Daily Tech Briefing: June 16, 2014

Samsung is touting its newly introduced Galaxy Tab S tablet as a flagship product, featuring a new Super AMOLED screen with roughly 4 million pixels – which is more than the iPad Air.

Samsung also says that the construction of the display makes it more vibrant than an LCD, in addition to cutting down on reflectivity—which helps with outdoor viewing. At 6.4mm thin, it’s also one of the thinnest tablets on the market. The Tab S will be sold in 8.4- and 10.5-inch models.

The proposed merger between AT&T and DirecTV appears to be moving through the regulatory approval process without a great deal of controversy. The Senate has scheduled hearings on the matter later this month.

But House leaders told The Hill political news Web site they don’t plan to hold any, since the merger doesn’t appear to be anticompetitive in many arenas. AT&T hopes the deal will give it some needed access to media when competing with the also-planned merger of Comcast and Time Warner.

Intel is reporting strong demand for business PCs, which is creating positive financial momentum. The company now says it should see revenue growth all year, beating its earlier projection of roughly flat sales. Some of the improvements may be due to the need to replace many Windows XP systems following Microsoft’s decision to end support for the operating system.

Hewlett-Packard executives have announced a new, open-source server architecture it is calling the Machine. The announcement came during the HP Discover 2014 show last week, where the company also unveiled both its Moonshot microservers and a new line of Apollo supercomputers.

The company says the Machine design is based on its continued work on various server components, in addition to its memristor memory technology, high-speed silicon photonics and a custom operating system.