Intel is getting ready to launch two major products that will combine the most visible piece of the company's evolving platform strategy, its Centrino mobile brand, with the company's most ambitious effort yet at building the digital home.
The PC market has a somewhat unfair reputation as the mature, staid sector of IT. True, the basic PC is over 20 years old and no longer has the buzz factor of generated by Internet companies like Google Inc., but some of the most fascinating, controversial, and relevant stories of the year involved PC makers and their chip suppliers. A sampling, in chronological order:
Sun Microsystems Inc. will try to convince legions of users who have switched to low-cost Windows and Linux x86 hardware for Web serving to switch back to the company's forthcoming UltraSparc T1 servers, company executives said Monday.
Dell Inc.'s third-quarter revenue and earnings came in short of the company's original expectations, as it had warned last week.
Dell Inc.'s run as the financial darling of the technology world may have come to an end Monday as the company announced it would miss its quarterly revenue target for the second straight period. The company blamed a shortfall in its U.S. consumer business and its U.K. operations, but competition around the world and a changing market may also be dragging Dell back down to earth.
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, claims the company has ironed out all of the security problems in its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system so that users can consider adopting it the first day it is released. For the most part.
Portable music players were around before Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs got involved in digital music, but four years after the launch of the first iPod, Apple now owns 75 percent of the MP3 player market. Now that Apple has staked a claim to the portable video market, can the company duplicate its success with music in the vast wasteland of television?
Apple has several things working in its favor, according to analysts interviewed after Apple's big television announcement Wednesday. Users of Apple's iTunes music software will now be able to download episodes from five ABC Inc. television shows, music videos, and short films from Jobs' Pixar Animation Studios on their PCs or Macs, and transfer them to a new generation of iPods, Jobs said at a media event in San Jose, California.
Intel's first dual-core Xeon server processor is around 50 percent more powerful than its single-core predecessor, but it will cost around 40 percent more than that chip, company executives said Monday.
It was Jan. 5, 2004, Ed Zander's first day at Motorola. The company was plagued by quality issues, financial confusion, and slippery launch dates. Plus, it was well below zero degrees Fahrenheit in Schaumburg, Illinois, a long way from the mild Silicon Valley climate where Zander had spent the last several years.
After months of frenzied speculation, Apple Computer has unveiled an ultra-thin iPod about half the size of its iPod mini as well as a mobile phone built by Motorola Inc. that features the iTunes music player software.
Apple's new iPod nano will feature 4G bytes of capacity for US$249 in a device that is thinner than a #2 pencil, said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive officer at a jam-packed media event at San Francisco's Moscone Center.
Yonah, Intel Corp.'s dual-core mobile processor for the first quarter of 2006, is every bit as revolutionary as the single-core Pentium M processor that changed the way Intel designed its chips, company executives said at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF).
Tuesday's big news at IDF was confirmation of the company's plans to base forthcoming dual-core processors for desktops, notebooks and servers on a common architecture inspired by the Pentium M. While much has already been revealed about Yonah, it is basically the rough draft for those chips and a more elegant design than the company's first attempts at dual-core PC processors.
Intel's first dual-core chip was a hastily concocted design that was rushed out the door in hopes of beating rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to the punch, an Intel engineer told attendees at the Hot Chips conference.
With the realization that its single-core processors had hit a wall, Intel engineers plunged headlong into designing the Smithfield dual-core chip in 2004 but faced numerous challenges in getting that chip to market, said Jonathan Douglas, a principal engineer in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, which makes chips for office desktops and servers.
Intel plans to introduce a major change in the architecture used to build its chips during its upcoming Fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is readying several new versions of its iPaq wireless personal digital assistants that will also feature a new version of Microsoft's mobile operating system, according to details of the new products posted on Web sites for HP in both the US and the UK.
Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor garnered more than 10 percent of last quarter's server processor shipments, a sharp increase compared to the first quarter and a remarkable climb from AMD's minuscule share of the server market several years ago.