This week in gEEk: Solar stymied; AMD cheered; iPhone doesn't bite on Atom

Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN’s short review of the week’s happenings.

It’s a short week for those of us here in the United States celebrating Independence Day (woo hoo! Three-day weekend), so we’ll keep today’s “week in gEEk” entry brief.

Pat Gelsinger won’t be shooting off any fireworks this weekend. The Intel general manager is “disappointed” that Apple has decided to pass on using the company’s Atom processor in its iPhone, at least for now.

Unfortunately, that was the second piece of bad news for Intel this week. According to iSuppli research, while the company still has a tremendous MPU lead, it has lost market share to AMD. Ok, it was minimal, but hey, market share is market share.

AMD also got some praise from Lehman Brothers this week. The financial research company cautioned that Nvidia has faced some hard-core competition from AMD on the GPU front. Lehman said so while reporting on Nvidia’s fiscal Q2 update, which called for an approximate 20% sequential fall in revenue and noted a one-time charge up to $200 million on costs and expenses from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebooks. Despite, the holiday weekend, the Street was watching and sent the company’s stock, NVDA, down about 30% Thursday on Nvidia’s update.

On the upswing, NAND is expected to gain 35% in unit growth this year. According to Semico, 2008 revenues for the memory will increase 13%.

PC shipments are also expected to record some gains this year, around 10%, depending on what research you buy into. China-based PC OEM Lenovo this week introduced its first consumer desktop model, just as the Semiconductor Industry Association reminded that PCs remain a healthy source for IC sales.

Solar is a recognized healthly source for IC sales, too, as well as a credible means of alternative power. So leave it to the federal government to step in and rain on the parade. The fed this week placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land while it studies the environmental impact of both photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations. EDN PowerSource blogger Margery Conner estimates that the affected proposed projects would cover more than one million acres and have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

Speaking of power, read Margery’s EDN cover story on automotive electronics that seek to plug power leaks.  And before you gas up this weekend – surely to be gouged at the pump – take this gas guzzling quiz featured in EDN’s Brian’s Brain blog.

Have a great holiday, all.

–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News