New Chip Industry Evolves Around High Density, Mobility
The chip industry is driven by a number of consumer and enterprise trends, which all center on the demand for higher performance for lower costs. Vendors are addressing this topic in both segments, and several milestone developments have been gaining the public’s attention lately.
One of the main highlights of the past month is the launch of AMD’s 16-core Opteron 6200 server chips. The five different products offer higher-density computing with lower power consumption; the main reason behind the amount of early support the new product line comes from high profile vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others.
But AMD got itself into a legal clash with Oracle over its decision to pull the plug on software production for Intel’s Itanium chip line, which powers a sizable amount of HP-built servers. The fight between the two platoons is getting messier, with accusations being fired back at HP claiming it has secretly entered into an agreement with Intel to pay for the continuation of Itanium. The chipmaker naturally got caught in the middle of the crossfire even as it remains focused on keeping up with competitors.
AMD is not the only the only Intel rival that has made gains recently. In the mobile space (where Intel is looking to establish a foothold via a number of new and upcoming initiatives), ARM is working to increase the adoption of its chips by appealing to the developers. They launched a new Android toolkit late last month, not long after revealing some new info about the ARMv8 architecture, which is designed to power a broad range of electronics thanks to its small chip size. Samsung’s fresh promotion of Kwon Oh Hyun to the position of head of its computer memory chip or DRAM business is another sign that competition is heating up in this area.
Another related update in the past 24 hours is Broadcom‘s announcement of new reference architecture and software, developed to power wireless devices and computer accessories. The technology is Bluetooth compatible, and more significantly, has the potential of extending battery life by years.
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