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You can't build chips for all the game consoles. That's not possible. They would all like a slightly different style from the others. Difference is important. The same chip company would have difficulty designing chips for the different styles. It's also so high stakes that you need to focus. No one has enough extraneous resources around to build chips for all the game consoles.

I apologize for not citing sources for the HD-DVD over Blu-Ray debate. I figured it was common knowledge at this point, what with the AV forums buzzing about it.

The whole thing about Cell yields isn't that they're low (of course we expect them to be low when starting production) it's that its look like they'reFAR LOWER THEN EXPECTED.

And since you asked, I don't have a link but IIRC the last cost estimated the Cell and RSX chips cost Sony ~$110 a piece. No idea about how the RSX yeilds are. I'd almost be more conserned about RAM yeilds though.

"Crocus [Technology] is moving toward first production devices. The aim is to create a first memory, test vehicle in the next 12 months and its first commercial product should follow "shortly thereafter." "We now have everything we need to be the first to bring to the marketplace a competitive MRAM memory that will fulfill the customers' expectations, in particular with regards to reliability, speed and capacity," said Braun. MRAM has been pursued for over a decade as a promising non-volatile memory technology by major companies including IBM and Infineon Technologies without making it into the mainstream memory market. However, the technology has never been made to match the density of flash or DRAM because a single MRAM memory cell has had to consist of multiple transistors and multiple magnetic tunnel junctions. When Cypress Semiconductor sold its MRAM business last year after successfully sampling a 256Kbit device, CEO Rodgers commented: "We no longer believe 1T-1MTJ MRAM technology can successfully attack the SRAM market, leaving MRAM as a niche technology with higher bit pricing than SRAM." Earlier this year researchers in Maryland's John Hopkins University made a breakthrough in MRAM design by shrinking the storage element of ring-type MRAM to less than 100x100nm per bit. MRAM requires a magnetic structure with two stable magnetic states manipulated predictably. One structure, for which read and write techniques are already established, is the ring in which magnetism can run around in either a clockwise or anticlockwise direction. Experiments so far, using bulk read and write to billions of rings on a substrate, indicate a ring-type MRAM would be fast. According to the research, MRAM read time can be 1ns and write time is 0.8ns."

This site: http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/art icle/CA6338353.html seems to have a pretty good sized list of companies and news on this topic. My company http://www.intuit.com/ is also one of them and had a press release today http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8II3 R980.htm?sub=apn_tech_down&chan=tc saying that they have now been issued a subpoena after starting their own internal investigation over a month ago.

Already done. Read it here And they make hard drives nowadays that will spew a built-in vial of acid onto the platter remotely, so one can easily imagine some scheme where if you don't pay within some time frame, your computer self-destructs!

Network Mirror content is here. I was also able to get the original article by trimming back the cited URL:
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA6 328378

HT enabled FPGA boasts 300x performance gains in some computations

Intel's board sees numbers going south and CEO of AMD Hector Ruiz is such a pain in their asses. AMD is indeed very happy with Ruiz, his paycheck is about half a mil bigger then Intel CEO's $1.8M, also Intel's CEO and other high officers were selling shares like crazy recently.

http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA6 287342

Intel's insider selling: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=INTC

Actually, Intel has their own solution to this problem - redesign transistors out of different materials that switch faster and consume less power.

"Physicists at the University of Durham (Durham, UK) have fabricated a magnetic NOT gate that can operate at room temperature. It is the first wholly magnetic logic device to be formed on a microchip, and offers a key to what could become a completely new micro- and nano-magnetic chip technology.

The Durham NOT gate consists of a track of a naturally ferromagnetic alloy shaped like an inverted "Y." The magnetism of this ferromagnetic alloy tends to run parallel to its track length and points in one of two opposite directions. A single ferromagnetic track can contain different regions, each magnetized in one of these two directions. Where these opposite magnetizations meet, a transition region or "domain wall" is formed in which the..."

You can see interviews and a video here. The team's website is here.

Airgo is a participant in one of two consortiums of companies promoting competing technologies to use in the 802.11n standard. Here's an article that covers the situation:

http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/art icle/CA445702

Airgo is obviously trying to gain leverage with their technology by getting it out on the market early. I don't think this is a good thing in the long run, since we all have benefitted by the degree of standardization in 802.11b/g and Airgo seems to be trying to get their own proprietary technology out there in front of the legitimate standards process.

-R

It's interesting, people say adapt or die, and that's true. But the choices facing my generation in the US are pretty poor. The technical fields are going overseas. What's left for the nerds out there?

There is a parallel advance in cooling technology using liquid based cooling. While this may not seem like a new idea to the /. crowd, integrated fluidic interconnects (analogous to optical or electrical interconnects), would allow a cooling liquid to be delivered to a chip. Researchers at Georgia Tech have demonstrated fluid flow through a chip: http://www.reed-electronics.com/semiconductor/arti cle/CA604509?pubdate=6%2F1%2F2005&industryid=3028 Connecting the chip to a printed wiring board with fluidic channels would allow an integrated heat removal system without significant need for additional pumping power (only a few atmospheres at low flowrates). Sounds like a pretty neat idea to me.

Businesses benefit hugely from IEEE standards.

The likes of IBM, Sun, MS, Oracle, et al could all contribue what to them would be a pitance. So long as all the big companies were involved, there wouldn't be any undue influence by any one of them

...
Rambus Inc.'s new parallel I/O interface is a sign that the leopard is trying to change its spots.

Once notorious for its Rambus DRAM, a proprietary memory technology that saw a trouble adoption at the hands of the chip industry, Rambus has gone on to reinvent itself as a company that delivers chip-to-chip interface solutions allowing higher performance and system bandwidth. ...
"Can a leopard change its spots? That is the perennial question," Feibus said. "In this case, the signs are yes, they can."

In the 1980s, IBM opened representative offices in Beijing and Shanghai, followed in 1992 by establishment of the IBM China Company Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM World Trade Corporation. The IBM China Research Laboratory was established in Beijing in 1995. Today, IBM China has offices in 11 cities and operates eight joint venture companies in China.
--PrimeUR

IBM built and operates a chip packaging plant in China (registration site), a Research Laboratory in China, and is eyeing upward of a 50 percent share of China's market for business computers. Even IBM mainframes are big in China

IBM is creating a chip ecosystem in China and expects that Asian manufacturers will represent the bulk of the new Power licensees

In addition, 64-bit-capable x86-64 servers continued to ramp in volume with server units based on AMD Opteron processors growing 81.1 percent sequentially in Q2.

1. "Meanwhile, IBM Tuesday served its own news to Microsoft, making announcements on its Cell technology that has been rumored to be a central focus of PlayStation 3, expected in 2006.

   "Cell" is the code-name for an advanced microprocessor under development by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. The technology uses massive data bandwidth and floating point capabilities, coupled with a parallel processing architecture, to deliver what IBM said will be a "quantum-leap innovation to entertainment applications."

   Through a deal with Sony, IBM said that it plans to develop a digital content creation environment, the first computing application planned for the Cell processor, with the first prototype Cell-based workstations in Q4.

   IBM intends to develop the Cell-based workstations to power digital content creation, while Sony will lead the development of the Cell-based operating environment by providing the architecture, algorithms, middleware and data structure for tools needed to create digital content for movies and computer entertainment applications. "

Why use a PC-centered development library like the one for the Xbox, when you can use a set of tools that broadly cover games through to movie production -- tools created by a chip producer (IBM) and for a movie company (Sony)?

That is debatable.

From the sounds of it, Arm found a way to make this go away

It probably is academic though. Any significant competitor to ARM that used their instructions would bring a lawsuit.

That is debatable.

From the sounds of it, Arm found a way to make this go away

It probably is academic though. Any significant competitor to ARM that used their instructions would bring a lawsuit.

Sematech 3D Interconnect Conference

Those sites that are able to approach lights out manufacturing are typically running stable, high yield processes and products that don't require much in the way of continuous improvements. Think DRAMS.

According to this article Apex already beat Sony on their own turf by selling more DVD players in the US than any other manufacturer.

Personaly, I think the Apextreme box would make a fine HTPC (like a frontend to MythTV).

Leaking Capacitors are actually a very common problem for all hardware, expensive and not-so, made in the past couple of years ("High-End" computer companies such as ASUS and ABIT have even been caught out). Sorry to hear you were bit by the pirate hand that feeds some of these companies.

C is intentionally a little vague about the sizes of ints.

Using your 37-bit CPU example:
If all you're doing is manipulating values from 1 to 1000, you really don't want your C compiler doing software-checks for 32-bit overflow and underflow every time you use your registers. You really want a type that matches the native register.

If this kernel you're trying to compile really needs a variable with math that has predictable 32-bit underflow and overflow, you want a int_32t.

PS: Is that 37-bit example real? I know of ones with 24 bit (some motorolla dsps), 20 bit (Zoran ZR 38001), and 40-bit (Texas Instruments 67XX.

See Minimizing failures in electronic systems by design for an overview of the subject.

I'm not sure if anything short of Pentium/Athlon would be state of the art enough, but I'd recommend the Atmel AVR. Firstly, there are lots of demo/examples with it and existing software archives exist.
This processor is used in some smart-sensor applications where you have distributed sensors.
Here's a 1998 EDN mag review and some simm circuit boards which make project computers.

PK

It shows silliness because of the content of the patent. This isn't something non-obvious or hard to research. It's plugins! It's like patenting vulcanization and then suing every tire manufacturer after they've been doing it for years.

Of course that isn't the case -- the claim is narrower than you suggest, and was construed to be narrower than that by the Court. Your next suggestion?

Again, we are talking about a specific set of frivolous patents, so yes there is alot of evidence that they hurt innovation.

So frivolous that even Microsoft's legion of attorneys couldn't put two and two together to find ANY probative prior art to invalidate it. Your next suggestion?

I wrote: Odd how many inidividual inventors seem to make the biggest political push for stronger patent laws, with large companies tending to push for more relaxed "patent harmonization" approaches.

He responded: Talk about presenting evidence to backup your claims ....

This isn't a close question -- only the truly clueless needs to ask for further evidence -- anybody who followed the recent harmonization battles knows who the players are.

What documentation, exactly? Panasonic's docs for one, mention no such thing as a memory effect, neither do Sanyo's, both of which are incidentally the leading manufacturers of NiCd cells. I came across this article on EDN, which doesn't give many details, though, but this this usenet thread sums the issue up pretty well, particularly the last sentence of the last post.