Here come the Windows 8 device announcements: Acer’s first Windows 8 tablet, the Iconia W700, hits the market on Oct. 26 with a starting price of $799. That price includes a keyboard and unique case / cradle, giving hints on Windows 8 RT pricing. Read more »
After watching the mobile market pass it by, Intel is aggressively moving forward. Its newest chips for smartphones and tablets run longer on a single charge and the company now has the latest version of Google Android, known as Jelly Bean, running on those chips. Read more »
If today’s smartphone and tablets may impress you, just wait until the next generation. A whole new mobile chip architecture is about to enter the game and Samsung’s Exynos 5 is the first to play. No products use it yet, but here’s what you can expect. Read more »
Cloud computing is changing the world of microprocessor-chip design. Soon we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) and a group of new incumbents (Tilera and others) that offer fresh solutions to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tablets featured prominently in the connected consumer space, both as a product category and as a component of broader platform strategies by major OS providers Microsoft, Google and Apple. Meanwhile Facebook began laying the groundwork to add payment processing to its platform. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new ARM-based OpenStack cloud comes online this week, courtesy of HP, Calxeda and Canonical. The new “TryStack” facility gives developers who want to test out OpenStack clouds another flavor to try. The news comes out of the OSCON conference this week. Read more »
Facebook has made waves by detailing its plans to use what an executive calls chips that have a cell-phone architecture in its future data centers. The social network plans to test such chips now and next year and will likely have them in production in 2014. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Server giant HP promised new low energy servers — under the Project Gemini code name — based on Intel’s 64-bit Atom Centerton chips, actually systems on a chip or SoC. The servers, due late this year, can be modified to handle new workloads. Read more »
Microsoft did what many would consider unthinkable by introducing Surface, a slick 10.6-inch tablet with two different models designed and built by Microsoft. There’s a key strategic difference, however: Surface tablets place Microsoft in direct competition with its licensees for both tablets and PCs. Read more »
The world of information technology is always changing, but in the last six years it has started to change more rapidly. We celebrate the people who are orchestrating this change. Here’s ten innovators that are changing the game of Internet infrastructure. Read more »
AMD has taken an ARM license, a huge step for the company. But in taking an ARM license, which gives AMD the ability to design ARM-based chips, AMD is targeting security — not phones or even servers. Read more »
AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments and two smaller chip firms have teamed up to create a nonprofit that will try to unseat Intel’s x86 dominance in computing. But this group isn’t just after Intel; it’s taking the CPU — the beating heart of computers today — down a peg. Read more »
Dell showed off a box that contains 48 ARM-based servers, joining others making boxes with processors that uses the same architecture as the chips inside your cell phone. The server consumes less power and could find a home in web servers and Hadoop clusters. Read more »
Only 20 percent of smartphones sold last year had dual-core chips, but among those, Samsung sold the lion’s share: 60 percent of all dual core smartphones sold in 2011 had a Samsung processor. Who’s poised best to challenge in 2012? Only one company for now. Read more »
ARM’s CEO Sir Warren East is casting his eye on the next big opportunity for the chip architecture firm — the Internet of things. In an interview East says the market for embedded chips will be ten times the market for mobile device chips. Read more »
HTC is planning to develop its own application processors for smartphones and could partner with ST Ericsson. The company’s new HTC ImageChip works great in the new One handsets, but why reinvent the wheel for smartphone silicon; especially if these will go in low-end Android handsets? Read more »
The first commercially available Intel smartphone debuts in India this month with the launch of the Xolo X900. The Android 2.3 handset with high-resolution screen looks quite capable with a 10 frame per second burst mode. Has Intel licked the power challenge of mobile devices? Read more »
This quarter the EV market struggled to find its footing. Meanwhile, the smart-grid sector solidified and low-power technology proved itself important in the data center. Read more to learn what these news pieces and others mean for the larger space over the next few months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Soon, there might be WiFi in everything around you. Earlier this morning, Atheros, a division of Qualcomm launched a new very low power consuming WiFi chip, AR4100P, that is focused on what is commonly known as the Internet of Things. Read more »
ARM, the semiconductor company whose chip technology powers most modern smartphones, has come up with a chip for the Internet of things. It is an energy-efficient chip technology that is optimized for use in everything from connected lighting to power controls to other home appliances. Read more »
When building chips, designers have to trade energy efficiency for performance. But Cyclos can help designers boost clock speeds while shaving 10 to 30 percent off the power required by the chip. As mobile devices need more gigahertz, this will be a big deal. Read more »
The industry has moved beyond starry-eyed soothsaying about a world of 50 billion connected devices to start talking about how these mammoth networks of objects and appliances would actually work and how they would be managed. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intel and AMD are at it again. Intel could have bought SeaMicro, the energy efficient server vendor that recently got snapped up by AMD, but it decided to pass, said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. Read more »
Now that AMD has confirmed its purchase of low-power server maker SeaMicro, I bet its next move will be an announcement around licensing the ARM architecture. That’s right: AMD will do a deal with the company that provides the architecture for chips inside your cell phone. Read more »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This year’s CES was the biggest in the show’s 44-year history. It boasted 15 miles of exhibit hall aisles, 3,100 booths and 153,000 attendees. It is easy to be jaded by the endlessly repetitive products, but the thousands of innovations point toward a future of connectivity. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The big buzz out of CES on Thursday is that Intel has been “talking” to Apple, among other manufacturers, about using its new line of Medfield chips in upcoming mobile devices. But the discussions are clearly very preliminary, and Apple has good reason to remain aloof. Read more »
Just like every prior CES in the past few years, Intel is touting how its chips are ready for mobiles. The only difference in 2012 is that I’m starting to believe the company after seeing Intel’s Medfield chip power an Android tablet that runs all day. Read more »
At Intel’s CES press event, Ultrabooks were the focus, as were the six “experiences” these thin and light notebooks bring. But consumers are getting such experiences from smartphones and tablets, so who has a problem that could be solved by Ultrabooks? Intel itself comes to mind. Read more »
Bright Capital, KPCB, August Capital and NEA have contributed to a $17.6 million funding round in SuVolta, a process technology company. SuVolta doesn’t design chips; it has come up with a novel way to manufacture transistors in a way that makes them use less power. Read more »
If we’re going to create an Internet of things that connects back to a cloud powered by millions of servers, the chip world will have to change to reduce power consumption, shrink in size and embrace new architectures. Here are three startups that showcase these shifts. Read more »
As we look toward the next year, the cleantech sector faces many challenges, which we examine in detail in this 2012 outlook. Renewable energy generators encounter an increasingly difficult subsidy environment, and key cleantech innovations like electric vehicles face an uphill climb in terms of connecting ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Interest in Microsoft Windows 8 tablets is waning, says Forrester, with nearly half of those who wanted such a device at the beginning of 2011 no longer interested. Time is against Microsoft, but there’s still some hope for success due to both hardware and software strategies. Read more »
In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read more »
Notebook makers are reportedly bidding on chip supplies from both Intel and those provided by vendors using the ARM architecture, presumably to compete better on pricing with Apple. The real story is that the next round of chip wars between Intel and ARM licensees is here. Read more »
In the drive to produce servers based on lower-power chips that reduce operating costs and conserve energy, the $13 billion Cambridge, England–based ARM is seen as the great hope. Read more »
