If, as pressure groups and campaigners suggest, the whole chain needs protection – for example, to try to unpick the influence of a retailer on an individual dairy farmer, whose processor supplies a number of customers – that would require substantial resources and would add significant cost to the supply chain.
AMD, whose processor doesn't work with Rambus memory, has hitched its wagon very closely to DDR.
Dr Furber is developing asynchronous chips for such devices in conjunction with ARM, a British company whose processors appear in many handheld computers and mobile phones.
Intel, whose processors run about 80percentt of the world's personal computers, is expanding into new markets, including chips for televisions and mobile devices.
Intel, the dominant chip maker whose processors run more than 80 percent of the world's PCs, forecast third-quarter revenue of $14 billion, plus or minus $500 million, in its earnings report.
Apple demonstrated its machines far exceeding the performance of the fastest Intel machines, whose processors have higher raw calculating speeds measured in megahertz, as both machines did the same multimedia editing.
In a New York venue dressed as a front room, with sofas, bookcases and a flatscreen television, Kindle executive Peter Larsen unveiled a drinks coaster-sized black box whose processors he claimed were three times as fast as rivals.
He describes a server upgrade on one of Sun's own data centers last June that turned 22 outmoded servers into 11 modern machines, whose processors run at a slower speed but are capable of far more simultaneous tasks.
Affected members were subsequently offered a free month's subscription and the company promised to help anyone whose processors might have overheated and been damaged as a result of its software.
Intel, whose processors still ship with higher speeds than AMD's new offerings, says the PC market is not yet ready for the switch and 32-bit chips have not reached their limits.
Nvidia, the chipmaker whose Tegra processor is found in the Asus Transformer, which runs Ice Cream Sandwich, thinks this solves fragmentation.
