Lay of the Land

Has Cleantech Peaked?

With little to show so far from government investments, and with private sector investment starting to level off, it’s time to ask whether cleantech has already had its moment in the sun.

Feds’ Support for Cleantech R&D in the Crosshairs

The Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy has become a lightning rod for critics of federal economic stimulus efforts.

SoC Providers Adjust the Picture On Their DTV Strategies

The rise of MediaTek and MStar in digital TV and set-top chips over the last several years has rocked the global consumer chip industry. When the DTV SoC business cratered last year, some high-profile IC providers fled the segment, presumably concluding that chasing the two Taiwan-based competitors’ doggedly downward pricing model was no longer worth the effort. We take a look at the companies that might stay and fight.

Mobile SoC Players Plot Moves In a Complicated Chess Game

There’s an unprecedented variety of mobile application processors competing for sockets in next-generation smartphones and tablets, giving OEMs and software developers plenty of targets to choose from. But they’ll have to watch out for some tricky technical twists and turns along the way.

Imagination Takes GPU Route to Heterogeneous Computing

Imagination Technologies says it is getting a handle on how space- and power-constrained mobile systems will leverage heterogeneous multicore processing. The U.K. IP licensor calls its approach "GPU compute".

ARM Elbows Its Way into Servers

Today’s most popular Web services are run on warehouse-sized banks of mainly X86 computers that require so much power they are sometimes parked near generator stations. The pain of deploying and managing such systems has motivated work to explore alternative ways to build servers and the processors that run them.