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Intel at chip conference: More wireless, less GHz

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel will present 15 papers, with a renewed emphasis on integrating more functions into one chip--and less focus on gigahertz. Intel is especially focusing on squeezing more sophisticated wireless silicon into small devices.

"The trend of using smaller transistors to build larger microprocessor cores with higher operating frequency is coming to an end," Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow, said Wednesday.

The chipmaker will highlight research on what it is proclaiming as the "new system-on-a-chip (SoC) era," which it describes as requiring "a fundamental shift in the way semiconductor … Read more

Cisco: Making lemonade from economic lemons

Updated at 3:45 p.m. PST: Upated throughout with information from the company's conference call.

Cisco Systems' optimistic leader John Chambers noted during the company's conference call Wednesday that the economy has gone from bad to worse as sales are expected to slip as much as 20 percent in the next quarter. But he said that Cisco is well-positioned to emerge even stronger after the economic malaise.

Chambers noted that revenues for the company's third fiscal quarter, which ends in April, will be down 15 percent to 20 percent from the previous year. In dollars, this … Read more

Q&A: Sun open-source officer Simon Phipps

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

Computer industry ranks third among job cuts

Baby New Year faces a tough time finding a job in this climate.

U.S. job cuts announced in January soared to 241,749 across all industries, marking the largest monthly cut in the past seven years, according to a report released Wednesday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The computer industry ranked No. 3 among the industries facing the biggest ax in January, with 22,330 layoffs announced.

For an industry already under siege, it offers little encouragement after the tech sector exited last year with 186,955 job cuts in the telecommunications, computer, and electronics sectors. That figure was … Read more

Rambus patent infringement trials put on hold

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday postponed indefinitely the coordinated patent infringement cases filed by Rambus against a collection of rival memory chipmakers.

The cases were scheduled to go to trial later this month.

Judge Ronald M. Whyte of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order indefinitely postponing the long-running cases against Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Nanya Technology, and Samsung Electronics, pending appeals of earlier court decisions.

Shares of Los Altos, Calif.-based Rambus, which licenses technology for high-speed memory architectures, plunged 22 percent in after-hours trading, or $2, to $6.95. … Read more

Intel at chip conference: More cores, less power

Intel will have a lot to say at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, spanning the spectrum of silicon from mobile to server processors. Here are a few of the highlights from abstracts of Intel sessions at the ISSCC, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco.

Nehalem, currently marketed as the Core i7, will scale down to sub-10-watt chips--that's ultraportable notebook (think MacBook Air) territory:

"A family of next-generation IA processors...The family has a coherent point-to-point link and integrates memory controller, power-management microcontroller and power-gate transistors and scales from sub-10 to 130W in mobile, desktop and server applications.&… Read more

SAP tries to make latest suite easier to digest

SAP is taking its on-premise suite and giving it a SaaS-y spin.

According to a prebriefing with The Wall Street Journal, SAP will launch Business Suite 7, which will allow customers to pay for just the modules they use. I'll be at SAP's New York office Wednesday with a handful of Enterprise Irregulars to get the rundown.

SAP's Business Suite 7 approach is a new veneer on on-premise software to make it more competitive with software as a service offerings. Typically customers buy a suite designed to run the back office operations.

That brain surgery, however, is … Read more

Toshiba handheld hits 1GHz with 'Snapdragon'

Has the era of the 1GHz smartphone arrived? It has for Toshiba, which has tapped Qualcomm's new Snapdragon silicon.

The Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile phone was unveiled Tuesday, according to reports. Based on Windows Mobile 6.1, it is designed to take on the iPhone 3G.

Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS.

The TG01 is slated to be available in Europe this summer. The price, at this time, has not been disclosed. (Acer and Asus are … Read more

EMC, Microsoft team for share of IT budgets

NEW YORK--While tech spending has not evaporated, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that most companies have mandated that their IT departments cut a significant percentage from their budgets.

"To save 5 (percent) to 10 percent, you have to save a little bit on a lot of things," Ballmer told CNET News on Tuesday, in a joint interview with EMC CEO Joe Tucci, "It's not like there's nothing new getting done. Some new projects are getting killed. There's pressure on vendors to reduce prices."

Tucci said he is seeing similar pressures due … Read more

VMware delivers personalized desktops on wheels

Have desktop, will travel.

VMware unveiled Tuesday its open source virtual desktop client VMware View Open Client, designed to provide users with constant access to their personal desktop on almost any device.

VMware View Open Client aims to provide organizations with the ability to host user desktops within their respective datacenters and allow their users to access their personal desktops from a variety of devices at any given time.

Jocelyn Goldfein, general manager of VMware's Desktop business unit, said in a statement:

Now we are sharing our source code in VMware view Open Client so vendors can easily optimize … Read more