Scott M. Fulton

Although oversupply of TFT LCD panels is expected to ease this quarter, demand for TFT LCD panels will still run short of supply by 12% in the second quarter of 2006, according to research firm WitsView Technology.

In his first in-depth interview since releasing the version 1.0 specification for IBM's Cell microprocessor last week, the principal developer of the CPU's innovative new synergistic processor elements (SPE) tells Tom's Hardware Guide he sees Sony's PlayStation 3 - the first major platform to utilize Cell - as the driver for a new general-purpose programming environment, using Linux but bypassing the PC.

With less than a minimum of fanfare, IBM today released the complete version 1.0 specification for its forthcoming Cell processor, or as the company now calls it, the "Cell Broadband Engine." IBM will be producing this graphics-intensive CPU in cooperation with Sony and Toshiba.

Now that Intel's next-generation Pentium architecture is confirmed to have fewer look-ahead pipelines instead of more, and will focus on power consumption even at the risk of moderating its performance gains, AMD may have been successful in forcing CPU market leader Intel into a long-term strategic U-turn.

Japan's Hitachi Ltd.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.

In the wake of its successful Centrino marketing campaign - where mobile computers that meet certain requirements qualify for the Centrino brand - Intel today announced a new and more sweeping branding scheme for personal computers in 2006.

In an exclusive interview with Tom's Hardware Guide this morning at the Fall Intel Developers' Conference, Stephen L. Smith, the company's vice president for desktop platform operations, revealed the following information:

In his first keynote address to the Intel Developers' Forum as Chief Executive Officer of the company, Paul Otellini confirmed this morning his company is shifting away from the NetBurst architecture that distinguished Pentium 4, to a new architecture that emphasizes power conservation over raw performance.

The chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, Hector Ruiz, told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that AMD and Infineon Technologies could cooperate on making flash memory chips.

If no surprises emerge from tomorrow's first day of the Fall 2005 Intel Developers' Forum, Intel may still command the headlines with its anticipated announcement from newly appointed CEO Paul Otellini, of the next-generation Pentium architecture.

Albatron Technology today unveiled its Nvidia NV43 based graphics cards (PC6600LE and PC6600LEQ) for the entry-level market.

An extensive review by the German Web site 3DCenter.org, recently translated into English, appears to lend credence to some complaints by users of graphics cards using NVIDIA's 7800 GTX graphics processor, that textures appear to shimmer even at highest quality.

With Taiwan chipset makers initially focusing their integrated PCIe chipset development on the AMD K8 platform, they may not be able to take advantage of Intel's plans to phase out its 915PL/GL series chipsets, sources at motherboard makers commented to DigiTimes.

A consortium of the world's leading embedded systems manufacturers and developers, meeting at SIGGRAPH 2005, today announced OpenGL ES 2.0, an improved derivative of OpenGL for use in cellphones, embedded systems, including Sony's Playstation 3.

Harddrives using perpendicular recording are on track to hit the market in early 2006 with capacities of up to 160 or even 200 GByte in 2.5" form factors. Consumer electronics using these devices could follow soon thereafter - but Hollywod may have a say in how quickly these monster drives make their way into portable audio and video players, Tom's Hardware Guide has learned.

"Parallelism" is the keyword underscoring several semiconductor architectures this decade. Now it's the turn of the memory: Rambus announced the availability of "micro-threading" for XDR2 memory, the company's next generation memory technology. Memory clock speeds will catapult to 8 GHz, up from a current maximum of 4.8 GHz of XDR1.

Originally developed to remove a massive processing workload from the CPU, some scientists examine how the graphics processors can accelerate non-graphic applications as well. The Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) Research Group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reported this week that Nvidia's 7800 GTX reference card increased the speed of test applications by up to 35x.

Scientists studying how a class of micro-organism called Geobacter sulfurreducens generates electricity to help remove radioactive material such as uranium from ground water, have discovered they actually build conductive 3 - 5 nm "nanowires" whose length can be measured in microns. The discovery is being published in the June 23 edition of the journal Nature.

Citing the need for software developers to take advantage now of the skyrocketing trend toward multicore and hyperthreaded processing, Intel Corp. announced the release of version 9.0 of its C++ and Fortran compilers. By embracing OpenMP 2.5 - the newest edition of a multiprocessing standard - the company hopes developers will create the software tools and applications that will justify its surging investment in multicore technologies.

A new storage networking products firm funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Tako Ventures has announced its entry into the already fiercely competitive enterprise storage hardware market. Pillar Data Systems' Axiom line can act as network-attached storage as well as conventional SAN storage for different network hosts.

In its regular second quarter conference call Thursday afternoon, Intel chief financial officer Andy Bryant reported revenue on the high side of the company's expectations, with a key factor being a surge in demand for mobile CPUs, led by Pentium M.