Chip

spending time with his nephews, Cole and Jud Cummings of St. Petersburg, Florida, and Rob Des Jardins, of Buffalo, New York, either in person or through Facebook where Chip added "friends" by the minute. Chip enjoyed spending time every summer at Seneca Lake with Di's family including her nieces, Kira and Abbie, and nephews, Charlie and Matthew. Chip had a zest for life that he loved sharing with his family and friends. He had a contagious smile and sense of humor that lightened the hearts of all those who knew him. He lived life to the fullest.

The heavyweights of the personal-computer industry are prepared once again to slug it out in Las Vegas where the annual Comdex/Fall trade show opens today.The tone for this year's extravaganza was set earlier this month, when a man in a powered parachute sailed down into the Las Vegas boxing ring where Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe were fighting for the heavyweight title.If there is a similar disruption this week, it will be the arrival of the PowerPC chip. The chip is a new microprocessor forged by the alliance of IBM, Apple Computer and Motorola.

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. -- Corey Pavin stunned his old friend and golfing foe, Mark O'Meara, with a 40-foot chip-in for birdie on the first playoff yesterday to win the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic."

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A new era in portable computing begins tomorrow, with dozens of players taking advantage of an innovative new processor to target one of the fastest-growing segments of the personal computer market.Intel's brand new "Tillamook" portable processor is a 200- or 233-MHz Pentium with MMX chip, the first Intel chip to be built with a so-called "0.25 micron" process.This process allows the production of smaller chips that use less power and generate less heat, making them particularly suitable for use in portables.

DALLAS -- The playing field is about to shrink inside the personal computer.In a few weeks, analysts expect, Texas Instruments Inc. will announce and set firm dates for the delivery of its first general-purpose microprocessors for standard personal computers.That, they say, will be the tip of Texas Instruments' plans to commercially introduce a new type of densely packed electronic circuit that informally is called a "mother chip."In a single microchip, TI will try to combine all the operations currently performed on a variety of general- and special-purpose microprocessors found inside computers.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Saying it has experienced a "virtual stampede of customers," Advanced Micro Devices Inc. reported yesterday that it had captured more than 30 percent of the market for the 386 microprocessor in the fourth quarter of 1991, leading to record quarterly revenues and its highest profit margins since 1984.The semiconductor company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said it had sold more than $145 million in 386 processors, many more than under the company's most optimistic projections.

Here we go again. Prices for computer memory chips have doubled in the past month, touching off a panic among computer makers and raising the possibility that computer prices will rise -- or at least stop falling for a while.Sharp price swings are nothing new to the memory chip business, perhaps the most volatile of computer component industries. Prices more than quadrupled in the late 1980s and then reversed direction to become cheaper than ever in the early 1990s."We're back in those wild times," said Mike Frost, chief executive of Tech Works, one of the leading vendors of dynamic random access memory chips.

WASHINGTON -- Trade relations between the United States and Japan took a turn for the worse yesterday as the two countries announced another drop in the foreign share of Japan's computer chip market, the leading barometer of trans-Pacific trade.In response, the United States ordered emergency talks with Japan, a step that could eventually lead to trade sanctions.The Clinton administration faces a diplomatic problem in the emergency talks, which will begin in mid-January. President Clinton is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa on Feb. 11, and while the United States and Japan agreed last summer in Tokyo to reach several new trade pacts by then, little progress has been made.

On more than a few occasions, my mother wondered what I was doing with her car when I was a teen-ager. I'll bet she would have liked to have had the DriveRight CarChip ($179 for 300 hours of recording ability; a basic model has 75-hour recording capability for $139). This is one of those technological wonders that provides all kind of information on what a car is doing. The CarChip, from Davis Instruments, basically reads data from your car - everything from diagnostic trouble codes to driver performance - once plugged into your car's On-Board-Diagnostics (OBD)

The Intel Corp., which makes the microprocessors that are the core of tens of millions of PC-compatible personal computers, has delayed its introduction of a next-generation microprocessor until next year. The chip, code-named the P5, is intended to be the successor to Intel's popular i386 and i486 processors.Intel softened the disappointing news last week by introducing the fastest version yet of its i486 chip. The new i486 DX2-66 chip uses Intel's so-called clock-doubling technology to achieve speeds of 66 megahertz, or 66 million cycles a second.