David Needle

The computer chip industry continues to break sales records. In October, worldwide sales of semiconductors reached a new high watermark, surpassing $20 billion, according to figures released today by the Semiconductor Industry Association. Sales are up 6.75 percent from the $18.4 billion that the SIA reported for October 2004, and 2.5 percent from $19.6 billion […]

To the average consumer it was just another computer ad. But there was something extraordinary about the full-page ad for HP computers that ran in USA Today earlier this fall. For the first time, a national, mainstream publication had run an ad featuring a family of computer systems — desktop, notebook and server — featuring […]

Intel plans to build a major chip manufacturing plant in Israel, at a cost of $3.5 billion. Construction is set to start immediately in Kiryat Gat on what will be Intel’s seventh 300-millimeter fabrication facility, Fab 28. Fab 28 is being designed to produce leading-edge microprocessors on 45-nanometer process technology, and it’s expected to go […]

Citing the public’s right to know, a prominent media coalition of some 25 news entities and open government groups is urging the judge in the AMD versus Intel lawsuit to make public evidence uncovered in the discovery phase of the case. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) sent its request in a […]

English language purists might cringe, but it may not be long before consumers routinely talk about “TiVoing” their favorite TV show to a Viiv PC. Intel and TiVo announced today that they are working together on a new TiVo application. It will let subscribers securely transfer their favorite television programs from the TiVo digital video […]

PALO ALTO — HP is broadening its six-year-old utility computing initiative by making it publicly available for the first time, primarily to enterprise customers. To date, the computing and services giant has incubated the service to a handful of blue chip clients such as DreamWorks and Schlumberger, and select ISVs . The newly branded HP […]

Wi-Fi, the wireless technology that lets you surf the Web by the pool and make stock trades at the local Starbucks, is growing by leaps and bounds. A record-breaking 100 million Wi-Fi chipsets shipped this year, according to data just released by In-Stat and the Wi-Fi Alliance. The two groups expect total shipments for the […]

It’s a phone, it’s a PDA, no wait, it’s also a high-speed modem. The latest BlackBerry handset released this week is all of the above, thanks to an agreement between Research In Motion (RIM) and Verizon Wireless . RIM’s BlackBerry 7130e is the company’s first handset to use Verizon’s BroadBand Access service, which is based […]

As demand for VoIP products continues to grow, so will the market for the integrated circuits that make the Internet-enabled voice communication possible. Research firm In-Stat is forecasting a five-fold increase in VoIP ICs, as VoIP functionality is increasingly integrated into customer premise equipment including modems, routers and residential gateways. In-Stat pegged the VoIP market […]

HP has a message for Sun Microsystems: Welcome to the green club. Where have you been? Sun made a big show earlier this month of playing up the environmental advantages of its recently introduced UltraSparc T1 with CoolThreads processor, formerly known as Niagara. Calling the UltraSparc T1 the first “eco-responsible microprocessor,” Sun is touting the […]

Those tiny “thumb” or flash drives popping up everywhere just got a little smarter. Leading providers such as Kingston, Memorex, SanDisk and Verbatim are incorporating software from U3 that adds applications to the handy storage USB-enabled devices. These U3-labeled smart drives include what the company calls a “personal workspace” that saves not only data and […]

The worldwide market for semiconductors is expected to reach record sales levels for the next several years, thanks in large part to consumer demand for smarter and more media-savvy gadgets, according to the the Semiconductor Industry Association The SIA’s annual forecast of global semiconductor sales is projecting a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 […]