Advanced Micro Devices

Dresden is one of the great success stories of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the capital of the East German state of Saxony remade itself as the center of European semiconductor production, becoming home to major facilities operated by U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices as well as Munich-based Infineon Technologies. When a 1998 Time magazine article dubbed the region "Silicon Saxony," locals embraced the label and even founded an organization by that name to promote industry interests.

IBM on Thursday announced two blade servers that will feature the new quad-core Opteron Shanghai processor from Advanced Micro Devices. The announcement was synchronized with AMD's release of the 45nm processor.

Shanghai delivers up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle than previous AMD processors. AMD promises its new Opteron product will drive data-center efficiencies and spur virtualization performance.

Without much in the way of fanfare, Intel added three new multi-core processors to its product price list over the Labor Day weekend. The chipmaker's stealth launch of the new low-cost chips followed price cuts at rival Advanced Micro Devices, which recently lowered the cost of selected Phenom X4, triple-core X3, and Athelon X2 processors.

The hot laptop market has sparked a war among computer chip companies -- and they're not just fighting over who can build the fastest processor.

Intel on Monday rolled out Centrino 2, its next-generation laptop chips. Centrino 2 laptops are faster than their predecessors. But their biggest benefits are other features, such as better graphics and battery life.

Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's chief rival, released a similar set of laptop chips last month. Graphics-chip maker Nvidia, best known for desktop components, also rolled out a laptop line.

A few weeks ago, Stephen Labaton of The New York Times broke the news that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had decided to open a formal antitrust investigation into Intel, the world's dominant maker of microprocessors. The investigation, as Labaton wrote, was going to revolve around "accusations that Intel's pricing is intended to maintain a near monopoly on the microprocessor market."

On the same day competitor Nvidia released its GPU 200 series of high-end graphics chips, Advanced Micro Devices announced what it called "the Cinema 2.0 experience" that will be possible because of its forthcoming teraFLOPS graphics chip.

At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, AMD said that, until this release, content creators had to make a choice -- between cinema-like experiences that were rendered offline and didn't have interactivity, or interactive experiences that didn't have ultra-realism.

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Once you've shattered the supercomputing speed barrier, what do you do for an encore? You train your sights on the next frontier of superfast high-powered computing, of course. At least, that's the plan for the engineers at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratories, who built Roadrunner, the world's fastest computer.

Intel has denied recent media speculation that it may be dragging its feet on developing technology essential to the release of the next-generation Universal Serial Bus 3.0 interconnect specification.

Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer said the chipmaker has invested heavily in the resources required to create the host controller technology for USB 3.0.

A supercomputer with components originally developed for Sony's PlayStation video-game console has become the world's fastest computer.

IBM said the computer, nicknamed Roadrunner, can process more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second, known as a petaflop. Built for the Energy Department's Los Alamos lab with off-the-shelf components, Roadrunner is named for the state bird of New Mexico and will be used to monitor the U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpile.

AMD's Puma is coming onto the stage. The new laptop platform from Advanced Micro Devices, with AMD's dual-core Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor, a seven-series chip set, and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics, was to be unveiled Wednesday at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan.