Stories about: Cyrix

The release of Intel's 8086 microprocessor in 1978 was a watershed moment for personal computing. The DNA of that chip is likely at the centre of whatever computer--Windows, Mac, or Linux--you're using to read this, and it helped transform Intel from merely one of many chip companies to the world's largest.

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding "the dawn of a new era." Overblown? Sure, but also prophetic. While the 8086 was slow to take off, its underlying architecture -- later referred to as x86 -- would become one of technology's most impressive success stories.

Last week's raid on Intel's Munich office by European Commission investigators marks the latest development in one of several antitrust cases that have dogged the world's largest chip maker for years. Here's a rundown of Intel's brushes with antitrust investigators and lawsuits around the world since 1990:

You just gotta love a Cinderella story. Advanced Micro Devices is the hardscrabble kid who came to Silicon Valley with a dollar and a pack of Luckies and ended up in a building with its name on top. AMD's rapid rise from startup to US$5 billion semiconductor powerhouse is, as Humphrey Bogart's English teacher once said, the stuff of which dreams are made.

Symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) is a parallel computer architecture in which multiple processors run a single copy of the operating system and share the memory and other resources of one computer. All the processors have equal access to memory, I/O and external interrupts.

Targeting companies that wish to give employees a simple way to access the Internet, PeoplePC will add the New Internet Computer (NIC) Internet appliance to its portfolio later this year, according to a published report Thursday.

Wireless devices, a high-powered graphics chip set and the debut of the next generation of microprocessor manufacturing are expected to share the spotlight next week at Computex Taipei 2001, the annual convergence in Taiwan's capital of IT hardware vendors and buyers from around the world.

Via Technologies Inc. officially launched its new low-power C3 processor Sunday, at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover. The device will be priced at US$54 per unit in quantities of 1,000, the company said in a statement Sunday.

VIA Technologies has launched a reseller program to help its channel partners with marketing and support.

Symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) is a type of computing that uses more than a single processor. It rests at one end of a continuum running from the tongue-twister Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory-Architecture (ccNUMA) to the less tightly coupled massively parallel processor systems and on to distributed systems such as Beowulfs, which are clusters of commodity, off-the-shelf PCs that are interconnected with a technology like Ethernet and run programs written for parallel processing.

In the wake of comments made Tuesday by Transmeta CEO Dave Ditzel that the ambitious microprocessor start-up is at least five years ahead of well-established competitors Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a spokesman for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Transmeta clarified that the company's lead is in its software emulation technology, a method of computing unique to the company's Crusoe processor.