Business Tech

Hewlett-Packard announced preliminary fourth-quarter results on Monday, saying it pulled in $33.6 billion in revenue, up 19 percent from the year-ago quarter, or 16 percent when adjusted for currency effects.

The company earned $1.03 per share, excluding after-tax adjustments related to amortization of purchased intangibles, restructuring, in-process research and development, and other acquisition-related charges of approximately 19 cents per share. Nonadjusted earnings were 84 cents per share.

HP plans to formally announce its quarterly results on November 24.

Looking ahead, the company said it expects currency exchanges rates to continue to be an issue, hitting revenue by about … Read more

Intel's next-generation microarchitecture has arrived. Officially.

Intel made the debut of the Core i7 processor official on Monday afternoon, launching the processor at an event in San Francisco. PC makers, including Dell and Gateway, quickly followed suit with announcements.

"The Core i7 processor speeds video editing (and) immersive games...by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption," the Intel said in a statement.

Combining the i7 with super-fast solid state drives will lead to significant jumps in performance, according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "When … Read more

Just a few months ago, Sid Agrawal, the chief operating officer of a 4-year-old semiconductor start-up in Santa Clara, Calif., was opining on the Silicon India site about the technology industry, noting that "green technology is the buzzword of the day" and bemoaning the challenge of "hiring good analog designers."

On Friday, however, Agrawal, 56, became one of three victims in a fatal workplace shooting that has saddened friends, colleagues, and family members, and left Silicon Valley employees--already shook up over constant reports of layoffs and bad economic news--feeling all the more uneasy.

"Silicon Valley … Read more

Spansion and Kodak slammed Samsung with two separate patent infringement lawsuits Monday.

Spansion, one of the world's largest suppliers of flash memory chips, on Monday announced it has filed two patent infringement complaints against Samsung with the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Spansion is seeking the exclusion from the U.S. market of more than 100 million MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras, and other consumer electronics devices containing Samsung's allegedly infringing flash memory components.

The complaint also seeks an injunction and treble damages for alleged patent violations relating to Samsung … Read more

Transmeta, a company that once hoped to rival Intel and Advanced Micro Devices to power portable computers, announced Monday that it would sell itself to Novafora for $255.6 million in cash.

Novafora said it hopes to use Transmeta's people and technology in its video processing chips.

"Transmeta's innovative technology and the expertise of its employees are valuable additions to Novafora," Novafora CEO Zaki Rakib said in a statement.

For their part, shareholders are expected to receive between $18.70 and $19 for each Transmeta share they own. The deal was unanimously approved by Transmeta's … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Inspired by a new generation of smartphones, Adobe Systems has begun a new, higher-power effort to spread its Flash technology to mobile devices.

The company has worked for years on a lightweight incarnation of its Flash technology for mobile phones, but it now is working to bring the full-fledged Flash Player 10 to higher-end smartphones, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said at Adobe's Max conference here.

"We are in the midst of evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile," Lynch said. "We're taking the full Flash Player and making that run on the higher end … Read more

Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year, according to analysts at Gartner.

However, only 31 percent of companies surveyed by the analyst house had formal policies for evaluating and procuring open-source software (OSS). Gartner conducted its survey of 274 end-user organizations across the Asia/Pacific, Europe, and North American markets in May and June, and announced the results on Monday.

Respondents to the survey consistently pointed to cost as a prime motivator for their adoption of open source, with some also suggesting OSS … Read more

25GB in 70 seconds. That's the torrid transfer rate consumers can expect with devices based on the USB 3.0 specification, which debuted Monday.

As reported previously, the USB Promoter Group finalized the "SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 specification today and is doing a "comprehensive review" of the technology at a conference in San Jose, Calif.

Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and NEC are the leading players in the group.

Among the initial devices, external solid-state (flash) drives and hard drives are expected to be popular. "The first SuperSpeed USB devices will likely include data storage devices such as flash (solid-state drives), external hard drives, digital music players, and digitial cameras," the group said.

Products aren't coming until 2010, however. "It is anticipated that initial SuperSpeed USB discrete controllers will appear in the second half of 2009 and consumer products will appear in 2010," according to the group.

"The USB 3.0 Promoter Group is now accepting adopters of the USB 3.0 specification, which has been finalized at the 1.0 level," the group added.

As its name (SuperSpeed) implies, USB 3.0 is all about speed. About 10 times more speed, to be exact, than the 2.0 specification. … Read more

Correction, 10:38 a.m. PST: This story misidentified the maker of the Power processor. The maker is IBM.

Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now.

But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas.

First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in … Read more