If you've ever struggled through a skiing lesson, you know exactly what the expression "too far over your skis" means: You're headed in the right direction, but you're leaning so far forward you're going to take a tumble. And that's what's going to happen to my colleague Galen Gruman, who along with other pundits is falling all over himself to bury Intel under the oncoming ARM tsunami.
AMD has announced its second-generation "Trinity" Accelerated Processing Units.
The A-Series APUs are aimed at laptops, PCs, and embedded hardware. AMD's latest processors will come in dual- and quad-core variations and go toe-to-toe with Intel's third-generation Ivy Bridge Core chips.
Lenovo on Tuesday announced a range of new ThinkPads with Intel's latest third-generation Core processors, including a ThinkPad Ultrabook that the company claims is the "thinnest Ultrabook in the world."
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook has a 14-inch screen, weighs under 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) and is 18.8mm (.74 inches) thick. It will have the latest Intel Ultrabook processors, code-named Ivy Bridge, which are expected to be officially announced next month.
Advanced Micro Devices hopes to provide thin-and-light laptops that are less expensive but equally speedy to Intel's Ultrabooks with its new A-series chips, which the company officially announced on Tuesday.
The A-series chips, code-named Trinity, will enable laptops to be made that are comparable in size, weight and battery life to Intel's Ultrabooks, said John Taylor, director of global product marketing at AMD. Users won't have to pay "premium prices" for Trinity ultrathin laptops, which will be significantly cheaper than Intel's Ultrabooks.
The upcoming shift from Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) RAM to its successor, DDR4, will herald in a significant boost in both memory performance and capacity for data center hardware and consumer products alike.
The DDR4 memory standard, which the Joint Electronic Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) expects to OK this summer, represents a doubling of performance over its predecessor and a reduction in power use by 20 percent to 40 percent based on a maximum 1.2 volts of power use.
Windows RT, aka Windows on ARM-based devices, is too limited to succeed, say many people who've tried out the Windows 8 consumer preview. However, you don't need an ARM tablet to simulate the Windows RT experience; just stick with the Metro part of Windows 8 on whatever touch device you have.
Dell and IBM on Monday announced servers with Intel's latest Xeon server chips, which will bring faster throughput and memory allowing servers to take on more complex workloads while reducing data center costs.
The new servers are being announced concurrently with Intel's announcement of new Xeon server chips designed for customers looking to lower power costs while adding processing muscle to handle more web, database and analytics transactions.
Intel on Monday announced faster and more power-efficient Xeon server processors, including the low-power E3 chip that has 3D transistors and is the first server processor based on Ivy Bridge microarchitecture.
The new processors include the eight Xeon E5-4600 chips for midrange servers and 11 low-power Xeon E3 chips for microservers, which are low-power servers designed mainly for Web serving and cloud applications. A number of server makers including Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Quanta and Cisco Systems are expected to announce servers based on the new chips.
HP has announced the t410 All-In-One Smart Zero Client, a thin client PC that only consumes 13 watts and can be run using Power over Ethernet.
Announced at HP's Global Influencer Forum in Shanghai among a slew of Ultrabooks, "Sleekbooks," workstations, and printers, the t410 All-In-One Smart Zero was overshadowed by more anticipated products.
Open source Java will be brought to the PowerPC architecture for Linux and IBM's AIX OS under a proposal floated this week that could eventually benefit the different Linux distributors.
Hewlett-Packard announced new Envy Ultrabooks on Wednesday, but also a new aggressively priced thin-and-light brand of laptops called Envy Sleekbooks, which boast starting prices that are $150 lower than Ultrabooks.
The Envy Sleekbook laptops, which have the latest chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, come with 14- and 15.6-inch screens and start at $599. HP's Envy Ultrabooks have the latest Intel third-generation Core chips, come with screens of the same size as the Sleekbooks, and start at $749.
Headset maker Plantronics this week is kicking off a campaign aimed at enticing developers to build line-of-business applications for the company's devices.
The company on Wednesday will formally launch its developer community at Plantronics Developer Connection. The program provides technical resources and support for "context-aware computing," with developers able to build applications that access and receive events on Plantronics headsets.
Dell on Tuesday announced a new microserver with Intel's first Xeon server processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which has not been officially announced by the chip maker yet.
Dell's PowerEdge C5220 is one of the first servers with Xeon chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. The server is targeted at Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance applications, Dell said in a statement.
Out went 42 aging black and white copiers with interface boxes that let them serve as printers. In went 42 new networked multi-function printers (MFPs) that could do color printing and copying and scan directly to e-mail, fax or files. And the owner, the Park Hill School District in Kansas City, MO, saves $19,000 yearly.
"Scanning has been huge, as we progress into the digital age and move accumulated paper resources on-line," notes the district's director of technology, Brad Sandt.
MasterCard WorldWide announced a digital wallet on Monday that consumers will be able to use for purchases in stores, on the Web and on their mobile phones.
The global credit-card company's entry into digital wallets will tie into its PayPass point-of-sale system, with nearly 500,000 locations around the world where consumers can tap a card or phone with NFC (near-field communications) to make a purchase. But with the new offering, called PayPass Wallet Services, MasterCard will also allow third parties to create payment systems under their own brands.
I've been saying for some time that virtualization and cloud computing are not mandatory partners. Certainly, virtualization is a tool that makes creating and managing cloud computing services easy. However, more and more, as organizations move to cloud computing, they're asking for the omission of that virtualization layer for better performance and control. Cloud providers are now agreeing to those demands.
Micron on Monday said that DDR4 memory -- the successor to DDR3 DRAM -- will reach computers next year, and that the company has started shipping samples of the upcoming DDR memory type.
The new DDR4 memory is more power-efficient and faster than the current DDR3 memory, which is found in most new computers that ship today. DDR4 memory will shuffle data at faster rates inside computers.
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