IBM’s Cell processor, originally designed (in Austin!) for the Sony Playstation 3, will return to its entertainment roots in a Toshiba television due out next year. The move makes it official: Big Blue’s big bet on a new chip architecture is paying off. Read more »
Computing giant Hewlett-Packard said today it would spend $360 million in cash to buy LeftHand Networks, a storage company that straddles two hot trends right now — allocating storage for virtualized servers and the using Ethernet for storage networks. LeftHand’s software essentially allows a user to […] Read more »
It is October and they are still playing Baseball in Boston and Chicago and L.A. and Philadelphia. Just not in New York, where even a combined payroll of $335 million doesn’t buy a playoff birth. The only team(s) more incompetent is in Washington DC, playing football […] Read more »
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[qi:006] Updated: The San Francisco Bay Area is living, it seems, in a protective cocoon of its own, oblivious to the current credit crunch and fiscal crisis that has been roiling the rest of America. This morning, while there is talk of a bailout plan being […] Read more »
Smart energy has become a household term, but smart energy technology still has a long road ahead before it actually reaches most U.S. households. However, the residential market is ripe with opportunities (and challenges) for both established and new technology innovators to revolutionize the ways in which we use energy. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Forrester Research recently sent us a copy of “It’s Time To Take Games Seriously,” an overview of the burgeoning “serious games” industry. As the term suggests, these are video and computer games created to achieve practical, real-world outcomes, such as education or job training; consequently, it’s […] Read more »
Just a day after Dell launched it’s own line of mini Inspirons, and after CEO Michael Dell said carriers would likely subsidize such netbooks, creating smaller price tags, the Wall Street Journal speculates that Dell will sell its manufacturing plants, shrinking its operations. This would be […] Read more »
AT&T, the largest phone company in the U.S., may buy UK-based Cable & Wireless, according to The Guardian. The rumors were prompted by a research report by a local stock broker. Cable & Wireless is one of those telecoms whose fortunes have followed the trajectory of […] Read more »
HP said today it has closed its $13.9 billion acquisition of Plano, Texas-based IT services provider EDS, which was first announced in May. The success of the deal will depend on HP’s ability to integrate such a large buy into its already mammoth corporate structure. HP […] Read more »
AMD sells digital TV chip division to Broadcom for $193 million in cash. It is part of companies desire to be an asset-lite company. Read more »
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that within 18 months HP plans to have multiple touchscreen products, including a laptop, “that use the same type of finger-tapping interface popularized by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.” If HP does use the same type of touch screen as that of […] Read more »
Combine technological advancement, a worldwide stage and fears of terrorism, and what do you get? An Orwellian 2008 Summer Olympic Games. From tickets containing RFID chips aimed at preventing fraud and ticket scalping to surveillance cameras set up on the streets monitoring people with state-of the […] Read more »
It looks like after Amazon, a mere book retailer, showed them the way, all the technology powerhouses have fallen in love with cloud computing. Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo earlier this week said they’ve teamed up with three universities to create a cloud computing testbed, and Michael […] Read more »
I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips […] Read more »
Computerworld has done a nice job of encapsulating a corporate IT trend we’ve been writing about for the last couple of months with our focus on accelerator chips — among them graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD and Cell (which was designed originally for the PlayStation […] Read more »
As semiconductor firms get around the limitations of making individual processors faster by putting more cores onto a single chip, the mindset of today’s software developers and engineers mindset needs to adapt. Here are five startups that have the potential to stretch multicore processors to their very limit. Read more »
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For a while there, covering the chip industry was like covering a race run by a rabbit and a cheetah. AMD was the rabbit, while Intel — with its much larger market cap and greater profits — was the cheetah. Evey now and then the rabbit […] Read more »
Cloud computing isn’t as nebulous as its name implies. Thanks to virtualization, one can separate the storage from the servers and the servers from the software—but it’s also about bandwidth. The primary value will be more about moving data from the hardware to the end user. […] Read more »
For all those that have been waiting to catch a glimpse of how Nanosolar has been printing its next-generation thin film solar cells, here’s some eye candy for you. The company, which started manufacturing in just December, put up this video clip of what the company […] Read more »
The Top 500 organization has put out its twice-annual list of the fastest supercomputers, and there are few surprises. Roadrunner, IBM’s mammoth supercomputer that broke the petaflop record, holds the top spot. Big Blue is also the source of the lion’s share of the computers on […] Read more »
Twice a year, the computing world waits to hear whose processors and which vendors will claim the equivalent of a gold medal for building one of the world’s fastest supercomputers as measured by the Top 500 nonprofit. This year it was IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner machine, […] Read more »
Supercomputers these days are compute monsters. IBM’s latest, the Roadrunner, packs the power of 100,000 laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, embraces a unique mix of IBM’s Cell processor and ubiquitous x86 chips from AMD, and has the ability to calculate 1,000 trillion operations every second. Of course, trends in supercomputing generally trickle downstream to the rest of the computer-using population eventually. Continue Reading. Read more »
IBM, with years of experience designing chips and LCD displays, is jumping into the solar sector — but not just silicon-based solar. Big Blue has announced a new joint effort with chip gear maker Tokyo Ohka Kogyo to develop thin-film solar panels based on CIGS (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide) […] Read more »
Chalk up another one for Linux. The open-source software was just deemed by Network World as greener than Windows Server 2008 when running as the operating system for servers. The computing magazine found that servers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux ran 12 percent more efficiently than […] Read more »
After our computers, our cell phones are surely the most essential tool for most web workers. With our on-the-go working habits, many of us spend hours every week with the tiny phones pressed to our ears, dealing with clients and coworkers. Recently the potential health risks of cell phones are back in the news – CNN and the New York Times are among the major media that have covered this issue. Read more »
IBM showed off a new computing system yesterday that packed layers of semiconductors in a vertical stack and cooled it with water running in hair-thin pipes along the chips themselves. This is more impressive than the water-cooled copper plates that subsequently cool chips, and a leap […] Read more »
To the envy of developers everywhere, Google Software Engineers are granted what they call their “20% time.” As a result, Google coders get 20% of their working time to work on projects that the developers select away from management approval. Many well-known Google projects have resulted […] Read more »
While it hasn’t yet decided to offer a cloud computing service, Hewlett-Packard today said it will combine its high-performance computing unit with it’s Web 2.0 and cloud computing infrastructure businesses to create the Scalability Computing Initiative, a name that will refer both to a business unit […] Read more »
Work-at-home web workers seem to divide into two categories: those who make do with just a laptop computer balanced on whatever flat surface has just enough space to hold it, and those who try to establish a personal workspace that makes it easy and pleasant to […] Read more »
There’s one big downside to dragging all your web-worker gear from venue to venue, Starbucks to client site: you lose things. A mini iPod here, a cell phone there – besides the trauma, drama and cost, you just know you’re never going to see that physical […] Read more »
Desktop virtualization is far from a new topic, in fact it dates back to the inception of the client-server model. But there are still virtualization startups out there, among them Redwood City, Calif.-based MokaFive, which is gunning for a chance to go up against Microsoft, IBM […] Read more »
Today, a new data center appliance launches from San Jose, Calif. startup Rohati Systems. The appliance monitors the flow of traffic in the network and uses information gleaned from the data packets to enforce various entitlement and authorization limits for a company, such as allowing only […] Read more »
Those of you who like me have been following with bated breath the new HTC Advantage 7510 and anxiously awaiting its release here in the US can take a deep breath and get on with your business. I have confirmed with HTC that the 7510 contains […] Read more »
IBM has taken the storied Cell processor and amped up both the processing capacity and production. IBM says it will produce the Cell processor at 65 nanometers and start popping it into servers to create a “supercomputing experience for the masses.” That is, if the masses […] Read more »
HP is trying to eliminate copper on semiconductors to make them run faster, and today the company is gathering about 150 researchers at its Palo Alto campus to push lasers as a means to do this. If it and chip manufacturers such as Intel, IBM and […] Read more »
It’s time to see how our favorite gadget makers and Internet search engines fare when it comes to their commitment to fighting climate change. While Greenpeace has its green electronics guide, the non-profit Climate Counts released a new scorecard on companies this week, which includes a […] Read more »
As Ruby on Rails rose to prominence in the last few years, the platform has faced derision from some programmers over its inability to scale for enterprise applications. Ruby on Rails might be good for making interactive web pages, but it was no C or Java. […] Read more »
Can Twitter help you turn your lights off? IBM’s “Master Inventor” Andy Stanford-Clark has rigged up his home to twitter its energy use, and if you follow the tweets you can see in real time when Stanford-Clark has turned his lights and fountain off or on […] Read more »
As data moves into the cloud, many storage companies are evaluating their use of memory in the data center as they try to strike a balance between easily accessible cache memory powered by flash and slower-to-access disk memory powered by hard drives. At the same time, they’re trying to make their storage easier to provision and more reliable by looking at some form of virtualization. Both trends will change the dynamic for large storage vendors in the years to come. Read more »
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