intel

Financing has been cut by about half for a partnership by Intel, ST Microelectronics, and Francisco Partners to launch a flash memory company called Numonyx, the companies said Wednesday. In addition, the company, called Numonyx, won't be established until early 2008, under a revised schedule.

Initially, Numonyx was to have received up to $1.55 billion in debt financing. The companies have revised financing terms so Numonyx now has a $650 million loan and $100 million revolving credit facility, Intel said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

STMicroelectronics added in a statement that the companies … Read more

After holding off on the release of a faster iPhone because of concerns about battery life, is Apple really prepared to take a step backward with Intel's Silverthorne chip?

AppleInsider reported Friday that Apple has decided to use Intel's upcoming low-power Silverthorne chip in "not one but multiple products currently situated on its 2008 calendar year product roadmap." Silverthorne is Intel's latest push to capture the handheld/mobile phone market as part of a product concept called the Mobile Internet Device.

The report goes on to say that the most likely candidates for Silverthorne are … Read more

Intel continues to move further and further away from its communications experiments as it refocuses on the things it does best.

The company agreed to sell the telecommunications portion of its Optical Platform Division to Emcore, a chipmaker for the telecom industry, for $85 million. This includes a bunch of technology that doesn't really fit into Intel's historical strengths, such as tunable lasers for telecom products.

At one point, Intel thought communications chips would be the answer to the company's search for growth outside the PC and server industries, but those days have long since passed. Intel … Read more

On March 21, 1983, AMD went public. Adjusted for splits, the stock closed at $9.00 that day. Today, shares of AMD closed at $7.95. That means if you invested $10,000.00 in AMD's IPO, today you'd have $8,833.33. Adjusted for 25 years of inflation, that would be about a buck and a half.

Just to calibrate that, the same investment in Intel would have gotten you about a half a million dollars, Texas Instruments about $150,000, both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 about $100,000; even National Semiconductor and LSI beat AMD, although not by much.

Of course, some investors have figured out that you can make a fortune playing the AMD roller coaster. Except for the tech bubble and a brief spike two years ago, the stock has traded in a relatively narrow range. Seems like a nerve-wracking way to invest, but I know people who swear by it.… Read more

Intel is making a "small" change to its lineup of solid-state drives.

The chipmaker announced late Friday that it is making a solid-state drive for handheld devices that is smaller than a penny and weighs less than a drop of water. The Z-P140 drives will be available in 2GB and 4GB sizes, and are intended for low-power, rugged devices, presumably gadgets like Internet tablets, smartphones, portable video players, and handheld computers. Intel says it is 400 times smaller than a 1.8-inch hard drive.

The drives use flash memory to store data, and have a PATA (parallel ATA) … Read more

There was a time when Advanced Micro Devices was on a roll, and really seemed to have Intel's number--especially in the server space.

AMD's Opteron processor represented a significant advance in x86 processor design, causing Intel no end of headaches. More than any other single reason, Opteron is what forced Intel to largely rototill its product roadmap a couple of years back in order to switch its focus from frequency to multicore designs sooner than it had intended. For that matter, Intel may well have never added 64-bit extensions to its x86 processors had AMD not done so … Read more

If you've been following the AMD saga lately, you probably know that this company is in utter disrepair. After shocking the world just a few years ago with a downright unbelievable set of processors that blew Intel's socks off, AMD awoke a sleeping giant that has proven to be more formidable and dangerous than ever before.

To make matters worse, AMD is in financial trouble and hopes to turn a profit by the latter half of 2008. Oh and in case you're keeping score, the company just admitted that it overpaid for ATI and will need to adjust its financial statements to reflect that error in judgment.

But for all of its issues, AMD is still the world's number two microprocessor maker in the world and it does control one of the major video card manufacturers. But is this enough to justify its existence? If it is, shouldn't something be done with the company's decision-makers to jumpstart things a bit?

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, there's one element to this story that should not be overlooked -- AMD is in dire straits right now and its chances of getting out from under it are dwindling with each new processor from Intel.

If you ask me, AMD should be sold to the highest bidder and liquidated. Of course, if you think that's a bit extreme, fire all of its loser executives and try to find some people who actually know how to run a business and compete against larger competitors.

Trust me, it's the only way.… Read more

Correction, 10:45 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated Fred Terman's title at Stanford University. He was provost.

Sixty years ago, on December 16, scientists at Bell Labs--William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain--built the world's first transistor and nothing has been the same since. We'll be covering the anniversary in subsequent articles, but here's a smattering of some of the implications, in somewhat chronological order, of the event:

1. The dawn of electronics. Vacuum tubes consumed lots of power and were fragile. ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, weighed 28 tons, consumed … Read more

Nicholas Negroponte had the best of intentions. Unfortunately, when those intentions clash with the profit motives of private vendors, private industry has become quite aggressive, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The One Laptop Per Child project has sold nowhere near its stated goal of 150 million laptops shipped by the end of 2008.

As is often the case, the person with the idea is not necessarily the right person to capitalize on it:

Mr. Negroponte's ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.… Read more