Business Tech

There are few, if any, microprocessor manufacturers equal to Intel. IBM, however, is a very large exception.

Power7 wafer: Like Intel, IBM manufactures its own processors, something few 'chipmakers' do these days.

(Credit: IBM)

By the time Intel had introduced its latest processor for servers, the Itanium 9300, on Monday, IBM had already stolen Intel's thunder with its new Power7 chip technology, announced earlier in the morning.

And rightfully so: the Power7 is impressive. It has eight cores, while Intel's Itanium 9300 (PDF) has four. And each of the Power7's cores is capable of four threads, or tasks, compared to Itanium's two per core.

Although both companies are touting dozens of other features--for example, better thread performance and improved scaling of workloads--IBM is taking a lead in marquee features for the lucrative high-end server market.

"While Intel is talking about a 2x [two-times] performance boost per chip, IBM is talking about almost an 8x [eight-times]," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64. "IBM has gone from two cores to eight cores per (chip). And each of the cores is roughly twice as fast as the [prior-generation] Power6," according to Brookwood, adding that IBM was already ahead of Intel to begin with.

"Buyers who are sitting on the fence and have an application that could go either way (Itanium or Power7), may find that the Power7 offers a more attractive platform," Brookwood said, acknowledging that Itanium or Intel's upcoming eight-core Nehalem-EX processor would be a good choice for those seeking to use popular applications such as SQL Server that run on Windows and are not supported on the Power7.

IBM Blue Waters supercomputer
Power7 has another leg up on Itanium: it is already being used to construct what may be the fastest supercomputer in the world at the renowned ... Read More

Among the bevy of Motorola phones.

(Credit: Motorola)

Both Motorola and Research In Motion are leading their respective markets, according to market researcher ComScore. But Apple is coming on strong.

ComScore's latest data from September through December shows that Motorola was the top cell phone vendor in the U.S. with 23.5 percent market share. It was followed by LG, Samsung, and Nokia, with 21.9 percent, 21.2 percent, and 9.2 percent market share, respectively.

Motorola led the pack, but its market share still declined 1.4 percent between September and December. Samsung had the strongest increase with 0.8 percent growth over the period.

On the smartphone side, RIM continues to dominate with 41.6 percent market share. That said, its share did decline by about 1 percent between September and December.

Picking up 1.2 percent market share over the period, Apple controlled 25.3 percent of the smartphone space.

Apple was followed by Microsoft, Palm, and Google, which commanded 18 percent, 6.1 percent, and 5.2 percent market share, respectively. Google saw the biggest gains of any smartphone OS on the market. It increased its market share by 2.7 percent during the last quarter.

One note: There is a bit of apples vs. oranges comparison going on here, so to speak, because RIM's market share figure includes all its models, while Apple's share is comprised on just one model: the iPhone.

Texting on the rise
ComScore also found that text messaging is coming on strong. Back in September, 61 percent of mobile users text messaged others. By the end of December, 63.1 percent of all mobile users in the U.S. were text messaging.

According to the researcher, mobile Web browsing, mobile gaming, and use of downloadable apps are growing in popularity too.

ComScore found that 27.5 percent of U.S. mobile users surf the Web on their phones, while 21.6 percent of users play games, and 17.8 percent use downloadable apps. Social-networking use and music listening are increasing as well. ComScore found that 15.9 percent of mobile users access a social network or blog and 12.1 percent listen to music on a mobile phone.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' chief executive until January, has accelerated the pace of his public communications from blogging to the even faster-twitch Twitter medium. But he's also considering slowing it down by writing a book.

"I'm thinking of writing a book about my experiences as Sun's CEO (will not be in haiku). What would you like to read about?" Schwartz asked in a tweet on Monday.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The haiku comment refers to Schwartz's parting tweet as Sun CEO, in which he blamed the economy for the fact that Sun was acquired by Oracle rather than remaining independent: "Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."

A number of suggestions for subject matter have arrived:

• "the decision and discussion and hand-wringing behind the Great Open Sourcing efforts (Java, Solaris, etc.)," from pholdings.

• "Would like to hear about boardroom discussions about research directions: any disagreements? & Thoughts on A.I.," from FriskyBoy.

• "how to balance community rules & philosophy with company duties & profitability," from danieledemauro.

• "I'd love to know 'all' about the transitional period between between Scott 'stepping' down and you taking over," from rudids.

As Sarah Palin and countless other authors have found, autobiographies are a great opportunity to present personal history in a flattering light--and Schwartz has demonstrated skills in framing debates to his advantage. If a book comes to pass, let's hope that there's a healthy dose of reality in there, too.

Mozilla wants its Firefox browser to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4--the operating system also known as Tiger that was released in 2005--but the plan is running into some resistance.

If support is indeed removed, then Firefox 3.6--the current version of the browser--would be the last one to support Mac OS X 10.4, although Mozilla would still issue updates for several months after the succeeding version of Firefox is released.

"We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X, and 10.4 support has been a hindrance," Josh Aas, one of Mozilla's Mac experts, said in a mailing list post. "We are planning to make the decision to remove 10.4 support final and remove the code from the tree. If you have any strong objections please let us know now."

There are objections, of course.

"I still have two PowerPC machine that use OS X 10.4.11...As it stands now it impractical for me update either machine due to lack of funds...So if support for 4.11 is removed then that means I will have to go to something else such a iCab, Opera, or OmniWeb rather than Firefox and you don't need to lose users," Phillip Jones said in a response, suggesting a two-track approach. "You can create one with all the fancy new stuff. Then one for us poor people that [can't] drop ($3,000) at the drop of the hat and have to hang onto older equipment out of necessity."

But his objection and some from others have not moved Mozilla members to change course thus far.

"Does this suggestion come with a donation for doubling of full-time development resources, QA [quality assurance] and testing, build and release infrastructure, and user support for this second track that would cover a shrinking minority of Firefox on Mac users?" Mozilla's Asa Dotzler asked in a post. "There are currently approximately 1.5 million people using Firefox on 10.4 and we're fully aware of that...In one year, I expect 10.4 to account for less than 5 percent of Mac OS X users and at that point it will have less prominence than Windows 98."

Supporting Mac OS X 10.4 also comes with a penalty for those who are using 10.5 and 10.6, added Mozilla programmer Boris Zbarsky. "We can significantly improve the user experience on 10.5 and especially 10.6 if we drop support for 10.4 (we're talking something like 30 percent performance improvement on 10.6, for example if I recall the numbers correctly, between the newer compiler and doing 64-bit builds," he noted.

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, added that the decision wouldn't immediately cut off those with Tiger.

"10.4 users would still have a supported release until Firefox 3.6 was end-of-lifed, which I would expect to be at least 6 months after the trunk release of which Boris speaks," Shaver said. "They wouldn't be able to upgrade to the latest and greatest, but they would still get stability and security updates."

The sometimes-emotional debate recapitulated elements of a 2009 discussion about dropping Mac OS X 10.4 support.

A former Intel executive pleaded guilty on Monday to providing insider information to Galleon Group's founder, Raj Rajaratnam.

The case revolves around Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund that managed $7 billion in funds. In total, 22 people have been charged with criminal or civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Ten, including the Intel executive, have pleaded guilty to date.

Rajiv Goel, a former Intel treasury department executive, has admitted to providing Rajaratnam, in 2007, details about Intel's earnings before the information was publicly available. He also told Rajaratnam about a future Sprint Nextel joint venture that Intel had targeted for a $1 billion investment.

Goel pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and securities fraud, according to a report in The New York Times. If convicted, he would face a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.

"I cannot express how sorry I am for my conduct," Goel said in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, according to the Times. "I intend to do the right thing," he said.

Prior to the plea, Goel had been placed on administrative leave. He eventually quit his job at Intel.

Adobe Systems, evidently stung by recent criticisms of its widely used Flash Player browser plug-in, has promised better performance on Mac systems.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said. "In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and, we believe, will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering."

Things should get better with video, too, one of the primary reasons Flash has thrived on the Web. "Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on--for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34 percent of CPU on Mac versus 16 percent on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video."

The words reflect an Adobe effort to explain itself while under competitive threat. HTML is gradually encroaching on the turf Flash has had largely to itself, and some are taking advantage of the opportunity to bash Flash.

Adobe also is taking on the matter of bugs.

In particular, it's answering a security problem Matthew Dempsky reported in September 2008, shortly before Flash Player 10 was issued. Dempsky took Lynch to task for his statement in the comment that "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."

Flash Player manager Emmy Huang apologized for the issue in a separate blog post.

"We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch. The mistake we made was marking this bug for 'next' release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that," Huang said. "It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly."

And for those who are interested in helping Adobe track down problems, Adobe's Ted Patrick called on people to try the Flash Player 10.1 beta.

Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.

The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.

The number of IPv4 Internet addresses still unused is steadily dropping toward zero, according to Comcast.

(Credit: Comcast)

"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Friday. "Given all of this, we're proud to make YouTube available over IPv6 and to begin streaming videos from a select number of sites worldwide to our Google over IPv6 partners."

Because IPv6 hasn't been backward compatible with IPv4, its adoption has been a classic chicken-and-egg problem in the industry. With no services available, there was little incentive to built out the new IPv6 network to attach to them, and with no network, there was little incentive for services.

That's gradually changing, though, as the number of unused IPv4 addresses dwindles away. Google, among others, has been trying to nudge the world toward IPv6.

One big gating factor to IPv6 adoption is support by Internet service providers. Comcast is testing the IPv6 waters, though, with a trial program this year for its customers.

"In 2010, we will be conducting several IPv6 technical trials in our production network, with customers, in order to prepare for the IPv6 transition," Comcast said on its form for volunteering for IPv6 trial. "We will consider all volunteers."

The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate--4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren't generally available, and some experts forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.

IBM on Monday is launching its long-anticipated Power7 processor and systems based on the chip.

IBM Power7 chip

(Credit: IBM)

The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores--four times the number of cores in the prior-generation Power6--in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors--systems that Power7 will compete with--typically have two threads per processing core and contain four cores.

Blg Blue has already tipped its hand on the Power7 chip in discussions about its upcoming Blue Water supercomputer.

Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group, told CNET last year.

Rivals include Hewlett-Packard servers based on Intel's Xeon and "Tukwila" Itanium processors and servers from Sun Microsystems.

New Power7 systems

The new Power7 systems include:

• IBM Power 780: a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 cores.
  
• IBM Power 770: a midrange system with up to 64 Power7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than Power6 processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as Power6 processors.
  
• IBM Power 755: a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores.
  

IBM is touting the Power7's ability to manage millions of transactions in real time--necessary for applications such as smart electrical grids. IBM said electric utilities can move from processing less than one million meter reads per day, in a traditional grid for example, to more than 85 million reads per day in a smart grid.

eMeter, a leading maker of software that runs e-grids, ran a successful benchmark on IBM Power6 systems for more than 20 million smart meters. "Combining eMeter and IBM's Power7 we are confident we can hit much higher numbers to meet their needs," Scott Smith, eMeter client business manager, said in a statement.

The chief executive officer of SAP, Leo Apotheker, has resigned his post and from the company's board, after the board declined to extend his contract, the business software maker announced Sunday.

Leo Apotheker, SAP's former chief executive officer.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)

The resignation, which was reportedly by mutual decision, is effective immediately.

To replace Apotheker, the SAP's board has appointed co-CEOs: Bill McDermott, head of field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development.

"The new setup of the SAP executive board will allow SAP to better align product innovation with customer needs," SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner said in a statement. "The new leadership team will continue to drive forward SAP's strategy and focus on profitable growth, and will deliver its innovations in 2010 to expand SAP's leadership of the business software market."

Stung by lower sales and earnings, SAP actually beat expectations in the final quarter of 2009. The company in January reported sales of 10.67 billion euros ($14.9 billion), 8 percent lower than the 11.56 billion euros from 2008.

Despite the downturn, overall fourth-quarter sales and especially those from software-related services beat estimates from both the company and analysts. Operating margins for the full year also were better than expected. SAP attributed the improvement in part to cost cuts and layoffs it had announced earlier in the year.

Apotheker was appointed co-chief executive in 2008, serving with then-current CEO Henning Kagermann. He took over the role of CEO in 2009 after 19 years with the company.