Microsoft’s lackluster first quarter earnings news actually came as a relief after a raft of bad tech sector news from IBM, Intel and Google this week. The software giant missed expectations but not by all that much for the quarter ending September 30. Read more »
There has been a lot of bad news from the chip giants this quarter, but it’s not the decline of the PC or even merely economic worries pressing on the sector. No, there’s a systemic change in the market and the industry giants are reacting. Read more »
Jason Hoffman is familiar to many in the computing industry as the CTO of Joyent and a leader of the movement to build distributed systems. But before that, he was a doctor who helped his mom beat cancer. Here’s how the past and present connect. Read more »
Calxeda, a company making dense, low-power servers using the same ARM chip architecture found in cell phones, has raised $55 million to take on Intel as well as the myriad other vendors that want to take ARM’s low power chips and cram them into servers, Read more »
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 »
Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here are some noteworthy segments to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to apps to wireless networks. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As expected, Motorola announced a new smartphone that uses an Intel Atom chip. A surprise, however, is the phone’s battery life: At 20 hours of mixed use, it’s the same as a similar Razr using Qualcomm’s chip. Will Intel be inside your next phone? Read more »
Open Handset Alliance partners have to follow the rules, else face the wrath of Google: The company effectively shut down a press event for a new Acer phone for China. Meanwhile, it looks like Intel is about to redouble its Android smartphone efforts. Read more »
IBM has developed a microscopy technique that lets it see the bonds between molecules. While that’s pretty esoteric for most of us, the tool could help develop graphene-based semiconductors that would result in better batteries, faster chips, nicer displays and more efficient solar panels. 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 »
After weeks of back and forth and considerable anxiety, VMware, Intel and NEC are now Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. The news comes out of Friday afternoon’s OpenStack board meeting. Read more »
A survey of mobile and online manners by Intel found that most people think we are getting ruder and sharing too much information. Yet most of those same people agree that sharing makes them feel connected. Read more »
Mellanox, a maker of Infiniband interconnects and switches, has doubled its sales in the last two quarters. What is behind its recent success and what does that say about Mellanox, Infiniband and the current state of scale out data center networking? Read more »
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read more »
ZTE and Motorola indicated that they are making Intel-powered smartphones. Samsung announced the Microsoft Windows 8 powered ATIV-S phones, beating Nokia to the punch. These are first signs of PC-business behemoths trying hard to find relevance in a mobile-first world of Apple, Google and Qualcomm. Read more »
SUSE’s Alan Clark and Cisco’s Lew Tucker are the chairman and vice chairman of the fledgling OpenStack Foundation. They’ve got a lot on their plate as the foundation has to wean itself from Rackspace and set its own course. Read more »
John McCain and Ron Wyden are among the dozens of congresspeople people from Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico lobbying the ITC against harming the economy by banning the import of computers containing some of Intel’s most-popular processors. But saving the IT economy goes beyond patents. Read more »
Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members. Read more »
In the wake of a $1 billion acquisition of Nicira, BigSwitch said that it has seen 6,000 downloads of its SDN controller software. Big Switch is the likely the next big buy for software defined networking, but who will be the suitor? Read more »
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016, according to IDC. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, creating vendor discontinuities and a new IT order. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
MIT grad students studying Robust Robotics designed a plane that can operate in tight spots — avoiding pillars and low ceilings — without a GPS or outside help. The plane uses an on-board laser range finder and inertial sensors to fly right. 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 »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With $10 billion up for grabs, the EU is looking to stimulate both technological advancement and economic growth. Good news for European tech firms, for green technology companies — and for an embattled continent. 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 »
In the latter half of the 19th century, the introduction of elevators and steel trusses enabled us to put up taller buildings with denser cores. It changed urban landscapes forever–packing more people into small spaces. Now, chips are set to benefit from a similar design leap. Read more »
Intel Labs held an annual showcase in San Francisco on Tuesday and it showed off how it’s researching ways to use data to help curb energy consumption in residential homes, in offices, on factory floors and across smart cities. Read more »
Will hyperscale data centers like those at Facebook, Google and Amazon be willing to adopt low power ARM or even Linux based multi core processors in their data centers? Read more »
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
The number of servers in the cloud continues to grow, but should those servers use brawny cores filled with raw power or lightweight wimpy cores? Infrastructure planning requires both, says Jason Waxman from Intel: As the cloud to evolves, a wide range of chips are needed. 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 »
We’re number 1! An IBM supercomputer topped the semi-annual list of the 500 top supercomputers for the first time in three years. Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q System using 1,572,864 processor cores scored 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack Benchmark used to rate such things. 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 »
Has one single Android phone outsold the iPhone 4S? Apparently so, at least at Verizon, where the Motorola Razr and its 4G LTE radio is tops. Acer is taking on Apple’s iPad with a $449 tablet while an Intel phone — yes, Intel — gets a nice review. 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 »
At Computex, Asus introduced numerous new computer designs for Microsoft Windows 8, covering laptops, desktops, Ultrabooks and more. There’s even one laptop with two screens. But the smartest move by Asus is to re-use the popular design from its Android tablet and dock, the Transformer Prime. Read more »
