Globalfoundries is a California-based joint venture of microprocessor manufacturer AMD and financial investor ATIC (an investment company wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi). STMicroelectronics has become first true outside customer of Globalfoundries.

Today, an official contract is signed by the two companies, to make low-power chips using a 40-nanometer process which will be ideal for the next generation of wireless applications, handheld devices, and consumer electronics. Whereas, Intel pioneer in the chip manufacturing company manufactures flash memory chips at the 34-nanometer level.

“To ensure ample capacity for our customer/partners at the leading-edge of low-power design, ST needs an agile and high-performance manufacturing partner that can adapt to our changing needs,” said Jean-Marc Chery, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, STMicroelectronics. “With a strong commitment to manufacturing and technology excellence at the leading-edge, we believe Globalfoundries is an excellent partner to collaborate on low-power design innovation in 2010 and beyond.”

Globalfoundries has planned to extend its structure by building a wafer manufacturing facility at the cost of $4.2B in Malta, N.Y. Once complete, the additional facility is expected to be the most advanced semiconductor foundry in the world.

In 2000, Chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., filed a complaint saying Intel was blocking its access to the market. The main charges on Intel are: giving large rebates to computer makers; paying computer makers to delay or cancel product lines and offering chips for powerful server computers at prices below actual cost. After a lengthy investigation on the complaint, the European Union had prepared a draft decision calling for a fine against Intel.

“I’d be surprised if the fine isn’t as high or higher than in the Microsoft case,” said Howard Cartlidge, the head of the EU and competition group at the law firm Olswang in London, referring to the Intel case. “Technology markets are where the European Commission has perceived particular problems due to dominant companies.”

Also news from EU states that they can levy Intel as much as 10% of its annual revenue. For noncompliance in the EU’s long-running antitrust fight, the commission issued a record $1.16 billion fine against Microsoft Corp.

Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices’ ATI unit in the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The game graphics duopoly, Nividia and AMD, are keenly watching the each progress of Intel’s graphics chip after this conference.

Larrabee chip is expected to hit the market at late this year or early next year. The design of Larrabee is not yet finalized; the discussion is still going on among a lot of key developers. Forsyth said that “On the Intel Web site there will be a C++ prototype library. It doesn’t have the speed of Larrabee but has the same functionality. Developers can get a feel for the language

Jan 20, 2009 – Intel, the world’s largest chip maker announced price cuts on some of its processors. Cuts were concentrated on quad core chips are used in high end desktops, Celeron, xenon processors and Pentium dual core.
1.    The price of Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3.00GHz) processors are now priced at $316. Its previous rate is $530.
2.    Celeron processors 570 (2.00GHz) designed for laptops, dropped 48 percent to $70 from $134.
3.    Intel also cut prices of its xenon processors. Its price was cut 40 percent to $316 from $530.
4.    The prices of Pentium dual E5200core was reduced 24 percent to $64 from $84.
5.    Intel also introduced the Core 2 Quad Q9400s processor (2.66GHz) and the Core 2 Quad Q8200s (2.33GHz), are priced at $320 and $245.

On 7^th December Intel announced that it is claiming “world record” for their future optical communication. Intel going to use silicon photonics for optical communication, particularly this will be useful for high bandwidth applications. Ultra fast transfer of date in future computers powered by many processors cores – Intel. “This research result is another example of how silicon can be used to create very high-performing optical devices,” the development can be used not only in optical communications but areas such as sensing, imaging, quantum cryptography, and biological applications, Mario Paniccia, an Intel Fellow and director of the company’s Photonics Technology Lab.