Tag Archives: processors

Moore’s Law, the drumbeat that for decades has marked progress in the chip industry, has been faltering of late. But Samsung has a few more generations of processor improvements planned, it detailed Tuesday at its Samsung Foundry Forum. A key part of chip progress is shrinking the components called transistors — extraordinarily tiny electronic switches …

If a new Apple Watch debuts this fall, Google is likely to have a major new smartwatch (or watches) debuting right alongside it, powered by Qualcomm chips. Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead for Qualcomm’s Smart Wearables Segment, said as much yesterday in a story reported by Wareable. But I sat down at Google’s I/O developers conference with Kedia and …

You’ve likely seen artificial intelligence technology spread into apps, devices and services, doing things like recognizing your friends’ faces in photos and endowing smart speakers with human-sounding voices. Well, good news: The processor industry has noticed, too. That means we’ll see a slew of new chips that should speed up AI tasks not just on your phone or laptop but …

AMD’s second-generation updates to its mainstream Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 desktop processors isn’t quite as dramatic as Intel’s recent eighth-generation mobile launch; in part, that’s because AMD been-there-done-that with multicore, such as the 8- and 6-core Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen 5 1600 series from last year last year. So its second-gen products replacing them feel transitional, eking slightly …

Dell already has the smallest 13.3-inch laptop, the new XPS 13. Now it’s given the XPS 15 a similar overhaul to make it the smallest 15.6-inch performance laptop available. And at 4 pounds (1.8 kg) it’s one of the lightest, too. Like the XPS 13, Dell achieved the 15’s smaller size by shaving off millimeters around its display, bringing the …

Apple may start using its own chips in Mac computers as soon as 2020. The company is in the early stages of creating its own processors for the MacBook and iMac, which currently run on Intel chips, according to unnamed sources speaking to Bloomberg on Monday.   Should this happen, the Mac computer line would have a similar processor strategy to the …

Dave Patterson and John Hennessy, two San Francisco Bay Area professors now associated with Google, have won the computing industry’s top prize for revolutionizing processors with a technology called RISC. The pair won the 2017 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a $1 million prize named after Alan Turing, the British researcher who famously helped crack German Enigma …

I’m standing in front of a mirror, looking at an avatar of a woman that isn’t me. “Blink,” I’m told. But it’s not working for me. One eye is permanently shut. Maybe it’s my glasses? I try lifting the goggles away from my face a bit. Now, it tracks. I roll my eyes around, and my virtual eyes in the …

Moore’s Law, the principle that chips are supposed to get smaller and faster every few years, is faltering. But one company, Xilinx, thinks that’s actually good news for a new type of flexible processors it expects to sell next year. You’ve heard of Intel, Apple and Samsung, some of the biggest chipmakers around. But you probably don’t know Xilinx unless …

The good news is that the next version of Google’s Android smartphone software, Android P, has a feature to shrink your photos to half the size of an ordinary JPEG. The bad news is there’s no guarantee that every phone will actually be able to use it. That’s because of hardware and patent licensing limits on the technology used, called …