dell inc

Dell has ordered between 1 million and 1.2 million desktop computers with Advanced Micro Devices processors and about 800,000 notebooks, Bank of America financial analyst Sumit Dhanda said in a report Thursday.

The new machines are likely to arrive late in the third quarter or early in the fourth, Dhanda said, citing sources in the manufacturing supply chain in Taiwan. That would mean Dell is awarding AMD 15 percent to 16 percent of its desktop business and 18 percent to 19 percent of its notebook business, he said.

Dell currently has announced plans only for a four-processor server … Read more

Answering Intel's "Montecito" processor launch this week, IBM on July 25 will announce new high-end Unix servers using its own Power5+ processor, sources familiar with the plan said.

The Power5+ processor, a faster successor to the Power5 that's used in the existing top-end 32-processor p5-595, is expected to run initially at a top speed of 2.3GHz.

Toni Sacconaghi, the Sanford C. Bernstein analyst who has for years been unimpressed with Sun Microsystems' attempts to improve its business, awarded the company a more optimistic business rating.

Sacconaghi raised his rating for Sun from "under-perform" to "market perform" in a report Tuesday. Granted, part of the reason was that Sun's stock has slipped well below $4 per share--it closed at $3.82 on Monday--but Sacconaghi also said the upgrade was because of his belief that "positive change is afoot at Sun."

The stock price slip now indicates the market has absorbed … Read more

Persistent rumors in recent months that Scott McNealy may step down as Sun Microsystems' chief executive returned in force Thursday, as reports of the possibility appeared in the Wall Street Journal and San Francisco Chronicle.

The stories came as computing industry sources reported in recent months that major changes could be in the works at Sun, in particular with the return of Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman. Lehman has said that he'll reveal and begin a new Sun strategy in July and that he's "taking a fresh look at everything." Some expect deep layoffs.

One former … Read more

BOSTON--Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system now runs on x86 servers such as those Dell sells, but the company will consider adding support for the Unix version only if it becomes a standard part of the computing landscape.

That's the conclusion of Judy Chavis, director of business development for Dell's enterprise product group, who spoke in an interview at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here.

"Is it the next industry standard around operating systems? That's what it would take for us to do that," she said. So far, the answer is a definitive no. "Since … Read more

Dell said this week that it will ship wide-screen displays in its Latitude D620 and D820 laptops.

The D620 has a 14.1-inch wide-screen display while the D820 offers a 15.4-inch wide-screen display.

Laptops with wide-screens can increase worker productivity by improving the viewing of spreadsheets, monitoring-software and office programs. One practical business application, for example, is that the new wide-screen D620 and D820 laptops will make sales presentations more appealing.

Of course, nobody is going to buy the laptop for productivity. The laptop is going to be sold for watching movies on business trips and for gaming at … Read more

Several StorageTek executives have departed since Sun Microsystems acquired the tape storage specialist last year, according to an article in Computer Business Review.

Among them are Randy Kerns, vice president of strategy and planning; David Harrison, former StorageTek vice president of worldwide operations; Brenda Zawatski, vice president of information lifecycle management; and Thomas Despres, general manager of StorageTek's main manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico. Kathleen Holmgren, a longtime Sun executive who was vice president of disk products, also is departing, and two more vice presidents are expected to follow suit, the report said.

In a response to the report, … Read more

Supercomputing is on the verge of a new era of interactivity, and an IBM thinker forecasts that the change will have wide repercussions among those accustomed to submitting processing jobs and returning days or even months later for results.

"A petroleum engineer might accelerate the discovery process by quickly trying different kinds of analysis and visualization to pinpoint a potential oil field. Automotive engineers could continuously refine their designs to achieve a balance of aesthetics, safety and economics, much the way we keep formatting and reformatting documents until satisfied with the result," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who has led … Read more

Dell would gain market share over rivals if it adopted Advanced Micro Devices' processors, but changes in its relationship with Intel would likely more than nullify the business merits of the move, an analyst said Monday.

"Overall, it seems unlikely that Dell's share gains would be enough to offset the potential loss of Intel marketing monies," Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said in a report addressing the recent opinions that Dell would embrace AMD.

Adopting AMD could win Dell 1 to 2 percentage points of server market share and 0.5 to 1 percentage points of … Read more