Nokia plans to launch an ARM-based netbook that relies on the Google-pioneered Android mobile operating system in 2010, writes Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir in a research note issued this morning. In the same note, he predicts that the total number of netbooks sold worldwide will reach 25 million in 2009 vs. 10 […]
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The demand for ubiquitous web access and a scarcity of bandwidth on wireless networks are driving the technology world to try to figure out how to build the equivalent of a bandwidth cloud composed of a variety of available networks, from cellular to Wi-Fi and WiMAX. Various speakers at a Portable Computer and Communications Association […]
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Intel is expected to announce today that will sell its chips to Nokia for use in the Swedish handset maker’s mobile devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. The deal may be a coup for Intel’s low-power Atom chips, which it hopes to provide in small computers, embedded devices and eventually, smartphones. Intel’s Anand Chandrasekher, […]
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Austin is among the places that people are flocking to in the recession, according to BusinessWeek. Other magazines have given Austin (and all of Texas) similar praise, mostly because it’s so darn cheap to live here. But I don’t want to lie to y’all — Austin may not be the best place to build […]
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Sony Walkman
Sony CEO Howard Stringer reaffirmed the consumer electronics giant’s decision to focus on networked gadgets while discussing its restructuring at a shareholders’ meeting held today, according to Reuters. Stringer said the company would lay off 16,000 workers and close eight of its 57 manufacturing sites as part of an attempt to reduce spending by […]
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Intel has invested $43 million into Japanese WiMAX provider UQ Communications, as the chip giant continues its efforts to boost the mobile wireless broadband technology around the world. Compared with other forms of wireless broadband, such as the current 3G networks and coming Long Term Evolution networks provided by the cell carriers, WiMAX is […]

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The Semiconductor Association has lowered its chip forecast for the year, saying it now expects the sale of semiconductors to fall by 21 percent from 2008 to 2009. The revised numbers shave $53 billion off the previous 2009 forecast, issued by the SIA in November, when it predicted sales would fall by 5.6 percent. […]

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Intel today said it plans to acquire Wind River Systems for $884 million — a deal that gives the world’s largest chipmaker control of development software and operating systems for devices that range from cell phones to routers. Intel last year made a big to-do about getting into the embedded market that supplies chips for […]

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Wireless networking gets all the love in today’s mobile world, but inside the home, wires will still play a key role in delivering entertainment and other content. Your set-top box may sport an Ethernet port, but it still connects to the wall via coaxial cable. Wires are a secure, fast, cheap and existing network inside […]

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Even as times get tough for pioneering startups building semiconductors and computing equipment, the chip industry needs to maintain its biodiversity, says Matt Reilly, a co-founder of the recently shuttered SiCortex. I wrote yesterday about the green supercomputing company selling its assets, and Reilly left an excellent comment taking me to task for calling the […]

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Qualcomm isn’t going to cede the mobile computing market to Intel and its success with netbooks, the CDMA powerhouse made clear today while laying out its vision of mobile computing. The vision consists of what Qualcomm is calling a smartbook. But combining the words smartphone and netbook together may be the only new thing Qualcomm […]

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Intel believes the cannibalization of notebooks by netbooks to be at around 20 percent, Reuters reported today. Christian Morales, the European sales chief for Intel, estimated that netbooks currently comprise about 16 percent of worldwide notebook sales, though he put that figure slightly higher for western Europe, and said it could be as high as […]

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NebuAd, the company that planned to enable Internet Service Providers to offer behavioral advertising based on a person’s web surfing history, has shut its doors, according to MediaPost, which cites court documents. The controversial service, which is akin to Phorm in the UK, had conducted advertising trials with several U.S. ISP including Cable One and […]

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Next week Dell plans to announce a server based on the Nano chip from VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese x86 vendor known for its low-power chips for netbooks and other portable computers, according to the New York Times. Putting VIA chips in servers reduces both the cost and power consumption of servers — something important for […]

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Intel this week announced a $12 million investment into a visual computing research program focused on using three-dimensional imaging for entertainment, data analysis, medical imaging and scientific research. The Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, and will receive the $12 million over the next five years. The investment is […]

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A group of big-name technology companies including Intel, Dell, Broadcom and Marvell have joined together to promote a new wireless standard that could deliver between 1 gigabit per second to 6 Gbps inside the home. Chipmaking startup Wilocity is also part of the effort.
The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance plans to use the 60 GHz spectrum, […]

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Smartphones are becoming more like PCs in many ways, especially if you think of netbooks or mobile Internet devices as cheap computers. The underlying hardware is becoming more similar, connectivity is crucial, and the tasks people use them for are converging. But a key difference between a computer and a phone  remains: the operating system.
Software […]

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Nvidia today unveiled a system for high-performance computing that uses four graphics processors to provide 1 teraflop of computing power, and multiple units can be easily combined to form a GPU-based computing cluster. The system competes with CPU-based clusters that employ Intel or AMD chips, but offers faster performance on some tasks while using less […]

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A month after Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System, it has finally released pricing, processing power and memory details. The bottom line is this: the performance of the servers and overall system seem to be in line with competing products from HP and IBM built on Intel’s latest Xeon 5500 chips, but Cisco’s offerings have […]

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Nokia reported financial results for the first quarter today and, despite posting a 90 percent drop in profits, gave investors something to celebrate. The world’s largest cell phone maker said the handset market hit bottom in the first quarter and sales for the rest of the year would be off by about 10 percent from […]

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As computing becomes cheaper, smaller and more mobile, our gadgets are morphing from desktops into notebooks and from netbooks into smartphones. But rather than focus on how small or cheap these devices can become, forward-thinking companies should focus on how their constant connection to the Internet changes what they can do with a pile of chips, […]

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Intel made a series of announcements last night that push its low-power Atom processor closer to the smartphone side of the mobile computing spectrum. It announced more details of its Moorestown platform aimed at mobile Internet devices. The platform is coming in 2010 and includes an Atom processor that consumes 10x less power when idle; […]

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Fusion-io said today it has raised $47.5 million in second round funding led by Lightspeed Venture, and formally announced David Bradford as CEO. The enterprise Flash drive startup also saw Series A investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures, return for this round of funding. The company is one of several trying […]

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Intel released its proxy today, and in it was some blatant self-promotion that caught my eye. The chipmaker said that by making its proxy materials available online for the past two years, it’s saved some $4.5 million in printing and postage costs and avoided generating the equivalent of 8 million pounds of carbon dioxide and […]

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Google late Monday unveiled Google Ventures, a venture fund that seeks to combine the search giant’s technical expertise with strategies pioneered by top-tier venture firms. By looking to invest in what it called “a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care,” Google is either smartly casting its net […]

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Intel today unveiled its latest and greatest Nehalem chip for servers (now known as the Xeon 5500 series), setting off a round of announcements and articles comparing technical specifications across server vendors. And at 2.93 GHz (with certain tweaks it can get up to 3.33 Ghz), indeed, the chip is screamingly fast. Which is all […]

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Rackable announced today an update to its CloudRack servers. The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent. Since these beasts can […]

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Today Cisco announced its much awaited data center play with what it calls its Unified Computing System. Om does a great job explaining why the networking giant is moving into the data center as the demands of digital data tax the current three-part IT infrastructure of servers, networks and storage.
The current infrastructure is showing its […]

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Advanced Micro Devices said in a securities filing today that Intel has threatened its ability to make x86 chips, which includes AMD’s PC and server CPUs but not its ATI graphics chips. AMD licenses the right to the x86 architecture from Intel under a cross licensing agreement, that is a well kept secret.
When AMD announced […]

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Heterogeneous computing, where hardware vendors mix a variety of processors (graphics processors, CPUs, embedded chips or DSPs) on a server to increase energy efficiency and processing speed, will become a reality in the data center in the next decade, says an IBM executive. Such arrangements increase complexity and can cause headaches for developers and customers, […]

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The way we use computers is changing, as device makers and users emphasize mobility and incredible graphics. I’ve argued that these trends signal the end of x86 computing, but what I’ve ignored is Intel’s drive to bring its brand of x86 computing to these markets, which are traditionally based on other instruction sets. If it […]

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Our mobile phones are getting smarter, even as our laptops are getting dumber. Instead of packing fast processors into a notebook, PC makers are stripping them down into netbooks and other devices they can sell for less. Meanwhile, our mobile phones are looking more like mini computers with multicore processors, larger screens and improved graphics. […]

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As semiconductors try to get faster without breaking the laws of physics (not that researchers aren’t trying that, too) multicore processors have become all the rage. Quad-core chips are commonplace in servers nowadays, and six-core chips have been launched this year. But after a certain point adding more processor cores doesn’t improve performance for certain […]

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Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to build a software framework that would enable researchers to run […]

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As technology companies try to define the slew of devices that are smaller than a laptop or bigger than a smartphone, the mobile Internet device is one of the most vague. Basics such as screen size, whether or not it will have voice and other items are still up for debate. Today I visited Texas […]

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Intel’s low-power Atom processor for mobile devices didn’t just get its name because it’s small, but because Intel wanted it to be the building block for the Internet of Things. In a conference call today, Intel announced four new variations on the Atom processor — including a 1.33 GHz chip and the ability to run […]

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Psion took aim at Intel last week for the alleged theft of its netbook trademark and asked for three times the value of any profits earned from the use of the trademark, which would equate to about$1.2 billion in damages. Our colleagues over at jkOnTheRun have more, but the high-octane counter suit (which disputes everything […]

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When Intel announced its low-power Silverthorne chip in 2007 aimed at the mobile computing market, the folks at Centaur Technology, who had been designing low-power x86 chips for mobiles under Taiwanese parent company VIA Technologies, were vindicated. They also suddenly faced direct competition from the giant in the industry.
“Intel has made this a legitimate marketplace […]

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Intel is using an indirect, green-tinged strategy to sell more chips these days, attempting to convince governments that are spending billions in stimulus funds to include provisions for using more computing tools in designing infrastructure projects. According to Intel’s chief sales and marketing officer, Sean Maloney, if the heavy industries — construction, manufacturing and transportation […]

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Gartner said today it expects chip sales to drop by 24 percent in 2009 — an unwelcome revision to its previous forecast of a 16 percent drop issued in December. Back in November, when the sky started falling, it had expected (hoped for?) a slim 1 percent growth rate for 2009. Now, the research firm […]

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Microsoft today is expected to announce a research and development program called Cloud Computing Futures that aims to look at how the data centers underlying cloud computing can operate as efficiently as possible. The idea behind this year-old effort that will emerge from stealth mode at Microsoft’s TechFest event in Redmond, Wash., today is to […]

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Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips. It’s one of a handful of integration deals Broadcom has inked with software vendors to port their content to its chips. As broadband reaches more devices, deals between chipmakers and software vendors […]

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You know how you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover? Well, when it comes to smartphones and netbooks, a semiconductor research firm is predicting that in fact the cover — or rather, the device casing — may soon be one of the only ways to tell the two apart. Portelligent has analyzed […]

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The shift to mobile computing emphasizes the split between two distinct markets for the processor vendors that make the brains of computers. There’s the consumer-facing devices, which include everything from smartphone to laptops, and the server side, which offers content to consumer devices through the cloud.
That split is a reaction to how people use their […]

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Behind popular web services such as Facebook, Google and Amazon’s AWS are racks and racks of computers serving up millions of pages or providing raw computing power. The use of thousands of servers to deliver one application or act as a pool of computing resources has changed the way that chipmakers and computer vendors are […]

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Intel on Monday night filed suit to stop graphics chipmaker Nvidia from tying its graphics chips to certain future Intel CPUs. The suit filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery alleges that Nvidia doesn’t have the right to integrate a Nvida GPU with future Intel processors, such as the high-end Core i7 chip code-named Nehalem, […]

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Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, beat earnings and sales expectations for the fourth quarter, but still managed to disappoint when it came to the number of new subscribers for television and broadband services.
Comcast this morning reported earnings of $412 million on sales of $8.77 billion for the fourth quarter. However, like its rival Time […]

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Texas Instruments is expected to this week release details of its next-generation application processor, the OMAP 4 family of chips, which has made my love for Nvidia’s APX25000 processor grow cold. I’m faithless when a chipmaker shows me the prospect of 1080p video playback, 10 times the web surfing speed, a 20 megapixel camera and […]

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After success with its low-power Atom processor in netbooks, Intel is embracing the mobile Internet device, with the chip giant expected to announce at this year’s Mobile World Congress a planned MID with LG Electronics that will include 3G voice capabilities. The MID will run on Intel’s Moorestown chipsets, and debut next year. Also at […]

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Next week, while most Americans are lounging about in honor of President’s Day, the people responsible for your mobile phones, netbooks and cellular networks will converge on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show. Check back on Monday for clues as to what type of devices you’ll be toting in your pockets and purses […]

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