AMD

Advanced Micro Devices told the Securities and Exchange Commission this week that it will be recording a $70 million charge in the year ahead due to its implementation of a new restructuring plan that includes the termination of 600 employees -- 100 more than it had previously envisioned.

Moreover, the chipmaker's financial woes are far from over. Earlier this month, AMD warned investors that it expected a 25 percent fall in revenue for the fourth quarter this year "due to weaker than expected demand across all geographies and businesses, particularly in the consumer market."

The Khronos Group on Monday announced that its OpenCL 1.0 specification has been ratified and publicly released. Apple proposed the spec six months ago.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices is among the most recent casualties of the slowdown in technology spending. On Dec. 4 the chipmaker drastically cut its sales outlook, saying fourth-quarter revenue will drop about 25 percent from the third quarter's $1.59 billion.

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to regain its footing in competition with rival Intel, announced Tuesday that it will split into two companies. One of the companies will be a global enterprise focused on semiconductor manufacturing, temporarily called The Foundry Company. AMD itself will focus on designing microprocessors.

Abu Dhabi Investment

If you want a better desktop computer than the guy next door, now is the time to start looking and buying.

In previous months, PCs from the major makers were offering 2 to 3 gigabytes of RAM with dual-core Intel and AMD processors. You need that kind of power to make the Windows Vista operating system run well.

But in the past few weeks, I've seen a major uptick in desktop PC specifications -- and prices.

It will come as no surprise that Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang believes in the future of graphics processing. As he pointed out in a two-and-a-half hour presentation at the Nvision 2008 conference, today's GPUs have the equivalent of 1,000 times the processing power of a Cray supercomputer from 30 years ago.

What's less obvious is that Huang also sees Nvidia's future in smartphones.

Advanced Micro Devices announced Tuesday what it called "the world's fastest graphics chip." Its ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 delivers 2.4 teraFLOPS of graphics processing on a single card. Available Sept. 1., the HD 4870 is reported to consume less power at greater performance than competing single- or even some dual-card solutions, such as NVIDIA's 9800 series.

Size, Performance and Cost

NVIDIA denied rumors Friday that it might exit the chipset business. DigiTimes of Taipei had reported that NVIDIA indicated to a Taiwanese motherboard partner that it would not be in the chipset business in the near future.

But Derek Perez, director of press relations at NVIDIA, said in a phone interview, "It's completely false. In fact, we're growing market share in the chipset business."

On Wednesday, AMD announced an external graphics platform technology called ATI XGP. The company hopes to revitalize its notebook-chip business by bringing desktop graphic performance and rich-media capabilities to laptops.

The ATI XGP technology lets AMD deliver graphics over a connected cable to an externally powered and cooled device. It delivers up to 4GB in bandwidth in each direction between the notebook and external graphics, according to AMD.

AMD announced a major executive shake-up Monday as it tries to rebuild its ailing business. President and COO Dirk Meyer said the company is accelerating a transformation by bolstering its management team for the x86 microprocessor and graphics businesses. But some analysts said it may be too little, too late.