Slashdot Mirror

Blind RMS Groupie writes "According to this article at EE Times, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is developing a voice/data unit for infantry soldiers based on multiple StrongARM processors and embedded Linux. The radios will link together in what is characterized as a "mobile, ad-hoc, peer-to-peer network that uses frequency-hopping technology to avoid communication intercepts and location-finding capability.""

Blind RMS Groupie writes "According to this article at EE Times, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is developing a voice/data unit for infantry soldiers based on multiple StrongARM processors and embedded Linux. The radios will link together in what is characterized as a "mobile, ad-hoc, peer-to-peer network that uses frequency-hopping technology to avoid communication intercepts and location-finding capability.""

Slashback tonight with more on clockless computing; Benjamin Franklin on patents (!); and early notice to evacuate Zurich in advance of the ISWC Borg. (Read more below.)

I've broken two Timexes this month, this is just old hat now. Pete Brubaker writes: "A few days ago this story was posted to /. pointing to a NYTimes article about Sun's new asynchronous processor. The article, though informative, lacked detail. EE Times comes through and discusses this technology in quite a bit more detail."

If it won't fit in your overhead bin, it probably isn't wearable. If you were intrigued by the wearable computers mentioned in October, you can thankjoeboy4h for pointing out that "the 5th International Symposium on Wearable Computers will be in Zurich this October. Aside from being an excellent academic conference this is also the ultimate hack fest; lots of cool people all interested in hacking both hardware and software, most wearing their wearables, and some really incredible presentations. The call for papers is out now; it would be an excellent place for slashdoters to strut their stuff."

I hope they can webcast a stroll in the Alps with a well-outfitted wearables party ... now that would be a Linuxbierwanderung.

But for the record, would you say you're a "real American," Mr. Franklin? Ovidius writes "Need a historical precedent to argue in favor of open source and against the rash of insane technology patents? Tell people how Ben Franklin valued innovation over profits--in 1742 he not only published the details of his newly conceived Franklin Stove, but refused a patent on it on the principle that "as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

Even when a London entrepreneur took out a patent on a poorly modified version of his stove, Franklin still did not pursue the matter, though maybe he would have if he had known where the use of patents in business would be headed 250 or so years later. The account is from chapter 10 of his Autobiography (which is available at the esteemed Project Gutenberg) :

In order of time, I should have mentioned before, that having, in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand.

To promote that demand, I wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled "An Account of the new-invented Pennsylvania Fireplaces; wherein their Construction and Manner of Operation is particularly explained; their Advantages above every other Method of warming Rooms demonstrated; and all Objections that have been raised against the Use of them answered and obviated," etc.

This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

An ironmonger in London however, assuming a good deal of my pamphlet, and working it up into his own, and making some small changes in the machine, which rather hurt its operation, got a patent for it there, and made, as I was told, a little fortune by it. And this is not the only instance of patents taken out for my inventions by others, tho' not always with the same success, which I never contested, as having no desire of profiting by patents myself, and hating disputes. The use of these fireplaces in very many houses, both of this and the neighbouring colonies, has been, and is, a great saving of wood to the inhabitants.

So who is more American, Ben Franklin or Bill Gates?"

Slashback tonight with more on clockless computing; Benjamin Franklin on patents (!); and early notice to evacuate Zurich in advance of the ISWC Borg. (Read more below.)

I've broken two Timexes this month, this is just old hat now. Pete Brubaker writes: "A few days ago this story was posted to /. pointing to a NYTimes article about Sun's new asynchronous processor. The article, though informative, lacked detail. EE Times comes through and discusses this technology in quite a bit more detail."

If it won't fit in your overhead bin, it probably isn't wearable. If you were intrigued by the wearable computers mentioned in October, you can thankjoeboy4h for pointing out that "the 5th International Symposium on Wearable Computers will be in Zurich this October. Aside from being an excellent academic conference this is also the ultimate hack fest; lots of cool people all interested in hacking both hardware and software, most wearing their wearables, and some really incredible presentations. The call for papers is out now; it would be an excellent place for slashdoters to strut their stuff."

I hope they can webcast a stroll in the Alps with a well-outfitted wearables party ... now that would be a Linuxbierwanderung.

But for the record, would you say you're a "real American," Mr. Franklin? Ovidius writes "Need a historical precedent to argue in favor of open source and against the rash of insane technology patents? Tell people how Ben Franklin valued innovation over profits--in 1742 he not only published the details of his newly conceived Franklin Stove, but refused a patent on it on the principle that "as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

Even when a London entrepreneur took out a patent on a poorly modified version of his stove, Franklin still did not pursue the matter, though maybe he would have if he had known where the use of patents in business would be headed 250 or so years later. The account is from chapter 10 of his Autobiography (which is available at the esteemed Project Gutenberg) :

In order of time, I should have mentioned before, that having, in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand.

To promote that demand, I wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled "An Account of the new-invented Pennsylvania Fireplaces; wherein their Construction and Manner of Operation is particularly explained; their Advantages above every other Method of warming Rooms demonstrated; and all Objections that have been raised against the Use of them answered and obviated," etc.

This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

An ironmonger in London however, assuming a good deal of my pamphlet, and working it up into his own, and making some small changes in the machine, which rather hurt its operation, got a patent for it there, and made, as I was told, a little fortune by it. And this is not the only instance of patents taken out for my inventions by others, tho' not always with the same success, which I never contested, as having no desire of profiting by patents myself, and hating disputes. The use of these fireplaces in very many houses, both of this and the neighbouring colonies, has been, and is, a great saving of wood to the inhabitants.

So who is more American, Ben Franklin or Bill Gates?"

zakath writes "EETimes.com has an article on Motorola's successful presentation of 256-kilobit MRAM at ISSCC this week (Instant-on PCs anyone?). While they're still far from commercial production (2004 is their target) its nice to see some progress being made. Please tell me RAMBUS has no patents for this tech..."

zakath writes "EETimes.com has an article on Motorola's successful presentation of 256-kilobit MRAM at ISSCC this week (Instant-on PCs anyone?). While they're still far from commercial production (2004 is their target) its nice to see some progress being made. Please tell me RAMBUS has no patents for this tech..."

Houndogk writes: "I came across this reading the news of the day at Tomshardware. This [article] talks about a new generation of CD-RW that promise to be 3x as fast and have 3x the capacity as current drives. It is also expected to scale to 4x and 5x." From the article: "[T]he premise of ML technology is the use of gray-scale disc encoding, with 3 bits per spot giving eight shades of gray. Under a microscope, the disc surface appears as a continuous blending of light to dark shading, versus the traditional disc appearance of either dark or bright spots." And what happens when we go to 24 bits per spot? ;) This announcement seems to partly answer GeoffM's quest for dual- or quad-density CD-Rs, and handily top Sony's moves to double-density.

ddillman writes "EETimes.com has a story about new DNA-based sensor chips that can detect any of a range of hazardous metals such as lead and mercury in real time. Previously, this had required lengthy and expensive testing in batches for specific elements. When the sensors detect the metal for which they're testing, they emit light into a fiber optic line. They've already got a range of three orders of magnitude in sensitivity, and expect to be able to refine this considerably."

ddillman writes "EETimes.com has a story about new DNA-based sensor chips that can detect any of a range of hazardous metals such as lead and mercury in real time. Previously, this had required lengthy and expensive testing in batches for specific elements. When the sensors detect the metal for which they're testing, they emit light into a fiber optic line. They've already got a range of three orders of magnitude in sensitivity, and expect to be able to refine this considerably."

Mayor Quimby writes: "EETimes reports that LED guru Shuji Nakamura predicts White LEDs to overtake the light bulb Mr. Nakamura is an amazing guy who is given substantial credit in the development of blue and white LEDs. Other articles about him can be found here and here. He "works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 355 days a year, and says he has never taken a vacation." Also, check out this circuit board found in an LED flashlight that uses a single AA battery. It'll be nice when low cost knockoffs start flooding in from the Far East." I can vouch for the life of white-LED flashlights -- the ones I purchased more than a year ago from Holly Solar are still on their first sets of AA batteries. Not as bright as incandescents, but plenty for lighting up a tent or to keep from stumbling on a trail.

sacremon writes: "An article in EETimes describes research at the University of Nebraska on the development of an improved method for the generation of quantum dots. The researchers invoke the infamous 'five years away from having a small-scale quantum computer in the lab,' but the technique looks promising, particularly for generating a large array of quantum dots."

Geoffrey Kidd writes: "There's a very interesting article at EE Times about some research which seems to indicate that an essentially unlimited number of bits can be stored in ONE electron. Hmmm. What if one could encode every .mp3 file on Napster in one electron? :)"

Geoffrey Kidd writes: "There's a very interesting article at EE Times about some research which seems to indicate that an essentially unlimited number of bits can be stored in ONE electron. Hmmm. What if one could encode every .mp3 file on Napster in one electron? :)"

Quite a number of people have written in over the last day or so regarding the article in EE Times about the possibility of integrating bacteria into semiconductors. The hope would be to make biotransistors with "unique capabilites." The idea, itself, isn't a new one however and work has been going on in this area for a while. Like the quantum machine, a lot of the work in this area probably won't see practical fruition for quite some time.

ruiner writes: "This post at EE Times discusses that it now appears that silicon dioxide can be used as an insulator down to a process of .07 micron for processors. This will buy processor manufacturers a few more years to develop solutions for smaller processes. "

Bfaber wrote in about researchers at the University of Illinois having come up with a method to produce atomic-scale TeraHertz switches. It's possible that when attached to specifically designed molecules, these puppies would act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second. Kind of throws MHz right out the window, don't it?

madcat15 writes "I was reading EETimes and came across a piece discussing Rambus' lawsuit against Hitachi and Sega. This also includes an injunction on the importing of Sega's DreamCast consoles, which use a Hitachi chip. Hitachi is counter suing. Patent Warfare? " This comes on the heels of a patent infringement suit filed by Rambus against Hitachi back in January.

Harry Houdini writes "EETimes has a story about how OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor IP core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS. "

demachina sent us an EE times article about the realtime Linux conference in Vienna. Attendees decided to endorse the Cygnus EL/IX API for Realtime Linux and to start work on kernel patches.

Anonymous Coward writes "As part of its new restructuring SGI is spinning off its unprofitable NT workstation business and its Cray divisions. It will instead shift its Intel based products to Linux, integrating IRIX into Linux open-sourcing the merged technology, in preparation for using Intel platforms and Linux exclusively, according to Richard E. Belluzzo SGI CEO. " A lot of old news, but it's interesting to see that that they are spinning off the NT workstation business as well.

cyberdude wrote in to link us to an EETimes story that talks about a new digital camera coming out that claims to be able to capture 4000x4000 pixel images. There are lots of comments about existing digital camera technology and why this is different. All I know is we're getting closer to ending the need for film. Thats cool by me.

RobertPearse submits this question: Here's an article about ILM engineers using a small Linux box to reboot systems quickly. They mention a "TTL data-acquisition card". Housed in a linux box, it allows them to reboot a system very quickly. Anybody know anything about this? My company is a Microsoft shop -- and given the fragility of NT, this sounds like a great idea. (God forbid we need to reboot an NT box ;-)"

Christopher Thomas writes "Tom's Hardware Guide had a link to this EE Times article, which describes a new type of RAM developed by Hitachi. It uses stored charge in what looks like a cleverly controlled floating gate to store data, as opposed to stored charge in capacitors in conventional DRAM. Hitachi says that it will be able to ship this in quantity reasonably soon. It looks reasonably compact, and will scale much more easily to smaller linewidths than standard capacitor-based DRAM cells. It's also faster, as you don't have the whole precharge/amplify readout cycle to deal with. "

Chris Siegler wrote in to sent us "An article on the engineering behind the camera work at ILM, including a nice Linux mention. And another on their architectural setup, used for pushing around as much data as AOL (14 Tbytes) on peak days." I got 2 light sabers for our booth at Linux Expo (but no tickets- and I haven't been on my email in several days- eek). I will be glad to see the movie released just so the hype can die out some.

Chris Siegler wrote in to sent us "An article on the engineering behind the camera work at ILM, including a nice Linux mention. And another on their architectural setup, used for pushing around as much data as AOL (14 Tbytes) on peak days." I got 2 light sabers for our booth at Linux Expo (but no tickets- and I haven't been on my email in several days- eek). I will be glad to see the movie released just so the hype can die out some.

Joy! Cleaning out the submissions box: Praxxus sent us a link to an article you'll swear is a joke... a new use for old computers: filling potholes. HerbieTMac wrote in to say that Ice-T has joined the fray by releasing a new MP3 single. sanpitch sent us an interesting article about facial expression recognition. polar_bear` wrote in to say that Linux Mall has an Associates Program just like CD-Now. Or Amazon, speaking of which Sevn gave me the heads up on their entry for Bill "Family Circus" Keane- check out the reader reviews of Daddy's Hat is on Backwards. Trust me. Read it. Someone had to much spare time, and I'm glad they did. [null] hooked us up with the definitive Mr. T vs. site and east sent us an offensive dilbert parody site. gseidman wrote in to tell us about an important translation project underway to decipher the alien language used on Futurama. Assorted Slashdot notes from the world: An anonymous reader linked us to a cute comment on Neal Stephenson's server about the Slashdot effect. suprax noted that Slashdot and Freshmeat have a cameo in the current dead tree edition of PC Computing. adamv sent us a link to an interview with the creator of IMDB where he says he wishes he designed Slashdot. Funny, I wish I had designed IMDB. And Lastly, Jesse Shrieve, my favorite BSD pusher and dedicated Slashdot Server whipping boy noticed that Slashdot is up to 28 on hot100.com. We're neat.

strcat sent us a collection of interesting links at the EE Times about the practice of Salary Histories. "I found some stories that describe why all nerds need to think twice before blindy giving their salary history to potential employers: A view on salary history from an employee stand point Here's a follow up of some people who disagreed, and his response. There is other good job hunting info here. "

strcat sent us a collection of interesting links at the EE Times about the practice of Salary Histories. "I found some stories that describe why all nerds need to think twice before blindy giving their salary history to potential employers: A view on salary history from an employee stand point Here's a follow up of some people who disagreed, and his response. There is other good job hunting info here. "

strcat sent us a collection of interesting links at the EE Times about the practice of Salary Histories. "I found some stories that describe why all nerds need to think twice before blindy giving their salary history to potential employers: A view on salary history from an employee stand point Here's a follow up of some people who disagreed, and his response. There is other good job hunting info here. "

hin writes "At the recent ISSCC in San Francisco, a review paper was presented at the conference in regard to the feasibility of carbon nanotubes for use in semiconductors. " As most people know, put nano in something, and you'll get my attention-but these engineers are talking about using carbon nanotubes that would be hexagonally shaped (thoughts of benzene rings run through my head), and can be as small as 1.4 nm, and as long as 10 microns. There are still a significant number of hurdles to jump before having this even practical, but as the artile states: "It's becoming an experimental field of research rather than a theoretical one."

Watchman writes "EE Times Online Mag has a story about the new MP3 HW players like RIO that are being developed by upstarts around the world. Most of the article is about the Linux powered empeg-car unit from the UK. Also some stuff about the MP3 controversy with RIAA and the rights to the MP3 format."

xedd writes "Looks like IBM brings us one step closer to a system on a chip. " There's a lot of stuff in this article about assorted hi tech advances that are interesting if you're into this stuff.

A nonymous Coward writes "EETimes is reporting that Thompson and Ritchie won a National Medal of Technology medal December 8th for inventing Unix and C. Not sure what happened to Kernighan... "

davie writes " Looks like EDA users are disappointed with NT due to a lack of features and because of maintenance costs. There are a few mentions here of Linux as an alternative. "

In a very interesting twist, HP has announced that it will be using techniques it developed for EPIC for use in embedded systems: HP claims that the compilation techniques required by EPIC to make parellelism explicit in critical code paths can be used to create a custom hardware engine with sufficient hardware parallelism to meet the performance requirements of the application. If this were to be done automatically (by a compiler), HP would have a killer product that could explain their motivation for working with Intel on EPIC technology (it was originally HP's idea): HP has been focussing more on Embedded systems recently (witness their recent spat with Sun over their embedded Java) and with the workstation and PC markets becoming saturated this may be a very lucrative move on their part).

In an update to our previous article, AMD has revealed more details about its K7: rather than using RISC operations, the K7 uses MacroOps -- 15 byte bundles of instructions able to encode up to 2 primitive X86 instructions. The instruction decode unit serves up to 3 MacroOps per cycle (6 instructions at most). To reduce stalls, up to 15 MacroOps can be buffered and rescheduled before hitting one of the K7's three integer pipes: apparently this increases the amount of paralellism the K7 can uncover and exploit. The FPU's instruction buffer is even deeper at 44 entries. However the price of all of this is a huge die: 184 sq mm of silicon and the associated costs in decreased yields. Don't expect cheap K7s for a while.

In a very interesting twist, HP has announced that it will be using techniques it developed for EPIC for use in embedded systems: HP claims that the compilation techniques required by EPIC to make parellelism explicit in critical code paths can be used to create a custom hardware engine with sufficient hardware parallelism to meet the performance requirements of the application. If this were to be done automatically (by a compiler), HP would have a killer product that could explain their motivation for working with Intel on EPIC technology (it was originally HP's idea): HP has been focussing more on Embedded systems recently (witness their recent spat with Sun over their embedded Java) and with the workstation and PC markets becoming saturated this may be a very lucrative move on their part).

In an update to our previous article, AMD has revealed more details about its K7: rather than using RISC operations, the K7 uses MacroOps -- 15 byte bundles of instructions able to encode up to 2 primitive X86 instructions. The instruction decode unit serves up to 3 MacroOps per cycle (6 instructions at most). To reduce stalls, up to 15 MacroOps can be buffered and rescheduled before hitting one of the K7's three integer pipes: apparently this increases the amount of paralellism the K7 can uncover and exploit. The FPU's instruction buffer is even deeper at 44 entries. However the price of all of this is a huge die: 184 sq mm of silicon and the associated costs in decreased yields. Don't expect cheap K7s for a while.

In our previous roundups of the Microprocessor Forum, we missed Cyrix' announcement. (It was not exactly well publicised, no nice slides to download :-(). Well it turns out they made two of them. On the technical front they presented Jalapeno, a dual-pipeline out-of-order 600Mhz core. Jalapeno will have an 11-stage pipeline, an on-chip 8-way associative 256 Kb L2 cache (giving it similar coverage to a traditional 512 Kb L2) and support for Rambus on the die (rather than in the chipset) boosting memory bandwidth to 3.2Gb/s. However Cyrix is focussing on the integrated low cost end of the market: MediaGX will be replaced by MXi (includes 3D graphics and the new Cayenne core) and later by M3 (even better 3D). The Cayenne core (basically an improved MII with 2 FPU/MMX pipes) will also make its way into a Socket 7 design. But Cyrix also made a lot of noise on the marketing side: Brian Halla (head of National which owns Cyrix) boldly predicted that next year companies will be giving PCs away for free, much as they give cell-phones away to make money on the services they can then provide. He expects PCs-on-a-chip to provide the next major cost reduction which will make this possible. Note that such a device would not need a CDROM drive, a large harddisk, or even a monitor (high cost items)

In our previous roundups of the Microprocessor Forum, we missed Cyrix' announcement. (It was not exactly well publicised, no nice slides to download :-(). Well it turns out they made two of them. On the technical front they presented Jalapeno, a dual-pipeline out-of-order 600Mhz core. Jalapeno will have an 11-stage pipeline, an on-chip 8-way associative 256 Kb L2 cache (giving it similar coverage to a traditional 512 Kb L2) and support for Rambus on the die (rather than in the chipset) boosting memory bandwidth to 3.2Gb/s. However Cyrix is focussing on the integrated low cost end of the market: MediaGX will be replaced by MXi (includes 3D graphics and the new Cayenne core) and later by M3 (even better 3D). The Cayenne core (basically an improved MII with 2 FPU/MMX pipes) will also make its way into a Socket 7 design. But Cyrix also made a lot of noise on the marketing side: Brian Halla (head of National which owns Cyrix) boldly predicted that next year companies will be giving PCs away for free, much as they give cell-phones away to make money on the services they can then provide. He expects PCs-on-a-chip to provide the next major cost reduction which will make this possible. Note that such a device would not need a CDROM drive, a large harddisk, or even a monitor (high cost items)

5 hours ago, Rise revealed details of its new mP6 x86 core: it is 3 way superscalar, is pipelined and has a 3 way superscalar MMX unit. According to this EETimes article sent to us byChris Howard the processor is specifically targeted at multimedia applications, while boasting low power consumption Ed: It would be interesting to know how much of a performance boost the 3rd way gives them: for normal C code the V pipe of the pentium is used around 30% of the time. A third pipe would be used even less. 3-way superscalar MMX makes more sense however as only a few critical routines need to be changed. If a large OEM like Compaq were to ship a DVD-player on each of its boxes, it could expect the DVD software to be tailored for the chips it uses. update: The mP6's measured speed is around 1.15 times the speed of a Pentium II on Windows Apps. However their use of a 6-stage pipeline may reduce their ability to reach high MHz.

Bill Rugolsky writes " A research compiler environment is available from HP for an architecture with EPIC features. It does predication, etc. Maybe somebody wants to look at how the techniques used fit into the GCC framework? " Update This page gives an overview of the inner workings of Trimaran.

Compaq has surprised many by announcing that it will capitalise on its leadership position in 64 bit architectures by moving Alpha and Digital Unix into volume platforms. In particular, Compaq now wants to drive Alpha to be part of an open industry standard for 64-bit computing, with its partners Intel, Samsung and AMD. To read some analysis, hit the link below. While this move may have been prompted by Intel's 6-month Merced delay, there may be even more substance behind it. Building an EPIC compiler will not only be very difficult, but is also critical to increasing system performance. Alpha on the other hand is a solid RISC architecture with existing NT and Unix compilers. The 6 months slippage may translate into a year or more when one adds the time it'll take before software is shipping, time that Compaq could use to build up its server division. Microsoft also wants to ship NT for warehouse database applications, now, not in 2001. Finally, AMD and Samsung do not have licenses to the IA64 instruction set and patents. A successful Alpha could be a godsend for them. It is therefore entirely possible that Alpha has a good 3-5 years of life in front of it before Merced software reaches Alpha software's level of performance.

Compaq has surprised many by announcing that it will capitalise on its leadership position in 64 bit architectures by moving Alpha and Digital Unix into volume platforms. In particular, Compaq now wants to drive Alpha to be part of an open industry standard for 64-bit computing, with its partners Intel, Samsung and AMD. To read some analysis, hit the link below. While this move may have been prompted by Intel's 6-month Merced delay, there may be even more substance behind it. Building an EPIC compiler will not only be very difficult, but is also critical to increasing system performance. Alpha on the other hand is a solid RISC architecture with existing NT and Unix compilers. The 6 months slippage may translate into a year or more when one adds the time it'll take before software is shipping, time that Compaq could use to build up its server division. Microsoft also wants to ship NT for warehouse database applications, now, not in 2001. Finally, AMD and Samsung do not have licenses to the IA64 instruction set and patents. A successful Alpha could be a godsend for them. It is therefore entirely possible that Alpha has a good 3-5 years of life in front of it before Merced software reaches Alpha software's level of performance.

Intel is having a bad month. C't now reports over 500 re-labeled Pentium II chips have been found, including in channels Intel claimed secure. More worrying is that some remarked chips may be undetectable until the overclocked chip is damaged. More info is available here.. In particular the class action suit in Taiwan is worth reading. The announcement that Merced will be late caused Technology stocks to tumble yesterday. And today, news.com reports that the top FTC litigator is recommending that Intel be sued for alleged antitrust violations.

(Read more below)

Meanwhile, the competition is heating up. Newcomer Rise has demonstrated its new mP6 x86 processor, designed (like Centaur's) for the notebook market.

Interestingly, Centaur is abandonning its unipipe solution for its second generation Winchips, using 2 6-stage pipelines at up to 300Mhz. A third 12-stage pipe line architecture is planned, which will running at frequencies between 400 and 600Mhz, should improve performance by 80%. Centaur is also jumping onto the integration bandwagon, proposing its Winchip 2+NB which reduces board area (and costs) by combining the C6 core and a north-bridge on the same die.

AMD has released its K6-2, at a higher price, and with little OEM interest. However this chip is a screamer, profiting from being the first to use the new 100Mhz front side bus, and the new 3DNow! instructions. Centaur, Cyrix, and IBM also plan to deliver these features in their upcoming processors.

Finally, IBM has released a PR333 version of the Cyrix-designed 6x86 MX, which apparently partially gains its speed from a new type of chip-package. This comes as IBM revealed that it expects its Slot1 solution to be developed by Cyrix.

Intel is having a bad month. C't now reports over 500 re-labeled Pentium II chips have been found, including in channels Intel claimed secure. More worrying is that some remarked chips may be undetectable until the overclocked chip is damaged. More info is available here.. In particular the class action suit in Taiwan is worth reading. The announcement that Merced will be late caused Technology stocks to tumble yesterday. And today, news.com reports that the top FTC litigator is recommending that Intel be sued for alleged antitrust violations.

(Read more below)

Meanwhile, the competition is heating up. Newcomer Rise has demonstrated its new mP6 x86 processor, designed (like Centaur's) for the notebook market.

Interestingly, Centaur is abandonning its unipipe solution for its second generation Winchips, using 2 6-stage pipelines at up to 300Mhz. A third 12-stage pipe line architecture is planned, which will running at frequencies between 400 and 600Mhz, should improve performance by 80%. Centaur is also jumping onto the integration bandwagon, proposing its Winchip 2+NB which reduces board area (and costs) by combining the C6 core and a north-bridge on the same die.

AMD has released its K6-2, at a higher price, and with little OEM interest. However this chip is a screamer, profiting from being the first to use the new 100Mhz front side bus, and the new 3DNow! instructions. Centaur, Cyrix, and IBM also plan to deliver these features in their upcoming processors.

Finally, IBM has released a PR333 version of the Cyrix-designed 6x86 MX, which apparently partially gains its speed from a new type of chip-package. This comes as IBM revealed that it expects its Slot1 solution to be developed by Cyrix.