What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘chip’?  If you love eating, then you might say potato chips.  If you’re a betting man, then you might think I’m talking about poker chips.  But since we’re a tech blog, I’m actually referring to the little chips that make your smartphones, tablets, computers, laptops or any other computer gadgets, work.  So let’s see what chip makers are up to these days as they dictate how powerful our future gadgets are going to be.

Samsung

The South Korean company is going to invest some $4 billion in their chip-making factory in Austin to put logic chip production into overdrive to meet the high demands.  The funds will be used to upgrade their production line that mainly manufactures processors for advanced mobile applications with mass production.  Production of said chips will begin during the second half of 2013.  The new investment brings their total to $13 billion since Samsung Austin Semiconductor started operations in 1996.

Intel

The  Stanford School of Medicine and Intel have teamed up and developed a  silicon-based peptide chip which they claim could form the basis of a real-time, point-of-care diagnostic platform.  Dubbed the Intel array, the diagnostics chip aims to identify proteins associated with severe forms of systemic lupus erthyematosus (SLE).  But they claim that the chip can also be used for epitope mapping, characterizing protein-protein interactions, as well as for personalized POC diagnostics.

ARM

ARM recently introduced the successors to their popular Mali-T600 graphics processors: the Mali-T678, Mali-T628 and Mali-T624.  ARM aims to equip 2013 high-end smartphones with their new line of graphics chips, but they’re also hoping to break into the smart TV market as well.  ARM’s Steve Steele said that HD recording and manipulating images on mobile devices would be greatly enhanced with their new graphic chips.  They’re also betting on more realistic gaming on mobile devices.  But the new line of chips is not only about improving graphics on mobile devices, it’s also about improving everything inside that makes your devices run, including audio quality or speech recognition.

AMD

Advanced Micro Devices welcomed renowned chip designer Jim Keller back into the fold after doing some time at Apple.  Keller was responsible for the processors in iPhones and iPads but his contributions at AMD are much greater.  He was crucial to the development of both the HyperTransport specification and the x86-64 processor instruction set used in AMD’s groundbreaking Athlon 64 and Opteron 64 processors released in 2003.  Keller goes back to AMD holding the prestigious title of corporate vice president and chief architect of microprocessor cores.