David Needle

May was a good month for semiconductor chip sales. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported chip sales of $19.7 billion for May, a 9.4 percent hike from the $18.1 billion tallied for the same month a year ago. The increase from April of this year, when sales were $19.6 billion, was only 0.7 percent. But […]

Microsoft’s controversial Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program designed to combat pirated versions of Windows is facing its first lawsuit. A check-in feature of the program, in which the users’ computers connect to Microsoft servers on a daily basis to check for updated configuration files, was the most controversial element of WGA. The feature remains though […]

Reporter’s Notebook: It is very much like old times for Scott McNealy. There he was earlier this month at Stanford University to help christen the Computational Earth and Environmental Science research center that Sun donated equipment too. Old times because Stanford was where it all started for McNealy, and “employee #1” Andy Bechtolsheim, who was […]

Virtualization is a hot commodity and Hewlett-Packard thinks its latest release makes it more valuable for its enterprise customers. Today, HP announced a new Virtual Server Environment (VSE) Reference Architecture for Oracle Real Application Clusters for HP-UX 11i database customers. The software dynamically scales the HP Integrity server infrastructure when mission-critical database workloads fluctuate. Another […]

Dell has earned a great reputation for aggressive pricing and prompt delivery of the latest computing technology. It’s less well-regarded as a premium enterprise service provider but hopes to change that with today’s announcement. The Round Rock, TX computer giant has upgraded its Platinum service and support program to a new Platinum Plus program that […]

ClearCube has announced it has begun shipping faster versions of its PC blade system based on Intel dual-core Pentium (the ClearCube R1300) and Xeon processors (the ClearCube R2200). Much as a server blade packs the key elements of a server onto a circuit board, ClearCube includes a central processor, memory, hard drive and video processor […]

Intel’s ongoing and aggressive 90-day review of its business operations has netted its first big result. Today, the chip giant announced it had sold its communications and applications processor business to its Santa Clara, Calif. neighbor, Marvel Technology Group for $600 million. Marvell  gains processors for handheld devices, including smart phones and personal digital assistants […]

NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO – Intel never sounded quite so bullish when it was promising to recapture the performance crown as it did today, when it proclaimed to have done just that. As expected, Intel unveiled its latest Xeon processor, the dual-core “Woodcrest,” at simultaneous media events today in New York and San Francisco. […]

Intel and its major computer partners are planning to unveil “Woodcrest,” the long-awaited next generation server chip based on the company’s new Core microarchitecture. All the major system vendors, including HP, IBM, and Dell have announced plans to support the new architecture with some servers slated to be ship as soon as next week. AMD […]

There’s growth in grids. IBM said in response to increasing worldwide demand for supercomputing resources, it is expanding the availability of computer resources available through its computing on demand program. IBM also said it would for the first time offer significant Unix-based capacity based on its Power 5+ architecture. One company already on board is […]

There are fast computers, and then there’s IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and IBM today announced the world’s fastest supercomputer has outdone itself. In its latest testing, IBM said its BlueGene/L (BG/L) achieved a sustained performance of 207.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS), a new record for […]

Sun Microsystems today joined Silicon Valley neighbor Stanford University in unveiling an advanced research center. The Stanford Computational Earth and Environmental Science (CEES) research facility is expected to allow deeper analysis, simulation and prediction related to complex Earth processes. Research at CEES could lead to better earthquake detection, oil exploration and the effects of oceanic […]