In a move that signals a firm and ongoing commitment to advanced semiconductor technology leadership, IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd., and STMicroelectronics have defined and are jointly developing a 28-nanometer, high-k metal gate (HKMG), low-power bulk complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology.

The low-power, 28nm technology platform can provide power-performance and time-to-market advantages for producers of a broad range of power-sensitive mobile and consumer electronics applications, including the fast-growing mobile Internet device market segment. The favorable leakage characteristics of the HKMG technology result in optimized battery life for the next generation of mobile products.

CEA/Leti (the Electronics and Information Technology Laboratory of the CEA, based in Grenoble), and IBM today announced that they will collaborate on research in semiconductor and nanoelectronics technology. This five-year agreement is focused on advanced materials, devices and processes for the development of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology for the production of microprocessors and integrated circuits at 22nm and beyond.
With this agreement, CEA/Leti becomes a research associate of IBM and IBM's semiconductor Joint Development Alliance ecosystem centered in Albany, N.Y. CEA/Leti will reinforce this ecosystem through its specific expertise in low-power CMOS (such as SOI technologies), in e-beam lithography and in nanoscale characterization and modelling. This agreement strengthens the links between the IBM and Crolles-Grenoble ecosystems, following STMicroelectronics' decision to join the IBM Alliance in 2007, for the development of core CMOS and value-added application-specific derivative technologies and industrialization of these processes.

In March IBM was reported to be in the midst of negotiating to acquire Sun Microsystems. On the time of the publication there was no more to talk about, but on Saturday IBM finally made a formal bid of $9.40 a share for Sun, or a deal that would have been valued at about $7 billion. Unfortunate for IBM, Sun rejected the offer and has terminated IBM's right for exclusive merger talks, making Sun open for other merger candidates. IBM, in return, withdrew its buyout offer. Two reasons stay behind Sun's decision, one being the belief that the bid was too low, and the other being the terms of agreement, which give IBM too much flexibility in walking away from the deal. It is unclear if a second bid will be proposed by IBM, or will the negotiation between the two companies continue. Representatives from both IBM and Sun declined to comment on an unannounced information.

IBM today unveiled a new generation of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based System x servers and software that enable customers to more easily roll out virtualized computing and significantly reduce growing operating costs with higher performance, simplified management and increased utilization.
With the new systems, IBM engineers addressed key challenges in today's data center, where hefty costs for power usage and IT management pile-up, while processors sit idle or under-utilized. To help enable a more dynamic infrastructure, IBM's four new x86 rack servers and blades feature unique designs -- such as lower wattage requirements -- that can slash energy costs up to 93 percent. At the same time, the new System x servers boast double the compute performance in some models, and support more memory, storage and I/O to help customers of all sizes ease the transition to highly efficient virtualized computing resources. System x blades and racks lead the industry with 96 GB to 1 TB memory options.

IBM will be supplying the US Government with two new supercomputers for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to handle analysis of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The first is a 500 teraflops supercomputer called the BlueGene/P which the lab will receive by April, the second being the 20 Petaflops supercomputer which is due by 2012. It is estimated to perform up to 10 times greater than the current most powerful systems. More information follows:

IBM has been accused of monopoly and anti-competition practices with the mainframe market. A complaint of the same has been filed with the European Commission on Tuesday. T3, a small American supplier of mainframes who, in the past, dealt in IBM products, alleges the company the company to have abused its market-position and monopoly power in the industry.

IBM is accused of engaging in several anti-competitive offenses, that include the prevention of the sales of competing mainframe hardware products by making its operating system exclusive to its mainframe hardware. IBM is further accused of withholding patent licenses and certain intellectual property to the detriment of mainframe customers, according to a statement by T3. In the same statement, T3 says that it dealt with IBM mainframes in the past, but it took to selling its own products developed by Amdahl (now part of Fujitsu). An IBM spokesperson responded saying that the company is yet to see a complaint, and that it was inappropriate to comment on specifics relating thereto.

IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics, and ARM today announced they will develop a comprehensive 32 nanometer (nm) and 28nm Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) design platform based on high-k metal-gate (HKMG) technology from the IBM-led joint-development alliance. Under this multi-year collaboration, ARM will develop and license a design platform of physical intellectual property (IP) including logic, memory and interface products for the Common Platform technology alliance of IBM, Chartered and Samsung for distribution to their customers.

IBM announced today that it has entered into a joint development agreement with Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to further explore "Racetrack Memory," an entirely new approach to solid state memory. Racetrack Memory was conceived by IBM Fellow Dr. Stuart Parkin at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Racetrack Memory is an exciting and highly innovative concept that builds upon IBM's significant accomplishments in the research and development of nanomaterials and nanodevices based on the manipulation of spin-polarized electrical current," said Dr. T.C. Chen, IBM Fellow and Vice President, Science & Technology, IBM Research.

Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250 percent. IBM has demonstrated, for the first time, the game-changing impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals manage and access information.

Following Intel and its partners working extensively on solid-state storage technology, IBM's research staff at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California, USA, have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by more than 250%, according to the company.

Titled Project Quicksilver, an effort in which IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-IO.

"It's feasible that we could get it commercialized within 12 months," said Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM systems storage. "Right now we have a screaming (fast) system, but there's more work to be done in terms of long-term reliability and integration with systems applications. We don't want to get distracted with 'push the hardware.' We want to focus on the solution piece first," he added.

IBM and its chip development partners announced today that they've developed the first functional 22nm silicon fabricated SRAM cell. This puts them ahead of Intel, which had announced its technological entry into the 32 nm domain in September, 2007. SRAM is usually the first semiconductor device a chip-maker tests a new fabrication-process on, before working on microprocessors. These devices were developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). They were built in the conventional 6-transistor design and on a 300 mm wafer. This level of miniaturization made the SRAM cell shrink to a mere 0.1 sq. μm, compare this to the SRAM cells that go into making caches on the 45 nm Intel processors, 0.346 sq. μm.

The first thing that comes to your mind when you talk about CELL Broadband Engine is probably the Sony Playstation 3. Toshiba, a prominent player in ultra-portable computing have announced that a new pair of laptops, the Qosmio G55 and Qosmio F40, which will feature processors derived from the CELL design methodology. Processing will be composed of a two-stage processor, the modified CELL processor SPE cores will handle the heavy calculations required to handle processor-intensive duties like processing HD video. The main processor in the pair of notebooks will be an Intel Core 2 Duo. The World's most powerful supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner, incorporates CELL technology. The CELL variation used consists of four SSP's apart from the arbiter, Toshiba brands this chip as Toshiba Quad-Core HD processor.

The G55 which has an 18.4-inch high-definition screen, 500GB of hard-disk space, NVidia GeForce 9600M graphics processor, dual digital TV tuners and wireless LAN including 802.11n will be priced from USD 2,700 and the F40, which has a 15-inch screen and 250GB hard-disk drive, from USD 2,320. Toshiba plans to put the machines on sale overseas but has yet to announce launch details.

A government computer in New Mexico is the first supercomputer to perform at one petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second). Located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which was until now the fastest computer in the world. The new supercomputer is designed and built by IBM using both traditional computer chips and IBM's Cell Broadband Engine. Roadrunner occupies 6,000 square feet and weighs 500,000 lbs. It is also aiming to take place among the top energy-efficient systems on the official "Green 500" list of supercomputers. Roadrunner will be used primarily to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also do research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change. Learn more here.

In IBM's labs, tiny rivers of water are cooling computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other, a design that promises to advance Moore's Law in the next decade and significantly reduce energy consumed by data centers. IBM Researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack.

AMD today announced growing industry support for the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor among global OEMs continues with IBM's launch of three updated System x servers. Designed to address customer priorities such as energy efficiency, performance, scalability, and virtualization, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers from IBM offer an exceptional power-efficient platform for today's most demanding datacenters.

IBM and its joint development partners - Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale, Infineon Technologies AG, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics N.V. and Toshiba Corporation - today announced that they have collectively demonstrated significant performance and power consumption advantages over industry standards by using a breakthrough material known as "high-k/metal gate" (HKMG) on silicon manufactured at IBM's state-of-art 300 millimeter (mm) semiconductor fabrication facility in East Fishkill, N.Y. With this achievement the joint development partners are now ready for early customer engagements.

IBM today introduced a new supercomputer powered by one of the world's fastest microprocessors and cooled by an innovative water system. The new Power 575 supercomputer, equipped with IBM's latest POWER6 microprocessor, uses water-chilled copper plates located above each microprocessor to remove heat from the electronics. Requiring 80 percent fewer air conditioning units, the water-cooled Power 575 can reduce typical energy consumption used to cool the data center by 40 percent. IBM scientists estimate that water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air.

Taiwan's ASUSTeK Computer Inc. said on Monday that it had filed a patent infringement suit against International Business Machines Corp (IBM) in a US court earlier this month.

We sued IBM for its infringing two of our patents related to storage on the Internet and server technology,

said an ASUSTeK spokesman who declined to give more details. ASUSTeK's move is part of a legal battle that first started on December 7th, when IBM filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission against ASUSTeK and its North American subsidiary ASUS Computer International. Back then IBM said the infringing products include notebook computers, servers, routers and some components. It said the patents cover important aspects of computer systems, including power supplies, computer cooling and computer clustering capabilities. IBM sought import restrictions on some ASUSTeK computer products and components.

IBM announced today that it has learned that it has been temporarily suspended from participating in new business with U.S. Federal government agencies.

The notice of temporary suspension was issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and relates to an investigation by the EPA of possible violations of the Procurement Integrity provisions of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy Act regarding a bid for business with the EPA originally submitted in March 2006. The temporary suspension applies to all Federal agencies and IBM business units. IBM may continue awards in existence as of the date of this suspension, unless a particular agency directs otherwise.

International Business Machines Corporation and Hitachi today announced that they have signed a unique, two-year joint semiconductor metrology research agreement in order to speed the pace of semiconductor innovation. The agreement marks the first time Hitachi and IBM have collaborated on semiconductor technology - the two companies currently work together on enterprise servers and other products.

IBM Researchers today unveiled a prototype technology that could bring massive amounts of bandwidth in an energy efficient way to all kinds of machines - from supercomputers to cell phones - that could revolutionize the way people access, use and share information across many different applications. The new technology uses light instead of wires to send information and could allow, for example, the transmission of 8 trillion bits (terabits) per second of information - equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams - using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it is working with IBM Corp. to deliver a powerful Windows Embedded-based plug-and-play solution to help make it faster and easier for retailers and hospitality organizations to deliver information and services to time-conscious, empowered consumers.

IBM is launching a free multiplayer online game (PowerUp) challenging teenagers to help save the planet "Helios" from ecological disaster. The game is part of IBM's TryScience initiative and will be launched at Engineer's Week 2008 opening on February 16 in Washington, D.C. The game, which can be played alone or together, features a planet in near ecological ruin where three exciting missions for solar, wind and water power must be solved before sandstorms, floods or SmogGobs thwart the rescue.

IBM was never known for making anything small. From some of the very first computers to the PlayStation 3 processor, IBM is one of the largest influences of the tech industry. As if to add to this success, IBM wants to be a host: to the entire internet. The thought is, at first, silly, and then unfathomable. How can one computer, let alone one company, run the entire internet? IBM claims they can pull it off with a heavily modified Blue Gene computer, which they have codenamed "Kittyhawk". The processing power of Kittyhawk would be immense. The software is too complex to explain, and will be left at "Kittyhawk will run the internet as a single application". As far as hardware is concerned, current estimates say that Kittyhawk will need 67.1 million cores and 32PB of memory.

IBM Cell BE PS3 Processor Shrunk to 45nm

At an ISSCC session yesterday afternoon, IBM announced details of a smaller, lower-power version of the Cell BE processor that powers Sony's PlayStation 3 entertainment system. The Cell BE is currently fabricated on IBM's 65nm SOI process, but IBM will soon move the console chip onto the company's next-generation 45nm high-k process. The 45nm Cell will use about 40 percent less power than its 65nm predecessor, and its die area will be reduced by 34 percent. The greatly reduced power budget will cut down on the amount of active cooling required by the console, which in turn will make it cheaper to produce and more reliable. Also affecting Sony's per-unit cost is the reduction in overall die size. A smaller die means a smaller, cheaper package; it also means that yields will be better and that each chip will cost less overall. All this will help Sony to slash the production cost of every PLAYSTATION3 console. Will this affect end users, only time will show. New price cuts or new PS3 models, haven't been officially announced yet.