Despite Intel readying low-power x86 processors for mobile devices, Intel today confirmed x86 on the iPhone will not come to fruition any time soon. Instead, it appears Apple will instead tap the design resources of its recent P.A. Semi acquisition.
Intel's PC processors may own the desktop. But the semiconductor giant's x86, or Intel Architecture design, is far from the most ubiquitous. Booming demand for mobile phones has made variations on U.K.-based ARM Holdings' design far more ubiquitous. Intel hopes to challenge that by offering a scaled-down version of the processor powering your PC for smaller devices. Intel's pitch for why device makers should use its chips: Their machines will be able to take advantage of much of the software built for everything from notebooks to desktop workstations and servers.
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excuzzzeme
Due to a bizarre new law passed in Taxes, computer repair technicians reportedly will soon be required to obtain private investigator licensing to continue their trade.
In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.
The AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition represents the company's new flagship consumer processor, but it also represents a potentially serious problem: reliable frequency scaling. To be painfully exact, the new chip is only 100MHz faster than the previous 9850 model. It is becoming increasingly doubtful AMD will further ramp Phenom core operating frequencies until the 45-nanometer "Deneb" and "Shanghai" cores reach full production status later this year.
The nominal voltage on the Phenom X4 9950 is listed as 1.05-1.30 Volts, which is interesting as the Phenom X4 9850 was 1.2-1.3 Volts. Taking a look at CPU-Z 1.46 we can see the processor is running at a core voltage of 1.296 Volts, which is right where the nominal voltage should be. The chip has a Max TDP of 140W and has official support for a 2.0GHz memory controller and HT 3.0 frequency with Dual Dynamic Power Management technology. At 140W, a robust platform will be needed for this CPU as budget boards won't meet the power requirements and will fail over time. For this reason AMD has a recommended motherboard page that they urge consumers look at when building a system around one of these parts.
Advanced Micro Devices has declined a renewal of fabrication agreements with Semindia following a three-year manufacturing agreement. The India-based chip manufacturer claims other potential customers are inline for negotiations, but the current downtown in the semiconductor industry has forced many corporations into a "wait-and-watch" scenario for new chip production contracts.
Bob Kondamoori, MD of Sandalwood Partners, an investor in Semindia, told the Financial Chronical, many companies were "in a wait-and-watch mode because of the economic situation and downturn in semiconductor industry. Many of them are themselves looking to sell their fabs."
Intel today officially inaugurated the opening of Fab 28, a 45-nanometer semiconductor fabrication facility that is the latest in a series of important investments for the company's increasingly valued Israeli operations.
Fab 28 is Intel's seventh 300mm wafer factory and its third factory to produce 45nm chips. It is, however, the firm’s first 45nm fab outside the US. Spanning a whopping 283 dunams (283000 metres squared) in total and with 20,000 square metres of clean room space, fab 28 certainly puts Israel on the fab map in a big way. Fassberg acknowledged, “this is a huge project on the scale never before seen in this country. We have to prove that the trust invested in us by Intel worldwide was justified.”
Gainward has traditionally been an exclusive partner for nVidia graphics accelerator, but industry sources are suggesting the popular brand is now working with AMD to launch an ATI Radeon HD product line in the near future.
Gainward's decision to launch ATI Radeon HD products indicates that the market for AMD graphics chips is good and more traditionally Nvidia only vendors may follow suit, market watchers commented. Whether Nvidia decides to try and woo partners back with reduced pricing or other incentives bears further observation, the watchers noted.
While Matrox left the enthusiast scene years ago, the Canadian manufacturer continues to churn out professional video cards for niche markets. With the company's graphics accelerator division somehow still staying afloat, it appears somebody, somewhere is still buying Matrox video cards for whatever reason - solid driver support seems to be the argument of the day. Regardless of the reason, Matrox appears to have the solution if you need a $599 video card with "QuadHead GPU" technology for driving up to four displays with a single-slot, low-profile card.
Let’s recap. Matrox is offering a low-profile graphics card will set you back about $600. Seeing that price tag, we had to remind ourselves that, for the same money, you can get two ATI Radeon 4870 512 MB graphics cards, and drive four 2560x1600 monitors. Or you can buy three 4850 512 MB, and drive six 2560x1600 monitors.
Solid state hard drives using flash memory modules are oftentimes touted as offering potential power saving benefits due to having no moving parts, but a recent product comparison review published by Tom's Hardware has debunked the popular assertion.
No, our results are definitely correct. We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” notebook hard drive.
With Windows XP officially being canned yesterday for most OEM configurations, Dell is instead rolling out a Windows Vista Bonus promotion for channel partners. The bonus? A preinstalled copy of Windows XP operating under a valid Vista product license for select systems.
Dell's stance of not just offering Windows XP directly but actively telling its huge ecosystem of resellers how they, too, can game Microsoft's system and continue selling Windows XP demonstrates a significant shift in the OEM's relationship with Microsoft. With chief software architect Bill Gates' departure fresh in the air, it should be remembered how, under Gates' tenure last decade as chief executive, Microsoft exploited its position as supplier of a popular PC operating system to play hardball with PC OEMs on licensing Windows.
Facing increasing competition from the Apple iPhone and the upcoming Google Andriod platform, Nokia is taking control of Symbian, the UK-based company responsible for the world's most popular smartphone platform. Nokia intends to repackage the source code for the Symbian operating system and S60 user interface under the Symbian Foundation, a newly formed non-profit organization.
The founding members of the Symbian Foundation are: Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone. Nokia is paying €264m ($411m) to buy the 52 per cent of Symbian it does not own. The transaction will dilute its earnings in 2009, but become accretive in 2011.
Virgin Mobile USA is moving to acquire Helio's subscriber base in a move that more or less equals a bail out for the "virtual" telecom provider. With a mere 200,000 or so subscribers, Helio is not exactly an industry heavyweight, so it is not surprising to learn existing Helio subscribers will simply be rolled into the existing Virgin brand. Still, one particularly interesting question remains. With Virgin already having about five million subscribers, along with its own market share concerns, why are Virgin executives even throwing a lifeline to such an underperforming company as Helio?
The biggest problems, outlined by Piecyk: Virgin Mobile is having a hard enough time eking out a profit in its existing business of selling cheap, pre-paid phone service, which is only going to get more competitive. (Virgin made $4.2 million on $1.2 billion of revenue last year.) And even once Helio is worked into Virgin's distribution network, it doesn't add much.
Starbucks once had a grand vision of promoting a viable music distribution business through its numerous retail locations, but industry insiders expect the coffee house will be dumping the bulk of its albums and iTunes gift cards by September.
The move shouldn't be a huge shock: Starbucks has been rethinking its forays into entertainment this year while it tries to restart growth in its core business. And its efforts to sell music in particular have come under heavy scrutiny: In March, a scathing New York Times article reported that the chain was selling just two CDs per store per day. A month later, Ken Lombard, the head of the chain's entertainment business, was bounced out, and the company handed management of its Hear Music label, which had just started releasing its own CDs, over to Concord Music Group.
For a company built on a background of expensive products, it is interesting to note Apple software engineers are apparently earning lower wages on average than similar positions held at Microsoft, Google, and even Yahoo!.
Yahoo and Microsoft engineers get about the same salaries, but smaller bonuses, leaving their take-home pay at an average of $105,642 and $105,375, respectively. Apple software engineers make only about $89,000, on average, but they get to create some of the most loved products on Earth.
Breaking through years of tension, Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project have reached an agreement to offer Windows XP as an option for the OLPC initiative. Apparently the Redmond-based software giant is even willing to participate alongside the project's existing Linux advocates by potentially leveraging a dual-boot configuration.
It is the same basic Windows XP implementation that runs on the Intel Class Mate, ASUS eeePC, and other products in this emerging class of ultra low cost laptop PCs. As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.
Citing continued technical issues with attempting to deploy Windows Vista, General Motors is considering a future migration to the next-generation Windows 7 platform instead.
Vista taxes all but the most modern PCs with hefty processing and memory requirements. Many of GM's PCs can't even run the system. "By the time we'd replace them, Windows 7 might be ready anyway," Killeen says. Then there are compatibility problems with all the software that needs to run on Windows. GM's software vendors still haven't ensured all their programs will run on Vista trouble-free. So the company is sticking with Windows XP for now. Killeen figures GM could install Windows 7 in three or four years.
Along with shuffling around executives, Advanced Micro Devices is forming a Central Engineering group tasked with developing corporate roadmaps and coordinating plans with both externals customers and internal company units.
Changes have been long expected at AMD, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past year and a half while it struggled to get Barcelona, a quad-core server processor, out the door. As leader of the chip group, Rivas appears to be taking the fall for the Barcelona debacle. Earlier this year, Phil Hester also left AMD after serving as chief technology officer.
Faced with the resource bloat otherwise known as Windows Vista, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates suggests the next-generation Windows 7 operating system will deliver "lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone."
Many have therefore turned their hopes to Windows 7. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will not increase the minimum requirements as it did from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Considering that Microsoft hopes to get Windows 7 out the door faster than it did with Vista (which came out six years after XP, compared to the typical three) this is entirely possible, and Bill Gates has all but confirmed that Windows 7 will focus on performance improvements.
Research in Motion is gearing up the Blackberry Bold smartphone, also billed as the BlackBerry 9000, to compete with the upcoming 3G Apple iPhone model.
The Bold is RIM's first BlackBerry to support tri-band HSDPA (3G) networks, which complements its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. The half-VGA screen features 480x320 resolution, which is twice the resolution of the most recent BlackBerry Curve. The Bold, of course, continues with RIM's commitment to the "real" QWERTY keyboard along with a trackball located just under the screen. The built-in 2MP camera has video recording capabilities, built-in camera flash that is common on BlackBerry devices, and 5x digital zoom.
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Microsoft has somehow managed to move two million Zune portable media players, which barely puts even a scratch into the competing Apple iPod market share. At this point the Zune is more or less competing with offerings from Creative, SanDisk, and similar.
While Apple is being beaten up by pundits for only selling 52.7 million new iPods in the last year compared to the 48.4 million it sold over the year prior, those figures also exclude Apple’s "best iPod," the iPhone. Add those in and Apple sold 58.1 million units over the last four quarters, an increase of 20% over its own sales a year ago. That’s ten million new sales over its previous record, or ten times as many new sales as the Zune managed to find this year.
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