shot up as much as 26 percent, according to data posted on DRAMeXchange. A number of reports have attributed this to the bankruptcy of Germany-based chipmaker Qimonda, and seem to indicate that this will relieve some of the pressure on prices caused by oversupply.

The price of certain DDR2 (Double Data Rate, second generation) memory chips rose as much as 28 percent Monday. Flash … Read more

AMD, Intel, Nvidia face bleak graphics market

Jon Peddie Research said Thursday that estimated graphics chip shipments in the fourth quarter plummeted 34 percent from the third quarter--a very atypical month-to-month decline.

"The fourth quarter is usually a positive quarter for the computer industry. There has obviously been some inventory problems in the quarter," said Jon Peddie, president of Tiburon Calif.-based research firm, in a statement.

And it will get worse. "We're...bracing for what will probably be the worst Q1 and Q2 decline we've seen since the Internet bubble pop of 2000," he warned.

Total shipments of GPUs for … Read more