Intel's Atom microprocessor

The success of Intel's Atom microprocessor, used mainly in netbooks, helped the chip maker gain market share in every quarter of 2008 and could carry the company this year as well.

Intel's share of the microprocessor market grew every quarter last year, market researcher iSuppli said Wednesday.

[ Intel's Atom is also beginning to show up in systems that some vendors consider full-featured PCs. | Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

The chip maker ended the fourth quarter of 2008 with an 81.8 percent share of global microprocessor revenue, up from 78.4 percent the same time a year earlier.

"Intel's low-priced Atom has become increasingly popular as the netbook market has gained steam," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at iSuppli, in a statement. He added that Intel's strength in microprocessors overall and its strong marketing were the main factors behind its strong revenue performance last year.

Intel's biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), lost market share last year.

AMD's share of microprocessor revenue shrank to 10.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, down from 14.1 percent a year earlier.

Netbooks could continue to boost Intel this year.

Although the company will see more competition from other chip makers entering the netbook microprocessor market, the overall market for netbooks is expected to continue to grow at breakneck speed.

DisplaySearch predicts netbook shipments will grow 66 percent this year to over 27 million units, in part due to the global recession.

"With the economic crisis on everyone's mind, many buyers are adjusting their discretionary spending and purchasing mini-notes (netbooks) as lower-priced alternatives to notebook PCs," the market researcher said in a report on Wednesday.

Aside from the downturn, the popularity of the devices took off because they're thin, light and more affordable than laptops.

"With the lone exception of Apple, all of the top 15 PC brands have entered the [netbook] market, initially as a response to competitive threats posed by Acer and Asus, but also to satisfy demand for low-priced, entry-level PCs," said John Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch, in the report.

Asustek Computer (Asus) pioneered the commercial launch of netbook devices in late 2007 with its Eee PC. The company was soon followed by Hewlett-Packard and Acer, which led the netbook market last year with its Aspire One

IBM and Sun Microsystems

April 5, 2009 (IDG News Service) IBM and Sun Microsystems have been unable to reach agreement on the terms of an acquisition, with the talks nearing collapse on Sunday, according to news reports.

Sun's board rejected a formal acquisition offer from IBM on Saturday, considering the offer price too low, The Wall Street Journal said. Sun was also concerned that the offer gave IBM too much leeway to walk away from the deal, according to the newspaper, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the situation.

The two companies are reported to have been in merger talks since at least March 18. The acquisition, valued at about $7 billion, would extend IBM's lead at the top of the server market and give it control of Sun's Solaris, Java and other technologies.

But the companies had reportedly been haggling over a price, and on Saturday Sun rejected IBM's offer of $9.40 per share, according to The New York Times, which also said the talks have fallen apart.

Sun had been seeking assurances that IBM would not walk away from the deal even if it faced tough regulatory hurdles, the Times said, and IBM considered the requirement too onerous.

Sun has sent a notice to IBM terminating its right to exclusive negotiations, and IBM in return has withdrawn its offer to buy Sun, the Journal said.

Such brinkmanship isn't uncommon during late-stage negotiations, the paper noted, and the companies may yet resume talks. But for now, the stance between them was described as "confrontational."

IBM and Sun were first reported to be in merger talks two and a half weeks ago. Neither company has confirmed or denied that any discussions are under way.

IBM has conducted its due diligence of Sun and found nothing that would prevent it from buying the company, the Journal said.

If the companies fail to make a deal, it is unclear whether another large vendor will step in and bid for Sun. After IBM first expressed its interest in an acquisition, Sun's investment bankers shopped the company around to most large IT vendors over the winter to see if any others were interested, the Journal said, but none were.

That puts Sun in a tough position, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. With no other suitor likely to step forward, Sun will probably have to accept an offer from IBM eventually, even if it means swallowing less favorable terms, he said.

The uncertainty around Sun's future will make companies wary of making big investments in Sun's products, he said, adding to the pressure to make a deal.

"Enterprise customers prize vendor stability; they do not buy big ticket items from vendors who are in turmoil," Olds said.

IE 8

Setelah melalui tahap uji coba dengan diluncurkannya versi Release Candidate dari Internet Explorer 8 beberapa waktu yang lalu, akhirnya Microsoft menyelesaikan versi final dari browser andalannya tersebut. Internet Explorer 8 final version secara resmi oleh Microsoft pada hari Kamis (18/03) yang lalu telah diluncurkan ke publik.

Peluncuran Internet Explorer 8 ini sebenarnya telah lama dinantikan publik, mengingat hingga saat ini Internet Explorer (IE) masih mendominasi market browser Internet di seluruh dunia. Dengan kata lain, browser terbaru besutan Microsoft ini tetap akan mempunyai captive market-nya sendiri yang menjamin kecepatannya dalam penerimaan konsumen. Microsoft sendiri mengklaim browser terbarunya, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) ini sebagai browser tercepat paling aman yang pernah mereka buat.

Microsoft sendiri tidak main-main dengan pernyataan tersebut, mengingat selain menambahkan aspek kecepatan, Microsoft juga menambahkan feature ‘Domain Highlighting’ yang secara otomatis akan menyorot nama top level domain halaman situs yang kita akses. Selain itu SmartScreen Filter juga akan mendukung keamanan user dengan cara memberikan peringatan otomatis pada saat user mengakses halaman-halaman situs yang dianggap berbahaya oleh Microsoft.

Dari versi Release Candidate yang ditawarkan Microsoft dalam Internet Explorer ini, setidaknya kita bisa mengetahui ada 3 feature unggulan yang ditawarkan dalam browser ini, yaitu Webslices, Accelerator, dan Visual Search.

Webslice sebagai salah satu feature unggulan dalam Internet Explorer akan memberikan kemudahan bagi user dalam hal akses informasi website. Tidak dapat dipungkiri, dalam aktivitas browsing yang kita lakukan setiap hari, sebenarnya kita hanya membutuhkan beberapa bagian informasi saja dari setiap situs yang kita kunjungi. Kecenderungan inilah yang difasilitasi oleh Microsoft dalam Internet Explorer 8 ini. Kita dapat mengumpulkan dan mengikuti bagian dari informasi-informasi penting yang ingin kita ikuti perkembangannya dari berbagai situs yang sering kita kunjungi, hanya dengan cara click tombol ‘Webslices’. Setelah menerapkan ‘Webslices’ pada bagian tersebut, maka browser secara otomatis akan menampilkannya pada ‘Favourite Bar’. Namun feature ini mungkin belum sepenuhnya dapat kita terapkan untuk website-website dalam negeri, karena untuk dapat memakai feature ini, dari sisi teknologi web development situs yang bersangkutan harus sudah dipastikan kompatibilitasnya terlebih dahulu.

Selain webslice, dua feature penting lainnya adalah Accelerator dan Visual Search. Accelerator berguna untuk mendapatkan informasi cepat dari setiap kata yang kita pilih (highlited) pada saat kita membaca sebuah artikel tanpa kita harus berpindah halaman browser. Tentunya proses ini akan mempercepat proses pembacaan kita terhadap sebuah artikel atau berita, tanpa kita harus mencari kembali secara manual kata-kata yang ingin kita pahami artinya dalam sebuah pemberitaan, dengan cara meng-copy dan mencari artinya melalui halaman lain dari browser. Dengan Accelerator ini, user akan dapat dengan mudah menemukan berbagai opsi definisi mengenai sebuah kata. Ada beberapa opsi keterangan yang dapat kita pilih dalam Accelerator ini, antara lain ‘Blog with Windows Live’, ‘Email with Windows Live’, ‘Map with Live Search’, ‘Search with Google’ hingga ‘Translate with Live Search’.

Sedangkan Visual Search merupakan feature pencarian bergambar, yang diharapkan akan lebih memperkaya hasil pencarian yang diberikan sehingga dapat lebih memuaskan user dari sisi content maupun visual. Konsep Visual Search ini sendiri sebenarnya berangkat dari kenyataan bahwa aspek visual manusia memegang peranan penting dalam pemahamannya akan suatu hal. Dengan menampilkan tidak hanya content, namun juga gambar-gambar yang mendeskripsikannya, diharapkan akan semakin meningkatkan kepuasan user dalam mendapatkan hasil dari pencarian yang dilakukannya.(dna)

Intel's Nehalem simply sizzles

ntel's new Nehalem Xeon CPUs, which are being introduced in countless one- and two-socket servers and workstations today, have already generated a lot of heat. While introducing the new processors to technical journalists in February, Nick Knupffer, Intel's global communications manager, boasted that "Nehalem represents the biggest performance jump we've made since the introduction of the Pentium Pro."

This claim was met with outright skepticism by nearly everyone in the room, and certainly by me. But after running a two-socket, eight-core Nehalem system in my lab for the past few weeks, it would appear that Knupffer is right. Intel has built a better mousetrap. And it used part of AMD's blueprints to do it.

[ Intel or AMD? See "Where does Nehalem get its juice?," "Intel engineers stage CPU coup," "AMD's six-shooter is loaded and ready," and "AMD spins Moore's Law in IT's favor." ]

Back when AMD's Opteron was ruling the performance roost, Intel was busy gluing two separate cores onto a single die and calling it a dual-core CPU. Memory bandwidth lagged due to the central off-die memory controller, and while the overall performance of the processor was acceptable, it lacked the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) punch that was the Opteron's claim to fame. Nehalem is based on a NUMA architecture, much like the Opteron, and its performance is miles ahead of anything else Intel has released to date. Color me impressed.

Inside Nehalem
The Nehalem chips (Xeon 3500 series for single socket and Xeon 5500 series for two-socket systems) feature a quad-core layout with 731 million transistors, 256KB of L2 cache per core, 8MB of L3 cache, deeper and faster caching, and better branch prediction. Essentially, Nehalem is a blend of the strengths of Intel's legacy Xeon processors with a fundamental architecture change in the incorporation of NUMA.

Tags: Intel, Nehalem, Xeon

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