processors - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

• Moore's Law at 50: The past and future

  When you're strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren't thinking of Moore's Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster.

• Intel vs. ARM: Two titans' tangled fate

  Intel has barely made a dent in the mobile market, while ARM has been wildly successful. Does that spell doom for Intel -- or is ARM's triumph overblown?

• Mindspeed acquisition fuels Intel's hopes for bigger network role

  Intel's acquisition of mobile network assets from silicon vendor Mindspeed Technologies will give the chip giant what it needs to extend the Intel architecture throughout mobile operator networks, helping the carriers upgrade hardware and roll out new services more quickly, according to Intel.

• Bringing brains to computers

  For decades, scientists have fantasized about creating robots with brain-like intelligence. This year, researchers tempted by that dream made great progress on achieving what has been called the holy grail of computing.

• Could be business as usual with Intel's new CEO

  With Intel's new CEO ready to step up next month to lead the world's largest chip maker, industry analysts don't expect to see any big change in strategy.

• Europe looks to ARM chips for supercomputing edge

  The European Union is moving to build a high-performance computing industry to challenge U.S. dominance, but it doesn't want to play catch-up. It wants to leapfrog, and it is seeing whether ARM Holdings technology can give it that edge.

• Samsung laying groundwork for server chips, analysts say

  Samsung's recent licensing of 64-bit processor designs from ARM suggests that the chip maker may expand from smartphones and tablets into the server market, analysts said this week.

• Autonomous cars will arrive within 10 years, Intel CTO says

  Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicts that driverless cars will be available within 10 years and that buyers by then will increasingly be more interested in a vehicle's internal technology than the quality of its engine.
  

• ARM CEO: PC market not our target

  Chip design firm ARM grabbed the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week when Microsoft announced that its new Windows OS would work on the ARM architecture. ARM processors go into most of the world's smartphones and tablets, and with Windows support, the company can now focus on the wider market for PCs, where it has virtually no presence. Nvidia also announced that it was building its first ARM-based chip, code-named Denver, for PCs and servers.

• Is the Microsoft-Intel marriage finally over?

  Cringely here, reporting from CES in Vegas, where rude beasts walk the earth (at least, the ones that don't crawl or slither), impeded in their forward progress only by hip-deep mounds of tablet PCs. Everyone appears to be tapping, swiping, and gesturing on some kind of sleek black touch-sensitive device, when they're not squinting at blurry 3D screens waiting for their turn with the polarized glasses.

• Ways to share spare CPU cycles

  A network of hundreds of thousands of home computer users recently discovered a rare celestial object by donating their computers' downtime to a worthy cause.