Intel looks beyond PCs, eyes new segments

The future is in personal computing, not just personal computers, according to Intel CEO Paul Otellini who said his company wasbetting on new market segments such as netbooks, handhelds and consumer electronics to drive growth with PC sales likely to be “flat or slightly up” this year.

Intel, whose range of microprocessors power almost 80% of computers worldwide, also announced that it

has built working chips that pack 2.9 billion transistors in an area the size of a finger nail.

Delivering his keynote at the Intel Developers’ Forum 2009, Mr Otellini also launched an Intel Atom Developer Programme inviting third party programmers to create new programs for its Atom line of microprocessors. Atom powers net books — bare-bone PCs with small screens for net surfing and word processing — a segment, which Mr Otellini said was holding up the whole computer market now.

“We have the worst recession in 70 years. The netbook filled the gap,” he said, adding that Atom will eventually cover connected devices. “At the highest level, every electronic device is likely to be connected to the Internet at some point in time. And we think the architecture to do this, obviously, is Atom,” he said.

Netbooks outpaced the two other popular devices in the consumer market — Apple’s iPhone and the Nintendos gaming console Wii — in the past three quarters, he added. In-vehicle infotainment systems, which clocked a 17% growth rate in the year when the automotive industry slipped to a recession, are another growth area for Intel.

Mr Otellini said that a company that Intel has been working with over three years, Harman Becker, has secured two major design contracts for Atom-based systems. “Daimler will put it into their S-Class and C-Class series starting in 2012, and BMW is developing a cross-platform, which means it goes across all their models, as an option for 2012 and beyond,” the Intel CEO said.

Intel has also begun factory production of its 32 nanometre chip, and the latest one — the 22nm one — continues to deliver the promise of Moore’s Law: smaller transistors, improved performance and lower cost, said Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice-president.

“The rapidly increasing number of transistors and processor instructions we add have made possible the integration of more and more capabilities and features within our processors. This has driven an incredible amount of innovation throughout the industry, with the real winners being the consumers, gamers and businesses,” he said.

AMD touts its graphics physics engine

AMD HAS BEGUN a campaign to step up the adoption of a new physics engine. The company is working with software developer Pixelux Entertainment to sell developers on a combination of the Bullet Physics engine and OpenCL processing.

AMD said that the campaign would seek to grow the use of the platform for applications such as gaming and simulations. The companies hope that, by combining the open-source Bullet engine with the OpenCL GPU standard, developers will have a more powerful and effective way to run physics simulations.

Additionally, AMD hopes to allow the adoption of a physics engine which can be taken advantage of by all graphics cards.

In announcing the initiative, AMD chief graphics technology officer Eric Demers took a swipe at rival Nvidia and its proprietary PhysX engine.

"Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and independent software vendors, while stifling true innovation. Our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs," he said.

"By working with Pixelux and others to enable open support of physics on OpenCL and DirectX 11 capable devices, we are taking the exact opposite approach."

Former AMD kingpin gives Intel hell

AMD's former CEO Hector Ruiz has released a commentary that picks apart Intel's defense against the European Commission's €1.06bn fine for anticompetitve practices.

Ruiz's scathing rebuke, published by MarketWatch, excoriates Chipzilla's efforts to wriggle out of responsibility for the actions that led to the fine - especially in light of the incriminating evidence recently released by the European Competition Commission.

In his commentary, entitled "Intel and the blame game: Time to take responsibility in chip-industry antitrust case," Ruiz writes: "Intel has apparently embraced the advice dispensed by the playwright Oscar Wilde: 'It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame.'"

Ruiz's argument takes several tacks, chiding Intel for its charges of Commission bias, scolding the company for suppressing evidence, reproving them for disparaging critics - "a typical monopolist defense" according to Ruiz - and saying that Intel's blaming of AMD for its European sales problems "really does twist reality into a pretzel."

Not that Ruiz is without bias. After assuming the positions of president and COO of AMD in 2000, he became CEO in 2002 and headed the company until he stepped aside in 2008.

And he has called Intel to task before, as evidenced by his statement in 2007 when the EU began its investigation of Intel that "This is not an isolated instance," citing similar investigations in Japan and Korea.

Still, Ruiz holds out an olive branch at the end of Wednesday's dressing-down of his former competitor: "Intel has been a global innovation leader in the past," he concedes. "It can be a global innovation leader in the future - but not until Intel's leadership recognizes a simple truth."

That simple truth, from Ruiz's point of view, is that Intel should take responsibility for its actions, and move on.

"The sooner Intel accepts a level of responsibility befitting a company of its scope, legacy and stature," Ruiz writes, "and takes responsibility for its own errors, the sooner that the full benefits of competition will flow, not just to the industry, and not even just to computer manufacturers, but to computer users the world around."

AMD Unveils Powerful New Graphics Cards

AMD on Wednesday unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, graphics cards that boast up to 2.72 teraflops of computer power.
The series will initially debut with two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, both of which include 1 G-byte of graphics double data rate version 5 (GDDR5) memory and support for OpenCL.

This type of computing power has prompted AMD to refer to the 5800 series as the "most powerful processor ever created," though AMD acknowledges that teraflops are "not necessarily an indicator of leading performance in every application."

The ATI Radeon HD 5800 is the first to support Microsoft DirectX 11, the new gaming and compute standard that will ship with Windows 7. It will also support DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1, and OpenGL titles in single card configurations or multi-card configurations using ATI CrossFireX technology.

"When measured in terms of game performance experienced in some of today's most popular games, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series is up to twice as fast as the closest competing product in its class," AMD said in a statement.

The 5800 series allows for multi-monitor gaming at up to 12 x full HD resolution. The HD 5870 and HD 5850 will allow up to three displays, and the forthcoming ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 graphics card will allow for six.