David Needle

IBM today announced a breakthrough development in semiconductor performance today. Working with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Cryogenic Lab, IBM said it was able to achieve a blazing 500GHz performance, with one caveat; the chip had to be cooled to near-absolute zero degrees temperatures. “We realize 4.2 degrees Kelvin is not a practical point of […]

PALO ALTO, CALIF. — Yesterday Sun Microsystems declared it was ready to enter the blades war. But today HP made its own bombshell announcement here at company headquarters. The HP BladeSystem c-Class line of blade servers, slated to ship next month, adds a host of new features, energy savings and improved manageability as the successor […]

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Only two companies stand in the way of Sun becoming a major player in server blades. Unfortunately, those two companies are IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which dominate the market for server blades with a 40 and 36 percent market share, respectively, according to IDC. But playing the role of upstart competitor is […]

Intel’s  researchers are closer to development of processors that use “tri-gate” or three-dimensional transistors, the microscopic, silicon-based switches that process the ones and zeros of the digital world. The 3D angle is tied to the latest semiconductor research into nanotechnology . At the nanotech level some transistor features may consist of only a few layers […]

The latest company perk is, literally, music to the ears of National Semiconductor employees. The chip manufacturer announced today it’s giving all 8,500 employees a new 30GB video iPod. The news comes on the heels of National announcing the most successful fiscal year in its history, but the company said the iPods are more than […]

Is this the IBM PC all over again? IBM thinks there are some strong parallels. The company that helped spawn the PC-compatible industry with the IBM PC back in 1981 thinks history will repeat itself with the blade industry and is ready for a similar expansion of competing players based on IBM’s Blade architecture. That […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – With dual-core processors going mainstream, chip makers are busy working on the next generation of multi-core processors that add even more processing engines to the CPU. Intel has gone on record as predicting there will be systems with dozens and even hundreds of cores in the next decade. The chip giant […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Don’t get too comfortable with wireless options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Oh, no, they’re not going anywhere. They’ll just soon have a lot of company crowding your mobile PC. In the next few years Intel predicts the number of radio technologies that connect mobile users to the Internet and each other […]

MENLO PARK, Calif. -– Sun Microsystems showed off a number of cutting-edge and just plain edgy research projects at a recent open labs event here at one of its main campuses. Sun Labs is focused mainly on near-term (one to three years) projects designed to augment Sun’s current lineup, though some break out into new […]

SAN FRANCISCO — HP and IBM have already announced new servers powered by Intel’s latest dual-core Xeon processors, but Dell is the first major vendor to ship them. Dell said PowerEdge 1950, 2950 and 2900 servers based on Intel’s “Dempsey”, the 5000 series dual-core Xeon processor, are available now. The Xeon series 5100, codenamed Woodcrest, […]

Transmeta, the once high-flying chip company that pitched more energy-efficient x86 processors years before Intel or AMD, is back in the game. In a surprise announcement today, AMD said it plans to buy Transmeta’s Efficeon processor for use in desktop computers intended for emerging markets. Under terms of the exclusive deal, the 1.1 GHz Transmeta […]

HP’s solution for big companies that need rock solid reliability in a server has been its NonStop Integrity line. Call it big iron for a big iron budget. But that’s about to change, HP hopes. Seeing an opportunity to offer those same “business continuity” features to mid-range companies and institutions, HP  today unveiled the newest […]