Saturday, October 3, 2015

TechEye

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IBM thinks carbon nanotubes are the future

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:31 AM PDT

IBM logoThe research wing of IBM claimed it has made an engineering breakthrough which could mean carbon nanotubes will displace silicon transistors for future computers.

The scients said they have managed to "shrink" transistor contacts without reducing carbon nanotube performance and that means more powerful microprocessors way beyond existing semiconductors.

IBM said that as devices get smaller, increased electrical resistance has prevented serious performance gains.

But a discovery by the scientists mean carbon nanotube chips will vastly improve the performance of high end computers, increase power and battery life of mobile devices and let cloud datacentres deliver services more economically.

Moore's Law, said IBM, "is running out of steam".

IBM thinks that its approach overcomes a major hurdle to the adoption of carbon nanotubes.

Globalfoundries goes it alone

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:25 AM PDT

Silicon wafer - Wikimedia Commons -Globalfoundries (GloFo) which manufactures semiconductors to customers' designs, is likely to develop 10 nanometre technology in house.

Previously it had struck a deal with Korean giant Samsung to license its 14 nanometre FinFET technology and the partnership has proved lucrative with GloFo winning orders from AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple.

But, according to people who talked to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, GloFo now believes it will be more economical to work on its next generation 10 nanometre technology in house, rather than licensing.

GloFo recently completed the acquisition of IBM's microelectronics division and that is going to help it to develop leading edge technology.

TSMC is GloFo's biggest competitor and the race will be on to woo companies including Nvidia to deliver semiconductors with high performance and at good prices, according to the wire.

Recent rumours suggested that Chinese investors are interested in buying GloFo and the Abu Dhabi owners are not averse to such an approach.

DRAM prices fell in September

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:17 AM PDT

Samsung DRAMSales of DRAM for notebooks and PCs continued to show a downturn during September, which is good news for buyers and bad news for the vendors.

DRAM Exchange, which tracks memory prices, said that part of the reason for the underlying decline is that notebook shipments in the third quarter didn't reach expectations, with the Windows 10 free upgrade hitting potential sales of new notebooks.

Analyst VP Avril Wu said that sales of both smartphones and servers aren't great. "This seriously eroded the margins of DRAM suppliers," she said. "If the global economy continues to stagnate, the end market will not generate the demand needed to effectively consume the new DRAM chips produced on advanced processes."

She predicted that prices will continue decline in the first half of next year, and the decline will be "more severe than the current slide".

The DRAM market continues to be dominated by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron and they moving production of the chips to 17 nanometres, meaning higher densities and better power efficiency.

Samsung will start producing 18 nanometre technology chips next year, and is ahead of the other two players.

Cloud IT infrastructure sales soar

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 06:09 AM PDT

cloudsA report from International Data Corporation (IDC) said that cloud revenues from sales of infrastructure products – that's server, storage and ethernet switches rose to be worth $6.9 billion in the second quarter of this year, up 25.7 percent year on year.

These figures incude both public and private clouds.

And while this sector showed steep growth, non cloud IT infrastructure fell by 3.5 percent in the quarter.

Kuba Stolarski, research director for the segment, said cloud IT deployments drove overall growth, with customers modernising their workloads.

"As cloud service providers continue to expand their datacentre footprints to meet growing cloud services demand, they increasingly rely on a bariety of as a service offerings and traditional hosting," said Stolarski.

Revenues grew fastest in Japan, Asia Pacific, Canada and the USA.

The top five players are HP, Dell, Cisco, EMC and Lenovo. But other significant players include NetApp and original development manufacturers (ODMs) selling their products directly to customers.

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