Los Angeles

Gasoline price decrease ends

Gas prices nudged upward about half a penny in the last two weeks after dropping more than 20 cents since May 21, but another price spike is not expected due to a decline in crude oil prices, an industry analyst said Sunday.

The combined national average for all grades of gasoline was $1.91, said Trilby Lundberg, who publishes the semimonthly Lundberg Survey. The price was up from $1.90 on Aug. 13.

The survey, taken Friday, polls about 7,000 gas stations across the United States.

Lundberg said the slight upsurge came from an increase in crude oil, which peaked Aug. 19 at $48.70 before falling to $43.18.

Self-serve regular, the biggest seller, was $1.88. Mid-grade national average was $1.97 and the U.S. average of premium was $2.07.

California

Intel packs more power onto single memory chip

Intel Corp. announced today it had created a memory chip using transistors that are considerably smaller than those powering today’s state-of-the-art chips, allowing for more memory and greater performance.

As a result of their smaller size, more of the tiny switches can be packed into a single piece of silicon without having to increase the size of the chip. Products built with the new technology are on track for delivery in 2005, Intel said.

The gate, or switching mechanism, of each transistor on the new chip is about 30 percent smaller than those in use today, Intel said. About 100 of them could fit inside a human red blood cell.

If the devices are released by 2005, as planned, it would keep with a famous forecast by Intel founder Gordon Moore. In the late 1960s, he predicted the number of transistors on a chip would roughly double every two years. “Moore’s Law,” as the prediction, is known, has held true since then.