Then there are the little things: the gyroscopes, altimeters, sound chips, and applications processors that make smart phones smart vary from one handset to another.

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Perverse as it might sound, when the chips are down our appetite for being scared witless increases.

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It has a fast multi-core processor, separate chips for graphics and sound, and a hard drive.

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Singapore makes lots of other electronics devices: printers, CD-ROM drives, DVD drives and printed circuit boards -- not to mention DRAMs (memory chips) and the sound cards and graphics cards found in PCs.

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Plessey makes analogue chips, which digitise and process signals such as sound and light, rather than the digital sort that Intel makes for computers.

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Cell chips are well suited to processing streams of video and sound, and for modelling the complex three-dimensional worlds of video games, so Cell's debut will be in Sony's next-generation games console, the PlayStation 3, which is expected to contain four of the beasts.

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Later that year, Don Cruise, Chips's partner, told me Elvis had booked American Sound to record what would become his "From Elvis in Memphis" album.

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While it is possible to refine audio quality through software, Audience specializes in chips because it says hardware allows more computational power for its complex sound processing.

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