Simple foundry business, just making chips to the designs of others, is pretty low margin stuff.
More rumours and suppositions that Intel is edging closer to making chips for Apple.
And the problem will get worse as the components become smaller, making chips even more inefficient, he said.
The landmark contract came last year when Intel started making chips for Achronix and Tabula, and more recently the publicly traded firm Altera.
FORBES: Report: Intel And Apple Talked Chip-Making, But No Agreement Reached
While the company does not, even in its wildest dreams, expect wafer-based techniques to vanish immediately, alternatives to the traditional way of making chips look increasingly attractive.
It sells 100 of the 130 molecules used in making semiconductor chips and liquid-crystal displays.
It leads in making the chips in communications gear, supplying rivals Cisco and Nortel.
Most are produced in huge, ultra-clean factories using batch processes similar to those for making silicon chips.
ECONOMIST: Electronic screens as thin as paper are coming soon
For Professor Rakesh Kumar at University of Illinois the demise of Moore's Law is being hastened by an insistence on making silicon chips operate flawlessly.
Illumina started making DNA chips, an early technology for detecting mutations.
They do everything from making the chips that go into electronic devices to designing, building and marketing the computers, mobile phones and other gadgets that use them.
The idea that it will, at some point in the near future, start making the processing chips for Apple.
Real promise lay in making cheap custom chips, not a better microprocessor.
What volunteers had failed to realize was that the comparisons they were making when the chips were in their heads were not the comparisons they would make when the chips were in their mouths.
The outlook is equally grim for the dozens of start-ups making Wi-Fi chips, systems and equipment.
While semiconductor makers were coming out with ever more powerful chips, making an inexpensive desktop videoconferencing system inevitable, Austin, Tex.
And just as the cost of making faster and faster silicon chips is rising exponentially, so is it getting more and more difficult to develop new drugs.
Korean makers LGand Samsung--making CDMA phones with Qualcomm's chips--began bombing the U.S. with far cheaper models, undercutting Qualcomm's handset business.
More importantly, Intel is already shipping the new Pentiums in volume, while Transmeta doesn't expect to have that capability until late this year. (IBM manufactures the Crusoes.) That could allow Intel to seed the market with low-power chips and prevent Transmeta from making major inroads.
One of these days, we'll be making fuel to power our automobiles from wood chips, to switchgrasses, to agricultural wastes.
Nvidia, once a provider of power-sucking graphics chips for gamers and engineers, seems to be making the most of the opportunity.
FORBES: With Asus Windows RT Tablet, Nvidia Continues Push Into Wireless
That's apparently possible by making the entire chip nonvolatile, as opposed to many current chips that only use nonvolatile merged memory.
ENGADGET: Integrated circuits with no standby power could be in use by year's end
Instead of making drugs, they would use the high-tech tools of gene chips, high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry (the rapid mixing and matching of chemicals) and bioinformatics (software that analyzes data)--to develop entirely different compounds.
Chips could also be used to pebble-dash office interiors, making the walls themselves intelligent.
It created a race to build the technology for making fuel from non-food sources, whether it was ethanol from wood chips and jet fuel from algae.
Users are throwing sand in Intel's money-making machine with their growing reluctance to pay a premium for PCs with powerful new chips.
The computer maker on Wednesday is discussing its advances in making optical-communications components from silicon, the mainstay material used in conventional computer chips.
Mr. Kocher, whose company, Cryptography Research, develops and licenses custom chips to protect data networks and prevent content piracy, says tech companies are making reasonable choices about safeguards, but fare poorly in some studies because they are better at discovering they have been hacked.
Rather than making the handheld itself, TI is hoping to attract the attention of manufacturers and then sell them the chips to do the job.
Making ever more complex and power-hungry processors to obey Moore's Law just limits how many chips you can fit in a given space, he said.
ENGADGET: ARM chief tosses Moore's Law out with the trash, says efficiency rules all
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