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Lyric Semiconductor, a startup company founded by an MIT scientist and a veteran semiconductor executive, is working on a processor designed to calculate probabilities that could dramatically increase computer performance in certain applications.
Lyric described the GP5 chip as a “general purpose programmable probability processing platform” and said it could perform probability calculations 1,000 times faster [...]

A new startup funded by major chip makers and investment firms is taking aim at electricity bills, the biggest cost in data centers.
Smooth-Stone, which on Monday announced it secured $48 million in new funding, plans to use mobile phone microprocessors inside the high-powered computer servers used in data centers to lower their electric bills. The [...]

Advanced Micro Devices is ahead of schedule with its upcoming Fusion chips, which will appear first in netbooks and low-end laptops early next year, but not in tablets, the company said on Thursday.
Interest from customers pushed AMD to accelerate the development of a low-power Fusion chip code-named Ontario, which the company will start shipping for [...]

Advanced Micro Devices is looking to invest in technology companies as it tries to build a hardware and software ecosystem around its upcoming Fusion processor, the company said on Tuesday.
The chip designer will invest in software companies to develop applications that harness the parallel-processing capabilities of CPUs and graphics processing units to boost system performance, [...]

Intel’s next-generation processor code-named Westmere-EX may include more cores than the company’s current server chips, according to the title of a paper about the chip announced on Sunday.
Intel will present a paper, called “Westmere-EX: A 20-Thread Server CPU,” at the Hot Chips 22 conference, which will be held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California [...]

SeaMicro has developed a server that packs in 512 low-power Intel Atom processors on miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, the company announced Monday.
Atom processors are more commonly found in netbooks, but Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro’s CEO, says they can be more power-efficient than x86 chips for certain cloud and Web transaction workloads. Such transactions [...]

Advanced Micro Devices gave reporters a first look at its upcoming Fusion processors on Wednesday in a demonstration calculated to reveal as few specifics about the chips as possible, lest the information fall into the hands of rival Intel.
AMD is readying two versions of Fusion for release during the first half of 2011, a mainstream [...]

Hardware makers will unite behind Google’s Android as the primary operating system for tablet computers, according to Nvidia’s CEO.
Tablets are shaping up to be one of the highlights of the annual Computex show in Taipei, where hardware makers are showing off their latest products and prototypes. Most manufacturers are expected to show off tablets, with [...]

PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell have spilled details about new quad-core laptop processors from Intel prior to launch of the chips.
Details about the new quad-core Core i7-840QM and Core i7-740QM processors were posted by HP on its Web site in a manual for the Envy 17 laptop. Dell previously listed the chips as available for [...]

Advanced Micro Devices is trying to beat Intel on price with its latest six-core desktop Phenom II X6 processors, which were announced on Tuesday.
AMD is shipping two X6 processors that are substantially less pricey than Intel’s latest six-core Core i7-980XM desktop processor, which was announced last month. The Phenom II X6 1090T processor runs at [...]