By Jon Stokes October 6, 2009
AMD's fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries, has announced a deal with ARM to make the latter's Cortex A9 parts available on the former's 28nm half-node process. This makes GlobalFoundries the first company to work with ARM on a 28nm A9 implementation, and it's a win for ARM because it makes any GlobalFoundries customers into potential ARM customers. A bit of background: an system-on-a-chip (SoC) provider who is already using GlobalFoundries to produce its SoCs can more easily mix its own technology with ARM's to produce SoCs based on Cortex A9. This is the same reason that Intel ported Atom to TSMC—so that existing TSMC customers can also mix Atom with their own IP to make Atom-based SoCs. (Of course, what was a shocking move for Intel is standard procedure for ARM, which is a fabless semi company whose total revenues are less than what Intel spends to develop one processor.) ARM PR, for its part, took this opportunity to once again remind everyone that Adobe Flash 10.1 is now available on its processors. This is a direct slap at the now-inoperable Intel talking point that Atom is better than ARM because only Atom "runs the full Internet." This talking-point was actually still in use at last month's IDF, despite the fact that everyone there knew that it was essentially nonsense.
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Nvidia Halting Chipset Development
by Mark Hachman 10.07.09
Nvidia has confirmed that the company has essentially placed its Nforce chipset line on hiatus, given the legal wrangling between itself and Intel. According to Robert Sherbin, the lead corporate communications spokesman for Nvidia, Nvidia will "postpone further chipset investments". Sherbin also dismissed a report that Nvidia was pulling out of the mid-range and high-end GPU market as "patently untrue". But Nvidia's recent chip introductions do imply a shift in graphics companys traditional stance is underway. Nvidia's launch of the Fermi architecture was a surprise not because of what it offered, but because of what was excluded: PC graphics. With the Fermi, Nvidia built in innovations like Parallel DataCache, a cache architecture for physics and ray-tracing algorithms, and IEEE-754-2008 floating-point accuracy, both of which analysts saw as unnecessary for the types of calculations performed by 3D PC games, traditionally Nvidia's core market.
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Nvidia has confirmed that the company has essentially placed its Nforce chipset line on hiatus, given the legal wrangling between itself and Intel. According to Robert Sherbin, the lead corporate communications spokesman for Nvidia, Nvidia will "postpone further chipset investments". Sherbin also dismissed a report that Nvidia was pulling out of the mid-range and high-end GPU market as "patently untrue". But Nvidia's recent chip introductions do imply a shift in graphics companys traditional stance is underway. Nvidia's launch of the Fermi architecture was a surprise not because of what it offered, but because of what was excluded: PC graphics. With the Fermi, Nvidia built in innovations like Parallel DataCache, a cache architecture for physics and ray-tracing algorithms, and IEEE-754-2008 floating-point accuracy, both of which analysts saw as unnecessary for the types of calculations performed by 3D PC games, traditionally Nvidia's core market.
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Patent holder that won against Microsoft now targets Apple
By Neil Hughes October 7, 2009
Apple and 22 other companies are the target of a new patent infringement suit over the use of browser-embedded interactive Web content. Previous patent suits on behalf of Eolas have gone favorably for the company. In 2004, it was granted $565 million in litigation against Microsoft over one of the patents. In addition, the validity of the patent in question was reaffirmed in three separate proceedings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The latest suit alleges that Apple and other companies are in violation of U.S. Patent Nos. 5,838,906 and 7,599,985, which involve embedded Web applications. It was filed Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas. The suit notes that Apple's official Web site includes interactive content, and that applications like QuickTime and Safari, for both Windows and Mac, enable the viewing of such content. It also alleges that Apple's hardware that runs the previously mentioned software is in violation of the patents. "Intellectual property is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy," said Dr. Michael D. Doyle, chairman of Eolas. "The primary reason for this has been the success of the U.S. patent system in allowing the innovative company in a field to develop and market its new inventions without having competitors unfairly profit from the innovator's hard work. We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair."
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Apple and 22 other companies are the target of a new patent infringement suit over the use of browser-embedded interactive Web content. Previous patent suits on behalf of Eolas have gone favorably for the company. In 2004, it was granted $565 million in litigation against Microsoft over one of the patents. In addition, the validity of the patent in question was reaffirmed in three separate proceedings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The latest suit alleges that Apple and other companies are in violation of U.S. Patent Nos. 5,838,906 and 7,599,985, which involve embedded Web applications. It was filed Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas. The suit notes that Apple's official Web site includes interactive content, and that applications like QuickTime and Safari, for both Windows and Mac, enable the viewing of such content. It also alleges that Apple's hardware that runs the previously mentioned software is in violation of the patents. "Intellectual property is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy," said Dr. Michael D. Doyle, chairman of Eolas. "The primary reason for this has been the success of the U.S. patent system in allowing the innovative company in a field to develop and market its new inventions without having competitors unfairly profit from the innovator's hard work. We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair."
Read more here -->Link
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