Latest news with #Pentium
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
TN floats tender for mid-spec laptops to give students free
Chennai: The state govt has floated an international tender to procure 10 lakh laptops to distribute free to students. The govt had earlier announced that 20 lakh laptops will be provided to college students over two years. Following a recent meeting with deputy chief minister Udhayanidhi Stalin, the Electronic Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) floated tenders on Friday to procure 10 lakh mid-spec laptops in the first phase. Officials said each laptop will be procured at a cost of about 20,000, with 2,000 crore in this budget and equal funding expected in the next budget. The laptops specified generally cost between 30,000 and 35,000 in the market. Officials with ELCOT said the contractor must provide at least one lakh laptops for the tenders to be valid. The specifications mandate firms to supply laptops with any processor equal to or above Intel Core I3 or AMD Ryzen, with a minimum RAM of eight gigabytes. The laptops shall be 14 inches or 15.6 inches, and they must have at least one USB C type port (for fast file transfers). "In the past, the govt provided the most basic version of Pentium laptops with only dual-core processors and 2GB RAM. The ones given now are the latest generation four-core processors with eight GB RAM. "This will help students edit videos and also play 4K videos on the laptop without issues. We are giving higher RAM to ensure it stays fast for many years," said the official. The laptops will also have modern and faster solid-state drive hard drives and a 720p HD video camera. The students will also get a free one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365, including Word, Excel, and Teams. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Brother's Day wishes , messages and quotes !
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
2 household-name stocks I'm avoiding in my Stocks and Shares ISA right now
Just because a company is well-known doesn't mean investors should automatically consider adding its shares to an ISA portfolio. In fact, I see a couple of such stocks I'm avoiding today. First up is Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), the chip company that will be familiar to most. Indeed, as I type this, there is an Intel sticker on the laptop telling me there's Pentium processor inside. Down nearly 70% over five years though, the stock's struggled for eons. However, Intel was once the world's undisputed chip titan before badly losing its way. There are a few reasons why, but basically it took its eye off the ball and executed poorly. For example, it missed the biggest consumer tech wave of the century — smartphones — and later lost Apple as a customer for Macs (in 2020). Then it failed to lead in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, losing out spectacularly to Nvidia. Under the previous CEO, Intel attempted to enter the third-party chip manufacturing business to take on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). That also hasn't been a success, pushing the firm to a $2.8bn loss in 2023, its first annual loss in decades. In recent days, the firm sold a 51% stake in its Altera programmable chips unit for $4.46bn. Perhaps it can use this cash to pursue growth avenues and reinvigorate the business. However, it's worth noting that Intel paid just under $17bn for Altera in 2015. So it's selling a majority stake at a lower valuation. Given the long-standing record of poor innovation and capital allocation, I have no intention to invest. The name Match Group (NASDAQ: MTCH) might not be immediately familiar, but dating app Tinder probably is. The company owns this, as well as Hinge, Meetic (a leading dating service in Europe), and many niche apps. Over the past five years, Match stock has crashed 70%. This is largely because the company's number of paying users has fallen for several consecutive quarters, including on its flagship Tinder app. Having said that, the company's still profitable. This year, it's expected to generate earnings per share of about $2. That puts the stock on a low forward-looking price-to-earnings ratio of 14. That's the sort of multiple I'd expect to see from a FTSE 100 blue-chip, not a Nasdaq tech share! Meanwhile, there's a 2.6% dividend yield. So on this basis, it could be said that the stock offers decent value. The issue I have here though is that there seems to be a paradox at the heart of the business model. Most of Match's apps are purportedly there to help users find a partner. But once they do, they delete the app. So when the product works, it loses users, which is unlike most successful digital platforms (Netflix, YouTube, etc). And if it isn't effective, users burn out or become disillusioned (especially men, who make up the bulk of Match Group's paid subscriber base). In 2023, group revenue was $3.4bn. This year? It's forecast to be $3.4bn. I think the paradox I've just described is why the company has failed to scale like other tech platforms, despite owning nearly all of the most popular dating apps. Therefore, I continue to avoid the shares. The post 2 household-name stocks I'm avoiding in my Stocks and Shares ISA right now appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool Ben McPoland has positions in Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool UK has recommended Apple, Match Group, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025 Sign in to access your portfolio
WIRED
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Angelina Jolie Was Right About Computers
Incredibly, Angelina Jolie called it. The year was 1995. Picture Jolie, short of both hair and acting experience, as a teenage hacker in Hackers. Not a lot of people saw this movie. Even fewer appreciated its relevance. Hackers was 'grating,' Entertainment Weekly huffed at the time, for the way it embraced 'the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like WIRED.' Thirty years later, Entertainment Weekly no longer publishes a magazine, WIRED does, and Hackers ranks among the foundational documents of the digital age. The last time I saw the movie, it was being projected onto the wall of a cool-kids bar down the street from my house. But that's not the incredible thing. The incredible thing, again, is that Jolie called it. It. The future. Midway through Hackers, she's watching her crush (played by Jonny Lee Miller, whom she'd later marry in real life) type passionately on a next-gen laptop. 'Has a killer refresh rate,' Miller says, breathing fast. Jolie replies: 'P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.' Miller's really worked up now. Then Jolie leans forward and, in that come-closer register soon to make her world-famous, says this: 'RISC architecture is gonna change everything.' You have to believe me when I say, one more time, that this is incredible. And what's incredible is not just that the filmmakers knew what RISC architecture was. Or that Jolie pronounced it correctly ('risk'). Or even that Jolie's character was right. What's incredible is that she's still right—arguably even more right—today. Because RISC architecture is, somehow, changing everything again, here in the 21st century. Who makes what. Who controls the future. The very soul of technology. Everything. And nobody's talking about it. And that's probably because the vast majority of people everywhere, who use tech built on it every single day, still don't know what in the computer-geek hell a RISC architecture even is.
The National
29-01-2025
- Business
- The National
AI chips: The nuclear arms race of the 21st century, says Vinod Dham
Future Technology Countries are pushing ahead with AI, seeing it as crucial for strategic dominance The global race for dominance in artificial intelligence is drawing parallels to the nuclear arms race of the 20th century, says Vinod Dham, founder of IndoUS Venture Partners and a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. Speaking on the sidelines of the Raisina Middle East, Mr Dham compared the importance of AI chips to the "nuclear weapons of the 1940s and 1950s". 'If you give away the recipe for building a bomb to everybody, then there'll be chaos in the world,' adding that the US was pursuing an appropriate policy of working in partnership with 'trusted nations'. 'One thing that America has done that will make it very difficult for the rest of the world to replicate. There's some fundamental complex machinery needed to build these chips. And those machines are only being made by the US or companies it controls.' DeepSeek's advancements in AI-driven chip design. Some experts say these advances could disrupt the current dominance of US-based companies like Nvidia in the graphics processing unit market. It has also called into question investment strategies in the booming AI sector, especially as China-based DeepSeek was able to train its large language model with significantly less budget and in less time. But as much as the US would like to keep an advantage in the sector, that will not be possible, he says, as other nations are figuring AI out. In a wide ranging discussion, Mr Dham, who is sometimes referred to as the father of the Pentium chip because of his role in the development of Intel's microprocessor, said the coronavirus pandemic five years ago acted as a springboard for the current AI-driven era. 'During the pandemic, everything shut down, and people had to stay home. Suddenly, there was a need for more computers. A huge demand and peak, which nobody had anticipated. It looked like a shortage, but it was really a shortage because demand went up and not because there was some issue with the supply chain. 'Subsequently, after the pandemic, it became apparent that AI would become crucial for strategic military use, warfare and weaponry. 'That made countries like the US, which is really at the leading edge, realise that maybe we should not have this technology freely given to everybody in the world, restricting those supplies to the so-called trusted nations that they felt it was okay to give it to. And that's really where we are today. Mr Dham also reflected on the foundation story of Pentium chips and how pricing and technology has changed. 'When we were building Pentium, these chips were costing us maybe a couple of hundred dollars, $100, $50 to make. We were selling them for $200, $300, $400. The GPUs today, which are a very different type of a processor, cost $40,000 for just one set of chips. 'They are so expensive that an average person cannot buy them and use them at home. It's a different ballgame than what we played during our time.'
