Business Tech

AMD launched its first six-core processor, which will compete against Intel's "Dunnington" chip.

The "Istanbul" Opteron processor is for high-end server computers that use two, four, and eight processors or "sockets." Intel has been shipping a six-core processor for this market since September of last year and will bring out a processor based on its new Nehalem architecture for this segment later this year.

Among other new features, AMD is touting an Istanbul technology called HT Assist. The previous way of retrieving data from the processor's memory was "like checking every … Read more

Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology.

Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open-source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

The new version, however, will be offered with an enterprise-grade support contract that … Read more

Dell has stopped selling 8.9-inch Netbooks, focusing instead on ones with slightly larger screens.

Visitors to Dell's U.K. Web site earlier on Monday found the Mini Netbook page displaying the phrase "Available in 8.9" but no actual options for buying the Mini 9 model. The site focused instead on Dell's Mini 10 and 10v Netbooks.

U.S.-based tech site Engadget noted that a customer service representative in the U.S. had confirmed the "end of life" of the Mini 9.

Dell is the latest Netbook manufacturer to move away from … Read more

Watching the Google Wave demo last week and reading Tim O'Reilly's enthusiastic review, it struck me how amazingly cool Wave promises to be...and just how paltry most enterprise software remains.

Sure, you think: it's easy for Google to innovate. It has thousands of engineers!

Maybe. But I don't remember Microsoft coming up with Wave, and it has even more engineers. Neither did IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.

Google did, and it started Wave with a small core team of two brothers, a core team that appears to have done much of the work gestating Wave to … Read more

I've been getting a fair number of questions about multi-threading the past couple of weeks. The reason is that Intel has been previewing its "Nehalem EX" Xeon processor in advance of Advanced Micro Device's six-core "Istanbul" CPU launch. Intel's Nehalem generation has simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)--which Intel calls Hyper-Threading (HT)--while Istanbul does not.

I wrote about this topic in depth a couple of years back in "Gradations of Threading," but it's worth reviewing in the context of these new server processors.

First, a little terminology.

A thread is a … Read more

Psion and Intel have settled their legal battle over the use of the word "Netbook."

Since early 2008, chipmaker Intel has been using the term to refer to small, cheap, low-powered sub-notebooks, and its Atom chipset has become by far the most popular engine for such machines.

However, British PDA maker Psion registered a trademark for "Netbook" in a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1996. The company, which is now called Psion Teklogix and is based in Canada, introduced a handheld device called the NetBook Pro earlier this decade but … Read more

Adobe Systems released on Monday beta versions of three programming projects for producing online applications that run in its Flash Player, software that's widely used but also under competitive threat from other Web technologies.

First is a beta version of Flash Catalyst, a programming tool that's meant for the designer crowd rather than the coding crowd. Catalyst lets designers create a Flash application's user interface in Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator applications, import the files, attach a variety of actions to user interface elements, then produce the Flash application for production or for handing off to more … Read more

This was originally posted at Between the Lines.

Global chip sales rose to $15.6 billion in April, up 6.4 percent from March. That's the good news. The bad: chip sales are still down 25 percent from April sales of $20.9 billion a year ago, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

The SIA provides the following color (statement):

• PC demand is better than expected as inventory is replenished;

• PC sales in 2009 are expected to fall 6 percent better than estimates that expected a decline of 12 percent;

• Cell phone sales also aren't as bad as … Read more

Qualcomm said Sunday that it is adding new Snapdragon silicon to its series of chips for Netbooks and other small devices while it showcases devices at the Computex conference in Taipei.

The San Diego-based company announced that it is expanding the Snapdragon chip platform with a next-generation chipset that uses the 45-nanometer process technology to provide faster processing, significant battery life improvements, and other enhancements.

The chips are targeted at smartphones and so-called smartbooks. The latter is a category of small devices that, in some cases, will be similar in appearance to Netbooks but will emphasize 3G connectivity and be … Read more