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Intel Pushes the Computing Continuum Down the 22nm Voltage Scale

by Peter Kastner on May 24, 2011 in Mobile Technology, Personal Computing, Semiconductors

Intel laid out its plans to aggressively use its new 22nm silicon process to dramatically lower processor voltages while actually improving performance over the next 30 months, the company told financial analysts at a conference on May 17 at headquarters in Santa Clara, California. What analysts heard was by far the clearest picture for a [...]

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Thoughts on Intel’s New 22nm 3D Transistors

by Peter Kastner on May 5, 2011 in Emerging Technology, Mobile Technology, Personal Computing, Semiconductors

Intel’s announcement yesterday announced the next generation of transistor process at 22 nm. New products based on the 22 nm transistors will begin arriving with the Ivy Bridge family in early 2012. What was not expected was that Intel would bet the fab on a radically new way of laying down transistors that puts the [...]

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Is Amazon Stealing Android from Google?

by Tim Bajarin on April 29, 2011 in Personal Computing

Is Amazon Stealing Android from Google? I have been watching with great fascination the moves Amazon has recently made with Android. Two weeks ago they launched the Amazon App store that focuses on Android apps and last week they announced their cloud based music service with a special version just for Android. Although Google has [...]

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How Apple Outsmarts their Competitors

by Tim Bajarin on April 18, 2011 in Personal Computing

When the iPhone was launched in 2007, I met with Phil Schiller, SVP of World Wide marketing for Apple, and Greg Joswiak, the Apple VP in charge of marketing the iPods and iPhones. During the meeting they showed me the iPhone’s many features and shared their goals for the device, which has now become a [...]

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Sandy Bridge Desktop Enthusiasts Should Wait … for Z68 in May

by Peter Kastner on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post is for a very select segment: desktop enthusiast PC builders who have not yet purchased Intel’s Sandy Bridge but are planning to soon. For you, I suggest a 3-4 week wait until new motherboards come out based on the forthcoming Z68 chipset. Z68 combines the best features of the H67 and P67 mother-boards [...]

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AMD Could Add ARM Faster Than Intel

by Roger Kay on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post initially appeared on Forbes.com April 4, 2011. This morning, AMD gave a press conference to discuss a renegotiated wafer supply agreement with Globalfoundries, which spun off from AMD into a separate entity in March 2009 and acquired Charter Semiconductor to broaden its supply capabilities in September 2009.  Wafers are the silicon disks on [...]

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Union Shop Or Open Shop?

by Roger Kay on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post initially appeared on Forbes.com April 1, 2011. Not long ago, I was riding the United Airlines “bus” from Boston to San Francisco, one of the few remaining non-stop cross-country flights, when I chanced to have an interchange with a stewardess while in the back waiting for the bathroom to free up. I was [...]

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Dystopia In The Lovely Walled Gardens

by Roger Kay on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post initially appeared on Forbes.com March 31, 2011. With each passing day, our experience of computing and communicating gets more restricted.  We hardly notice as the walls go up around what we can do on the Internet.  Some people never knew we had any freedoms in this domain to begin with.  Others shrug and [...]

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Shadow Market Keeps Computer Components Flowing

by Roger Kay on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post initially appeared on Forbes.com March 28, 2011. Minutes after the earthquake and tsunami hit the coast of Japan March 11, Tony Prophet, chief of supply chain operations at Hewlett-Packard (HP), was up and out of bed to see what could be done.  It was 3:30 a.m. California time and Prophet hopped on the [...]

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Yahoo Experiments With Commentary

by Roger Kay on April 16, 2011 in Personal Computing

This post initially appeared on Forbes.com March 25, 2011. I’ve been lamenting for a while about the incivility found in the commentary on Yahoo’s news pages, the steady rain of thousands of nasty remarks below each and every article.  But the clouds seem to be parting a bit. Whether my posting had anything to do [...]

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