Mobility

A Japanese researcher has developed a computer game in which the player becomes the game character, the game is played in real space and a pair of headphones substitute for a monitor.

IBM Corp. hopes to do for its Power processor what it helped do for Linux: create a bigger market in which lots of vendors can play, and earn more money for IBM in the process. At an event in Barcelona last week it announced that 11 new members have joined Power.org, a consortium set up in December for organizations developing Power-based chips, systems, software and tools.

India's minister for IT and communications said Tuesday that Intel Corp has decided to invest about US$400 million in an assembly and testing facility in the country. Intel denied the move, however, prompting speculation that the minister may be pushing the chip maker's hand.

The global semiconductor industry appears to be well on the mend after several months in the doldrums, with some major companies raising their forecasts for the current quarter, mainly because people are buying more notebook computers and mobile phones.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) believe they have developed a manufacturing technique that will allow chip makers to push the performance envelope after conventional transistors reach the atomic level. The technique, based on a mathematical principle called coding theory, will let future generations of microprocessor circuits be reliably manufactured in high volumes, according to HP.

When is a chip not just a chip? When Apple Computer Inc. is involved. The company's decision to put Intel Corp.'s processors in its Macintosh computers starting next year provoked a wide range of strong emotions on Monday from software developers, industry analysts, and the company's famously opinionated user base.

Macintosh computers using Intel Corp. chips will be on the market by this time next year with all Apple Computer Inc. Macs moved over to Intel chips by the end of 2007, Apple said Monday at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.

IBM and the Swiss research institute The Ecole Polytechnique F