Romanian and Turkish scientists turn circuit boards into oil

Whether through a force of expanding environmental activism or just compliance with government edicts, the IT sector is in a pinch over how to safely recycle defunct computers and equipment.

Unfortunately, IT kit is packed with enough environmental hazards to put the Toxic Avenger's codpiece to shame. And with each generation of electrical merchandise released, dealing with the jettisoned remains of yesterday's gear turns into a bigger problem.

But a team of scientists from Romania and Turkey say they've found a simple and effective method to turn printed circuit boards from discarded IT kit into material suitable as fuel or for industrial use.

The researchers note that the plastic portion of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is particularly tricky to recycle because it contains additives, heavy metals, and extremely toxic flame retardants. (You don't want too much polybrominated diphenyl ethers in your diet if you cherish your liver and brain.)

In their paper "Feedstock Recycling from the Printed Circuit Boards of Used Computers," the scientists describe using a process of heat and chemical decomposition to destroy or remove almost all of the hazardous toxic compounds. A copy of the paper can be found here. (PDF warning.)

The process isn't exactly light reading — but when it's done, what's left of the printed circuit board is pyrolysis oil (or bio-oil), which can be refined in a similar fashion as crude petroleum for fuel or can be used by industries to make other useful chemicals.

Indeed now more than ever, is there anything adding more RAM can't do?
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AMD rejiggers management; Forms central engineering group

AMD on Monday named a new head of its computing solutions group and created a central engineering unit to improve execution at the chipmaker.

Among the moving parts:

• Randy Allen was promoted to lead the computing solutions group at AMD, which focuses on the company’s consumer and commercial processors. Allen had been responsible for AMD’s server and workstation business and had been in charge of microprocessor engineering. He replaces Mario Rivas, who was responsible for the Barcelona launch (see Tom Krazit’s take).
• Chekib Akrout joins AMD from Freescale to help lead a new central engineering unit. Akrout was in charge of design technology at Freescale and had developed chips for IBM. Jeff VerHeul, corporate vice president of design engineering, will be co-leader of the group along with Akrout.
• Allen Sockwell becomes chief talent officer replacing Michel Cadieux.

According to AMD chief operating officer Dirk Meyer, the moves are designed to “enhance our execution” and focus the company.

AMD to hire TSMC to fab 'Fusion' CPUs?

AMD is said to be planning to add chip foundry TSMC's name to its (short) list of processor production partners later this year. TSMC's alleged role: to fab AMD's upcoming 'Fusion' CPU.

So say unnamed industry sources cited by DigiTimes, and the notion isn't without merit or precedent.

AMD already uses Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor to produce processors. Chartered was signed up in November 2004, but it was almost two years - July 2006 - before AMD said the deal was yielding it revenues. The deal centred on 90nm chips, and in October 2006 it was claimed Charted had already been certified to punch out 65nm Athlons and Opterons.

The moles suggest TSMC will come on stream in the second half of the year. It's not clear whether that's the point at which the partnership will be announced, or that the foundry will begin production. We'd suggest the former, given the sources' claim that TSMC has begun testing an silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process - a key element of AMD CPU construction, incidentally.

Testing the process, fine-tuning it and winning AMD approval is likely to take some time, so if TSMC is gearing up to fab AMD64 parts, it won't be doing so in volume until 2009 at the earliest.

That's when Fusion is scheduled to debut. Fusion is AMD's modular architecture for multi-core processors, where CPU cores can be swapped out at the design stage for specialist processing units like GPUs and TCP/IP packet handlers. This, it believes, will allow it to build mix'n'match CPUs, allowing it to target different applications with the same core technology, more efficiently and thus more cheaply.

Of late, AMD has refused to discuss its manufacturing strategy, CEO Hector Ruiz saying only that the company's plans are "bold".
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AMD to stockholders: Everything will be all right

During its annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas this morning, AMD CEO Hector Ruiz attempted to reassure shareholders that his company is on the right track. Ruiz opened by stressing how disappointed he is with last year's financial results, but he quickly went on to paint a more optimistic picture of AMD's future:

In looking back, 2007 was a difficult year of transition for AMD. And I speak for every AMD employee when I say that I could not be more disappointed with our financial results. The Barcelona processor delay really hurt. But that is behind us. As a matter of fact, we've learned some lessons very important to us. In our materially cyclical industry, we have learned to anticipate and prepare for the inevitable downturn. And that's exactly what we did. We have a healthy cash balance sheet approaching $2 billion, and we have some financial cushioning in place if the macro-economic environment continues to disappoint, particularly in North America.

Ruiz reiterated that AMD is on track to become operationally profitable again in the second half of the year, and he called 2008 "a year of opportunity." He also explained that the company is taking steps to avoid a repeat of the past few quarters:

While our short-term goal is to achieve operational profitability in the second half of this year, our long-term goal is to achieve consistent profitability in good times and bad times. To that end, we are re-architecting the business so that our financial success is not invariably dependent on continuous component performance and leadership.

In order to keep AMD's head above the water, Ruiz said, "[we will be] reducing our break-even point by several hundred million dollars so that we will be profitable on our current revenue stream." In other words, if the previously announced job cuts and restructuring work out, AMD may not need to double its market share to be profitable again.

Speaking of restructuring, Ruiz also had a little more to say about AMD's long-awaited "asset smart" strategy. As part of the strategy, Ruiz said, AMD will "deploy [its] manufacturing assets to most cost-effectively stay at the leading edge and deliver customer value." While vague, the statement further hints that AMD might spin off its manufacturing business as a separate entity.

Did Ruiz's promises successfully convince stockholders? That's hard to say: the only question after his monologue came from an elderly Austin resident, who talked for several minutes in a slow, baritone drawl about golf tournaments.

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Intel Steals AMD's Supercomputer Shopper

Cray and Intel announced today that they have established an R&D deal for research on next generation supercomputers. Cray Inc is one of the best supercomputer and high-performance computing manufacturer and mainly has been using AMD processors in its machines. Cray and Intel will be researching on the use of Larabee accelerators in supercomputers.

Larabee is Intel's next-generation GPGPU initiative, which is the cunning plan to use graphic cards to do other computing tasks than just showing graphics. GPU are known to have high-floating point processing capabilities and the industry has decided its time to use it for some math. AMD's ATI acquisition was on similar grounds and AMD today manufactures AMD Stream Processors that do the same thing. Nvidia with its CUDA is also doing a same thing.

AMD must be pretty sad that it hasn't been able to pull something similar with its Stream Processors. AMD Opteron has been pretty popular among supercomputer manufacturers due to scalability brought through HyperTransport architecture. Cray shares seem to have risen due to some excitement with AMD's chip availability, but I suspect its more to do with the Intel partnership.

Stream Processing are going to be the future of high-performance computing. Even on desktops, it'll be either be processors doing GPU work or GPU doing processors work sometime in the future.