Scott Ferguson

After years of falling behind IBM and other companies in the race to build the worlds fastest supercomputers, NEC is looking to gain back some momentum with a new machine that offers 839 trillion calculations per second. At the companys Tokyo headquarters, NEC executives unveiled the SX-9, a supercomputer that offers a peak performance of […]

These are good times for the PC market. These are good times to buy a PC. Two recent reports from IDC on microprocessor and PC sales indicate that demand for PCs is booming—microprocessor sales shot to $8 billion in the third quarter of 2007, up 14.8 percent, and PC shipments jumped to 68.5 million units […]

Intel will pay Transmeta Corporation $150 million and $20 million annually during the next five years to settle a patent dispute and use various microprocessor technologies that Transmeta claimed infringed on its patents, both companies announced Oct. 24. Transemta had accused Intel of using its patented LongRun and LongRun 2 technologies, which help manage the […]

NEW YORK—XenSource believes that its ready to challenge VMware. At the Ziff Davis Enterprise 2007 Virtualization Summit Oct. 24, Simon Crosby, a founder of XenSource, told the audience that the open-source virtualization company is ready to bring the technology to a much wider audience and ready to challenge VMwares dominance within the x86 virtualization market. […]

Dell is bundling XenSources open-source virtualization technology across its line of PowerEdge servers, which will give the systems makers customers an alternative to VMwares ESX Server and Virtual Infrastructure suite. The two companies will offer details of the agreement at Citrixs iForum conference Oct. 23. Earlier in 2007, Citrix Systems announced that it would buy […]

Sun Microsystems is rounding out its portfolio of Intel-based products. On Oct. 23, the Santa Clara, Calif., company will roll out the Sun Ultra 24 workstation, the first of its workstations to use Intel microprocessors. Sun already offers workstations that use its own SPARC processors as well as a line of workstations based on chips […]

XenSource is signing up with another major OEM that will sell its open-source virtualization technology with a top-tier server line. The same day that XenSource, now owned by Citrix Systems, announced Dell will bundle its rebranded Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition—formerly the XenEnterprise suite—in Dells PowerEdge servers, XenSource officials also said Hewlett-Packard has agreed to resell […]

Chip makers AMD and Intel are competing viciously for shares of the mobile processor market and notebook and portable customers can expect to benefit as both companies race for new technologies and a price war ensures. The financials of both companies, spilled in quarterly earnings reports made public Oct. 17 by Intel, Oct. 18 by […]

Thin-client vendor Wyse Technology is adding new hardware and management capabilities to its portfolio. At the 2007 iForum in Las Vegas Oct. 22, Wyse is unveiling several new models that will make up its Wyse G class of thin-client PCs. In addition, the San Jose, Calif., company is announcing that its thin clients will now […]

For several years, thin-client PCs, along with their PC blade cousins, were considered a niche market segment. They were mainly relegated to call centers for temporary workers and lacked the graphics ability and IT infrastructure to support demanding desktop operating systems and applications. The only top tier vendor that continued to engineer and sell PC […]

Advanced Micro Devices posted a net loss of $396 million, down from a $136 million gain a year ago, and the chip makers fourth straight fiscal quarter loss. AMD posted $1.6 billion total revenue for the third quarter—an improvement of 18 percent compared to the second quarter of 2007 and nearly 23 percent better than […]

A group of 10 Canadian universities has tapped an IBM supercomputer cluster to help store and analyze the huge amount of data expected when physicists from the CERN project in Switzerland turn on the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in 2008. Researchers from these Canadian universities are all part of the Atlas project, which will […]