Jeff Burt

Attendees at the Design Automation Conference are getting a glance at the first fruits of a collaboration aimed at creating a comprehensive solution for the design and manufacturing of mobile Internet devices. At the DAC show July 27 in San Francisco, the three companies that make up The Common Platform group-IBM, Samsung and Chartered Semiconductor-ARM […]

SGI might be building a new high-end Altix system powered by Intel’s upcoming “Nehalem EX” chips, but that doesn’t mean the company is abandoning Itanium, according to SGI CEO Mark Barrenechea. In a blog post July 24, Barrenechea said that SGI will continue supporting and developing systems that run on Intel’s Itanium processor. The blog […]

Dell has refreshed its online power consumption calculator and is promoting its energy-efficient PCs and workstations in conjunction with the new federal Energy Star 5.0 specifications, which were released July 1. Dell’s Client Energy Savings Calculator had been like that of other systems makers, measuring the energy consumed by particular systems and power supplies, Allen […]

Officials with Advanced Micro Devices are celebrating the shipment of the 500 millionth x86 processor. The announcement is part of AMD’s ongoing touting of the company’s 40th year of existence. AMD is noting the milestone by giving customers the chance to win one of four Pavilion dv2z ultra-thin notebooks from Hewlett-Packard. To win, customers need […]

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.-Three years ago, Hewlett-Packard officials announced an ambitious data center consolidation plan that would reduce the number of facilities worldwide from 85 to six. The project not only has given HP a much more cost-effective, efficient and dynamic data center environment, but it also has become a showcase for the company’s technologies that could […]

When Rackable Systems closed its $42.5 million acquisition of Silicon Graphics Inc. in May, officials touted the new company as one that could play a significant role not only in the data center, but also in the supercomputing space. Two months later, officials with the new SGI-now Silicon Graphics International-say the integration of the two […]

12 Reasons Why Unix Wont Disappear Any Time Soon (and 3 Reasons It Might) by Jeffrey Burt Money In HP, IBM and Sun have spent billions building up the features in their Unix variants. For example, in April Sun updated Solaris 10 to include greater optimization with Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series chips and more virtualization […]

IBM is expanding its partnerships with networking vendors Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems in a move that should increase networking options for customers. The enhanced partnerships, which include OEM and reseller agreements, are part of a larger strategy called the Data Center Networking initiative that was kicked off about two years ago, […]

Emerging markets hold a lot of promise for IT hardware vendors, according to research firm Gartner. In a report issued July 22, Gartner analysts said that in 2009, IT hardware spending growth rates in emerging markets will be larger than those in more mature markets. In addition, spending in emerging markets on virtualization and cloud […]

As Intel officials had promised, the giant chip maker is appealing the European Commission’s $1.45 billion fine stemming from antitrust allegations leveled by rival Advanced Micro Devices. Intel filed the appeal July 22, calling the EC’s ruling wrong and did not take into account the realities of the highly competitive processor marketplace, which has resulted […]

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu are rolling out enhanced UltraSPARC-based servers into a Unix market that could see continued shifting over the coming months. Officials with Sun and Fujitsu July 21 boasted improved performance and virtualization capabilities in the systems, thanks to the addition of the 1.6GHz UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors and the latest […]

IBM is readying servers that will ship with the upcoming Power7 processor, which officials say will offer two to three times the performance of the current Power6 systems while using the same amount of energy. IBM officials made the announcement July 21. In addition, the company announced new system management software designed to make it […]