AMD and Intel are at it again but this time it’s not on the chip market it’s in court. The ruling of which was surprising and in AMD’s favor. The European Commission decided that Intel had taken part in illegal actions to hurt its rival’s sales. The result was the largest fine in regards to antitrust laws. The fine for breaking these laws was a whopping 1.45 billion dollars.

The case came because Intel was accused, and found guilty, two separate crimes. The first crime was that Intel gave manufacturers special rebates for buying the majority if not all of the x86 type processors from Intel. There were allegations that Intel also made payments to retailers so that they would only stock the Intel version of the x86 chips.

The second crime that the European Commission found Intel guilty of was paying manufacturers to delay the release of competitor’s computers containing the other x86 chips or delay releasing the chips themselves. This occurred from October of ‘02 until December of ‘07!

You may ask yourself how this is harmful to the market. Well besides being a highly unethical practice, the smaller chip makers such as AMD are unable to compete with Intel as their computers are not being sold in the same stores and the manufacturers are being paid to put the Intel chips in rather than a mix of chips.

There were some computer manufacturers that were named as accepting payments from Intel to follow these practices. The larger manufacturers were Acer, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. There were some less known companies as well that were also named.

In one instance the rebates caused AMD to not even be able to give their CPUs away. The manufacturer (who was unnamed) only took 160,000 x86 chips from AMD because they would have lost their rebate from Intel if they had taken more.  Hopefully Intel will learn a lesson from this and not hurt the consumers further.

Source: CNET

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As the computer industry grows the demand for more materials rises. A semiconductor company in Taiwan has welcomed this growth and is one of the few companies that are able to meet the new demands. There limited companies who are prepared to make factories for semiconductors due to the high costs and risks involved. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. has turned into the largest producer of the chips and expects to see a 20% increase in sales, with $234 billion product sales in the U.S. alone.

The excitement started when Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing Corp. reported a 229% percent increase in its net worth over a year. A company that was previously worth 5 cents a share rose to 17 cents and the profit rose to $769 million. Fabrication facilities, also known as “fabs”, are often considered a high risk investment, costing anywhere from 2-5 billion each. While other companies are wary of the investment TSMC is snatching up factories to meet the new demand.

The semiconductors are made from silicon and other metallic materials. These chips are found in almost all modern electrical devices from computers to radios. A current is passed between the conductor and insulator of the chip to regulate the flow of electrons. The different types of metals added to the silicon effect the conductivity of the semiconductor.

Now that TSMC has become established, it is helping newer companies overcome the financial difficulties of starting a fab. Designers are able to make samples of each semiconductor in order to generate new business. This leap in innovation is expected to bring a further rise to the already growing company. In turn, industries that use these semiconductors are expected to grow as well. Graphics companies, communication companies, and all divisions of computer companies will be seeing this increased growth within a few short years.

Source: CNET

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“15 seconds just to load Microsoft Word? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

I’ve heard this a lot of times, especially during the days when Intel’s Celeron was reigning it over the other processors in terms of sales. It’s not surprising why applications ran slower a few years ago. There used to be a time when 64MB of RAM was an impressive spec already.

You may argue that the programs back then were not that big or complicated. True. However, multitasking was already as heavy and demanding three years ago as it is today. And with just 64MB of RAM, you shouldn’t wonder why it was hard running several applications simultaneously during the years when Shaq and Kobe were still together.

As you may have noticed, IT years are like dog years. Your Pentium IV may just be a year old, but it has actually reached its prime already. Dual core processors are the way to go today. Never has there been a time when the computer was so fast and powerful. For the first time, chip makers can claim that they have outpaced software manufacturers. No application today can complain that the available processors are not that powerful enough to satisfy its demands.

With all this computing power at your disposal, does this mean that applications should load up or run in a heartbeat? Theoretically, it should. However, the shriek at the beginning of this article continues to reverberate, and a number of them even come from people who have the best commercially-available laptop or desktop in the market.

How is this possible?

Well, for one thing, applications continue to get bigger and more complicated. But with a Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of memory, size shouldn’t really matter. So what’s really causing the slowdown?

Chip manufacturers blame software developers for faulty programming. They claim that there are applications which don’t terminate properly or completely. As a result, the RAM that it uses doesn’t become free. It continues to get occupied. This virtually and effectively reduces the size of your system memory. And if you’re physical memory is heavily clogged with programs, Windows will now use virtual memory. In case you don’t know, virtual memory is slower since it is just a space in your hard drive.

What if you’re just running one application and your system is acting as if it is running ten?

Don’t blame the software developer on this one. If your Core 2 Duo PC is performing like a Pentium II, then chances are that it’s infected with spyware. Spyware is often blamed (and rightly so) for most cases or incidents of computer slowdowns. No amount of optimization or hardware upgrade could fully improve the performance of your PC if it is infested with malicious programs.

Removing spyware can be challenging. However, there are many third-party programs out there which could make this task as easy as deleting a file from your hard drive. PC World has just featured a great article on how to determine if your PC is plagued by malware and how to remove them.

Don’t automatically tag spyware as the guilty party whenever your PC’s stamina is dropping. Malware infestation is just one of the many causes of computer slowdown. Determine the problem first before performing the remedy.

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Just when it seems that Intel has already made the ultimate processor in Core 2 Duo, it raised the bar yet again when it recently unveiled its new line of microprocessors.

Intel will be using the 45nm manufacturing process for the dual and quad-core chips dubbed as “Penryn”. This new innovation will allow the leading chip-maker to reduce processor size while continuously pushing clock speeds up.

This news can be either good or bad. Of course this is positive news in general for the IT industry. The faster the processor, the more productive the user is. However, software developers will be designing their products in such a way that it will demand more from the new processors since the latter have something extra to give.

I don’t know if I’ll be changing my still reliable Pentium D desktop anytime soon. Even though programmers are now designing their products in such a way that it will only run smoothly when using at least a core duo processor, I still believe that many applications won’t be needing that amount of computing power. As long as you have at least 512 GB of RAM and constantly optimize your unit, you’ll feel that your Pentium IV or III is running on steroids.

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