[H]ardNews 1st Edition - CPU Edition

Xeon M?:

Cnet reports that the new Xeons will trace their parentage to the Intel notebook Pentium M family to take advantage of the low power consumption and thermal profile.

Code-named Sossaman, the chip puts out a maximum of 31 watts, fairly low for server chips, which can boast thermal ceilings of 110 watts.

Opteron Hits 10%:

PC World reports that the Opteron has met and exceeded its stated goal of 10% of the server market shipment last quarter.

According to data from Mercury Research, Opteron shipments made up 11.2 percent of the total number of server processors using the x86 instruction set shipped during the second quarter, says Dean McCarron. "The market has gotten a little more competitive. The share reflects a very significant uptick in [Opteron] shipments during the quarter."

Cleaning Up:

ExtremeTech scrubs up to take you on a tour of one of the cleanest places on earth an IC fab. A companion piece to their Tomorrow's CPUs Today and CPUs Up Close exposés.

How clean is it? About 10,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room. Transistors in a modern chip are 50nm (0.05 microns) in width, about 2,000 times narrower than a human hair. The tiniest speck of dirt can wreck a transistor, potentially ruining the chip. Air in the cleanroom is filtered several times a minute, and all workers must be encased in "bunny suits" to prevent them from contaminating the air.

Future Tech:

Gaze deeply into the crystal ball as eWeek peers into Intel's proposed future with coverage of Silicon with Carbon Nanotubes and Photonics.

The ability to decrease the size of today's silicon-based transistors, which in turn allows chip makers to boost their chips' performance by packing more transistors into each processor, will eventually hit a wall, leading chip makers to look elsewhere. That's the point at which carbon nanotubes, nanowires or other materials and manufacturing techniques made possible by nanotech research could come into play.

Megacomputer:

NewScientist drops a supercomputer bombshell, Japan's ministry for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology along with NEC and Hitachi have announced plans to build a 10 petaflop supercomputer. Which will likely feature a hybrid architecture of several different types of processors.

Japan has revealed plans to build a supercomputer so staggeringly powerful that it will be five times swifter than the 500 fastest systems on the planet today – combined.

VIA OC Guide:

VIAarena serves up their overclocking guide, covering the BIOS, processor and memory.

Originally overclocking was frowned upon by manufacturers as it stressed their hardware in ways it was not designed to be. Then there were companies such as Intel and AMD who wanted to protect their high-end processors. Most users could not see the value in purchasing a $500 US processor when an overclocked $200 US processor could match it in speed.

Open Chips:

Again we head over to eWeek this time to examine processor designs anyone can employ, or modify for either free or with a small royalty.

The efforts of groups like OpenCores.org or Power.org might ultimately make it easier or cheaper—or both—for companies to acquire processor designs. However, open processors are somewhat different from open software, in that they are likely to be used by a relatively small group of companies. While it's certainly possible, it's less likely for an individual to experiment with an open processor than an open software application.