John G. Spooner

Microsofts plan to delay Windows Vista will bushwhack fourth-quarter PC sales, industry observers say. The software maker on March 21 said it would delay the release of Vista, an upgrade of its Windows operating system that promises PC users a better user interface and improvements in stability and security. The company said it would deliver […]

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices may get a hand in the ultramobile PC. The chip maker offers a fleet of relatively low-power, low-price chips in its Geode processor line, in addition to selling a series of mobile Sempron and Turion processors for notebook PCs. Several of the chips may fit into the new category of […]

Microsoft has pushed back its plans to support a new type of PC firmware, called UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which has begun working its way into the PC market. Company officials said in a presentation during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in early March that Microsoft would support UEFI in its […]

The first generation of ultramobile PCs have yet to hit the market, but some analysts are already calling them “tweeners” and projecting dismal sales without significant upgrades in the future. New ultramobile PCs, or UMPCs for short, are being pitched by companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Samsung as portable PC companions that are more […]

Computer enthusiasts are reporting the creation of a method for booting Windows on one of Apple Computers newest Macs. The Onmac.net Web site reported on March 16 that it has come up with a method for booting Microsofts Windows XP alongside Apples Mac OS X on Apples Intel processor-based Macs, which began rolling out earlier […]

Intel has taken the wraps off of a new, low-power, dual-core Xeon chip for blade servers, the first of three new server chips it will roll out in coming weeks. The chip maker on March 12 said it had begun shipping its Xeon LV chip. The Xeon LV is Intels first blade server-oriented processor to […]

Microsoft has pushed back its plans to support a new type of PC firmware, called UEFI, or United Extensible Firmware Interface, which has begun working its way into the PC market. Microsoft said in a presentation during last weeks Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that the software giant would roll out UEFI support—adopting the […]

Intel has made low-power processors its first priority, but its next step is to focus on system-level power management—the cooling fans, circuits and voltage regulators—inside computers, company executives said at its spring developer confab here. Officials for the chip maker at the Intel Developer Forum said the companys researchers are attacking system power with a […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel is assembling the building blocks for a radically different chip architecture that could arrive by the end of the decade. Although the chip giant officially announced its Core Microarchitecture at its spring Developer Forum, here, researchers at the company have already been working on a potential follow-on that will be capable of harboring […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel will continue riding the bus route. Executives at the chip maker, in a high-level discussion of its Core Microarchitecture at its spring Developer Forum, here, said that the companys bus approach—using a series of pipelines and a discrete controller to shuttle data between its processors and memory versus directly connecting the chips—still has […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Advanced Micro Devices says it wants to help create a better measurement for server power consumption. Executives at the chip maker, who are in town to tell its story this week while rival Intel holds its bi-annual developer forum, said that AMD is working with others in the industry to better understand the various […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel plans to power up the wireless capabilities of notebook PCs. The chip maker will offer, later this year, a WiMax PC card that will allow notebooks to tap high-speed Internet connections, and during 2007 it aims to equip its notebooks with a new generation of higher-bandwidth Wi-Fi, dubbed 802.11n. It also showed off […]