Jeff Burt

At the Structure conference in San Francisco June 25, Facebook Vice President Jonathan Heiliger took chip makers and OEMs to task, saying the social networking site was not seeing the expected performance improvements from systems powered by the newest processors. Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, said Facebook engineers were not seeing the […]

Three months after CEO Paul Otellini announced that the PC market had bottomed out, Intel’s latest quarterly numbers indicate that the industry may be stabilizing. Intel July 14 posted strong numbers in the second quarter, including $8 billion in revenue and a $1 billion profit. However, when the European Commission’s $1.45 billion fine for antitrust […]

Dell is going to continue moving away from its PC roots and deeper into bigger-and higher-margin-areas, particularly services and the data centers of large enterprises. At Dell’s annual analyst day in Austin, Texas, on July 14, CEO Michael Dell and other executives talked about their desire to change the company’s product mix to move away […]

VMware is putting new capabilities into its vCenter virtualization management product. VMware July 13 unveiled the AppSpeed and Chargeback features for vCenter, which are designed to help data center administrators automate the management of their virtualized environments. Enterprises are continuing to grow their use of virtualization in the data center and are moving more of […]

The friction between Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems is continuing, this time in the area of networking equipment. Specifically, the issue is the pricing of the networking equipment. HP officials are pointing to comments some Cisco officials made during the company’s Partner Summit in June as an indication that Cisco is instituting a program urging partners […]

With the release of two new models of its six-core Opteron processor, Advanced Micro Devices is not only expanding the reach of its “Istanbul” family of chips, but also is putting more pressure on larger rival Intel. AMD officials are looking to the six-core Opteron processors to compete not only with Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series […]

IT professionals at large and midsize enterprises are beginning to plan to make investments in technology and people, according to reseller CDW. In its latest survey of IT decision makers, CDW found that these companies-as well as federal government agencies-are feeling that the industry is reaching the bottom, Mark Gambill, CDW chief marketing officer, said […]

The semiconductor and electronics equipment sectors are the latest to see growth projections lowered. Research firm iSuppli is predicting that both areas will see revenue declines in 2009 be steeper than initially projected, thanks in large part to the woes of the struggling auto industry. However, they also said that both markets could see a […]

Inside Intels Chip Creation and Innovation by Jeffrey Burt Starting with Sand Sand is the base ingredient for semiconductor manufacturing, given its high percentages of silicon. The silicon is purified through multiple steps to reach a semiconductor manufacturing quality called Electronic Grade Silicon, which means there can only be one alien atom every 1 billion […]

As the use of cloud computing grows and the model becomes more complex, end users are going to need help integrating the various combinations of services, according to research firm Gartner. The need will give rise to what Gartner is calling “cloud service brokerages,” or third parties whose job it will be to negotiate the […]

Gartner is the latest research firm to lower its projections for IT spending this year. Gartner analysts July 7 said corporations are continuing to slash IT budgets in face of the global recession, and consumers aren’t yet feeling confident enough in the future to open up their wallets. The result is that Gartner, which in […]

Federal regulators have given the go-ahead to Nokia Siemens Networks’ $650 million bid for a part of Nortel Networks’ business. The Federal Trade Commission on July 6 put the bid on a list of approved mergers. Nokia Siemens’ bid, announced June 19, is part of a larger process that will decide the future of Nortel, […]