December and final thoughts
December
In an indirect admission that much-vaunted Larrabee wasn't going anywhere near as well as it had hoped for, Intel rolled out news of a 48-core chip.Larrabee's mass-market demise came a short while afterwards, and we were rather surprised by Intel's obvious inability to engineer a competitive GPU. AMD and NVIDIA must have thought Christmas 2009 came early.
ASUS let us in on Intel's plans for the high-end desktop space in 2010 by informing Joe Public that its X58 boards supported the upcoming six-core Gulftown CPU. Seagate decided that thin was in, Intel came clean with the CPU+GPU chips it plans to launch in early January 2010, and then followed that news with the arrival of 'Atom 2'.
Thoughts
There you have it, some of the more notable comings and goings in 2009. AMD's done better than average, launching a multitude of CPU and GPU products and getting a much-needed cash injection from Intel. NVIDIA's procrastinated over new GPUs and appears to have put 2009 down to broadening its reach in other areas.Intel's expenses are rather large for the year. It has invested heavily in 32nm production ($7bn), been forced to hand over large chunks of cash ($1.25bn) and then dismiss promising projects (Larrabee), but such is the market-share domination and manufacturing prowess, that it's still made money...and will continue to do so in 2010, no doubt.
Microsoft's year has been highlighted by the release of Windows 7. Did you buy it? Which technology/product impressed you most in 2009? What was your most memorable story of the year? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the HEXUS.community.
