Digital Trends
Last October, chipmaker AMD announced a bold move: to keep its costs under control, the company would go fabless, spinning off its factories in a partnership with Abu Dhabi into The Foundry Company. The spinoff would, naturally, make chips for AMD, but also take on manufacturing tasks for other companies. Meanwhile, AMD could focus on design—and would gain some financial stability from the deal.
Chipmaker AMD has announced it plans to spin off its manufacturing plants into a new joint venture with Abu Dhabi, in a more to increase cash liquidity, pay down its debt…and better compete with rival chipmaker Intel. The new operation will be named The Foundry Company—at least for the time being—and will manufacturer components not only for AMD, but for a variety of fabless semiconductor companies around the world.
If Amazon’s notepad-sized Kindle e-reader didn’t quite replicate the experience of thumbing through a pile of hot-off-the-copier printouts for you, a company known as Plastic Logic may have the next best alternative. The company’s new e-reader reaches the size of a regular 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, yet remains no thicker than a standard magazine.
Although Plastic Logic’s reader has white margins that make the actual display part of the unit significantly smaller than its full surface area, it still remains larger than most competitors. The reader supports a number of common formats, including documents from Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, plus Adobe PDFs, newspapers, periodicals and books.
There are desktop computers, and then there are supercomputers. And there are supercomputers, and then there is IBM’s Blue Gene/P – which should be able to run three computational laps by the time its closest opponent finishes one. IBM revealed the machine at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden on Tuesday.
The Blue Gene/P is the latest in IBM’s Blue Gene line-up of supercomputers. According to IBM, it’s able to perform one petaflops, meaning 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point calculations every second. That’s one thousand trillion, if it helps. The previous-generation Blue Gene, and current record-holder for speed, was the Blue Gene/L, which could pull off 280 teraflops.
The factory–AMD’s second in the city–will be built with financial help from Germany’s federal government and the state of Saxony, and should be up and running in 2006.
Dresden is already home to AMD’s Fab 30 factory, which makes its Athlon chips for use in personal computers.
Company president and chief executive Hector Ruiz said Thursday the plant would help the company meet an anticipated increase in demand for its products, including its new 64-bit chips.
“Positive customer response and increasing momentum for our AMD64 processors make it clear that the time is right to expand our manufacturing capacity in order to meet future demand,” Ruiz said in a statement.
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