Intel sells XScale business to Marvell for $600m | Reg Hardware

Intel sells XScale business to Marvell for $600m | Reg Hardware: "Intel is to flog off its XScale processor operation, the chip giant said today. The move paves the way for it to push low-power x86 CPUs at mobile phone and PDA makers. The buyer is comms chip company Marvell Technology Group, which is paying $600m cash for the product line and taking on 'certain liabilities'.

The deal covers the full XScale line-up, including the PXA9xx series of mobile phone chips and the PXA27x line aimed at PDAs. Intel has some 1,400 staff working on and around the XScale family, many of whom it expects will leave Intel and join Marvell, Intel said - handy for the chip giant's restructure plans. Selling the business had been forecast by analysts."

Apple to boost iTunes downloads with BitTorrent? | Reg Hardware

Apple to boost iTunes downloads with BitTorrent? | Reg Hardware: "Apple's next major operating system release - aka 'Leopard' - will feature built-in BitTorrent support to speed up the company's eagerly anticipated movie download service, it has been alleged. If true, it would allow iTunes Music Store customers to grab video data not only from the online shop but also from other customers who've already purchased the movie.

Readers assuming this marks Apple's whole-hearted embrace of P2P technology should remember that downloaded movies will still be DRM'd to the hilt. The move is more about getting content to customers more quickly than sharing stuff."

IBM overclocks chip to 500GHz | Reg Hardware

IBM overclocks chip to 500GHz | Reg Hardware: "Boffins from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) have produced what they claim is the world's fastest silicon chip thanks to what must be the acme of overclocking. The researchers reached a clock speed of 500GHz by reducing its temperature to just 4.5° above absolute zero.

The feat was part of the team's exploration of fourth-generation Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) devices, which IBM and GIT are investigation for future comms chip applications. The scientists wanted to see just how fast such a chip could be persuaded to run without malfunctioning or, in extreme cases, melting."

EETimes.com - IEEE catches the Spirit of IP reuse

EETimes.com - IEEE catches the Spirit of IP reuse: "There's more to Spirit than what first meets the eye, said Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest. 'Spirit has grown from a fairly boring standards effort to an extremely exciting effort over the past few years,' he said.

Beyond IP metadata, Smith said, the technical community is looking at Spirit as a way to embed constraints from the behavioral level down to RTL implementation. Some, he said, are looking at Spirit as a way of developing the 'intention layer' needed to imply parallelization for C-language code. That means Spirit could be an important part of what Smith calls the 'concurrent software compiler,' a future development that will be important for large-scale multiprocessor SoC design."