SEPTEMBER 6
Intel revamps its
Xeon 7300
quad-core server
processors just
days before rival
company AMD launches
its Opteron processor.
AMD releases its quad-core
Opteron on Sept. 10, just 10 months
after Xeon’s initial launch. A week later,
to increase competition with Intel, AMD
releases triplecore
processors
that offer
fast speeds but
lower prices
than processors
with four
cores.
SEPTEMBER 7
The U.S. House of Representatives passes
its version of the Patent Reform Act
of 2007, which focuses on minimizing
patent litigation by making it harder to
claim infringement on intellectual property.
Big companies like Intel, Apple,
and Microsoft hail the bill’s passage, but
it isn’t likely that the Bush administration
will sign off on the legislation.
SEPTEMBER 17
Europe’s second-highest court upholds a
2004 antitrust ruling against Microsoft.
The company allegedly abused its market
power by adding a digital media
player to Windows, undercutting Real
Networks. The ruling could be a bad
sign for other big tech companies like
Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm, who are
also under scrutiny in Europe.
OCTOBER 1
Fairchild Semiconductor celebrates its
50th birthday. The company started the
Silicon Valley sprawl after being founded
in Palo
Alto by the
“Traitorous
Eight.” These
engineers left
another firm
that was started
by William
Shockley, one of the three original
inventors of the transistor. Fairchild
engineers birthed companies like Intel,
AMD, and Xilinx. National Semiconductor
owned Fairchild for 10 years
before spinning it out again into its own
company in 1997.
OCTOBER 10
Two European scientists are awarded
the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for their
work on the discovery of giant magnetoresistance
(GMR), a
property employed in
hard-disk-drive storage.
In 1988, Albert
Fert of France and
Peter Gruenberg of
Germany described how particles used
in data storage could get denser and still
produce the electrical signals computers
read as ones or zeros, enabling the
shrinkage of disk drives.
NOVEMBER 12
Intel releases Penryn,
the industry’s first line
of 45-nm processors.
The dual-core processors
incorporate Intel’s
HK+MG transistor
design the company
announced in January.
DECEMBER 2007
Sony starts selling its 11-in. organic
light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs in
Japan. The 3-mm thick screens boast
high-res images and wide-angle views.
The TVs are expected to eventually
compete with LCD and plasma screens.