INTEL'S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
Still wants you to pick up the bill at dinner though
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
OCZ'S REVODRIVE PCI Express based SSD was something of a surprise when it was announced and it's a fairly unique product in the market considering its competitive retail price compared to a standard SSD. However, it's now looking like OCZ is readying a new model called the RevoDrive-B which is yet another PCI Express based SSD, but with an extra trick up its sleeve, it's got a pair of SATA ports for drive caching.
MICRON AND INTEL has announced that they're the first to sample 25nm three bits per cell NAND Flash memory today, also known as TLC NAND Flash. The companies are getting ready to enter mass production later this year, for what the two are claiming is the industries smallest and highest capacity NAND Flash memory.
YESTERDAY AMD QUIETLY dropped the prices for many of its Phenom II and Athlon II processors, although the biggest price drop is a mere 18.9 percent. Some models had their price dropped by as little as 99 cents and one model even went up in price by $4. We've compiled the numbers to make life easier for you to see the price changes, although there really isn't much to get excited about.
IT LOOKS LIKE some people are finally starting to catch on to what we have been saying for almost four years now, Nvidia is building an x86 chip. The story is long, complex, and it is SemiAccurate's opinion that the CPU will never make it to market for technical and legal reasons.
Preorder your Atom powered Cable Modem i6-.07734 HT today
Rumor has it that typing 5318008 into a calculator and flipping it upside down on the boardroom table wasn't quite enough to convince Texas Instruments to hand over their handheld number crunching business to Intel. However, the impressive feat of juvenile numerical rotation was enough to convince TI to hand over its cable modem division.
With the bowl of punch nearly gone, miscellaneous party favors littering the floor, and S|A writers stumbling about in various states of sobriety, it is time to settle down and discuss the results of Nvidia's recently concluded Q2, FY 2011 earnings conference call. Much of the information we already knew or surmised after the lowered revenue guidance bombshell they dropped on us in late July, but half the fun of these kinds of calls are the molehills-turned-mountain that companies create to keep investor's wallets open. Let's start hiking.
MOLES IN SANTA CLARA tell SemiAccurate that Nvidia's latest wonderchip, Tegra 3, has taped out. Expect the PR announcement storm to kick up soon, but don't look for product this year.
Part 3: Disclosures, burdens of proof, and compilers
THE LAST PART of SemiAccurate's look at the Intel/FTC settlement examines some of the worst accusations against Intel. Compiler tricks, technical openness, and a watchdog. Intel could be seriously hamstrung by some of these remedies, and worse yet, they could be the ones hamstringing themselves.
PART TWO OF SemiAccurate's look at the Intel/FTC settlement looks at sales, rebates, MCMs, bumps and cracking open an Apple. There is a lot of dirt in this one, and some business practices that will make your head hurt.
Part 1: PCI busses, fabbing, and hens with baseball bats
THE FTC HAS spoken, and the words came down on Intel with a force that is harder and more nuanced than almost anyone realizes. The settlement over a lot of alleged ills is brutal to Chipzilla, and both Nvidia and Via come out big big winners.
IS NVIDIA UP to it's old renaming games, or is it about to launch the second hottest GPU in the world? In any case, the Nvidia GT 425M GPU is turning up all over the place.
We fixed 40nm, we are expanding and preparing for 28nm
TSMC has just released their Q210 financial statements and the picture is pretty bright. They managed to grow in sales, their margins increased and the ramp up of their 40nm process seems on track, their inventory days were almost the same and their debt is hedge only.
ALTHOUGH AMD IS expected to unveil its Ontario platform this side of Christmas, it looks like we'll have to wait until Q1 next year to see any retail products in the market. That's a long wait for those that are hoping to get their hands on the first Fusion hardware from AMD, but hopefully it won't be a wait in vain.
HARD DRIVE DATA density has taken another leap forward, although this time it's thanks to Samsung, of all companies, as it latest EcoGreen F4 2TB hard drive features no less than 667GB of storage space per platter. That means that you only need three platters to create a 2TB drive, something Samsung's competitors have yet to accomplish.
After over 3 years of running around the legal jungle gym, the United Stated Department of Justice has finally caught up with Hewlett-Packard, the world's current leading provider of technological stuff, and reached a settlement after rubbing HP's face in the sand a couple of times [ DOJ -1 | HP -0 ]. The settlement lays to rest 2007 allegations of kickbacks and fraud related to government contracts negotiated by technology contractor Accenture over the past decade.
THE CRACKS ARE starting to show at Nvidia's Tegra unit, with some more huge contracts hanging on by a thread, and key people being shown the door. Couple that with a roadmap shakeup, and you have the right formula for a mess.
AS MUCH AS Intel wants to get into tablets and smartphones it seem to be an uphill struggle for the company. The problem is that Intel is anything but the only manufacturer of chips that go into these types of devices. ARM and its partners have something of a lead here. As such it looks like Intel is going to have to come up with something extraordinary to convince partners to move away from ARM and onto its x86 platform for these types of devices.
NVIDIA HAS A curious take on the causes of their latest financial meltdown, one that doesn't seem to mirror what is happening in the rest of the industry. The almost 20% drop in expected revenue announced at the last minute seems to be a largely self-inflicted wound.
IS THAT 32GB SSD getting a bit on the small side? Not to worry, Super Talent has announced that it's getting ready to ship its new UltraDrive MX range which tops out at no less than 480GB. That should be enough space to compete with most notebook hard drives at least, but the real question is, can you afford one?
AS WE PREDICTED last summer, it looks like Apple has kicked Nvidia to the curb. The new line of iMacs is out, and they all have, wait for it, ATI graphics.
INTEL'S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
OCZ'S REVODRIVE PCI Express based SSD was something of a surprise when it was announced and it's a fairly unique product in the market considering its competitive retail price compared to a standard SSD. However, it's now looking like OCZ is readying a new model called the RevoDrive-B which is yet another PCI Express based SSD, but with an extra trick up its sleeve, it's got a pair of SATA ports for drive caching.
MICRON AND INTEL has announced that they're the first to sample 25nm three bits per cell NAND Flash memory today, also known as TLC NAND Flash. The companies are getting ready to enter mass production later this year, for what the two are claiming is the industries smallest and highest capacity NAND Flash memory.
YESTERDAY AMD QUIETLY dropped the prices for many of its Phenom II and Athlon II processors, although the biggest price drop is a mere 18.9 percent. Some models had their price dropped by as little as 99 cents and one model even went up in price by $4. We've compiled the numbers to make life easier for you to see the price changes, although there really isn't much to get excited about.
IT LOOKS LIKE some people are finally starting to catch on to what we have been saying for almost four years now, Nvidia is building an x86 chip. The story is long, complex, and it is SemiAccurate's opinion that the CPU will never make it to market for technical and legal reasons.
Rumor has it that typing 5318008 into a calculator and flipping it upside down on the boardroom table wasn't quite enough to convince Texas Instruments to hand over their handheld number crunching business to Intel. However, the impressive feat of juvenile numerical rotation was enough to convince TI to hand over its cable modem division.
TSMC has just released their Q210 financial statements and the picture is pretty bright. They managed to grow in sales, their margins increased and the ramp up of their 40nm process seems on track, their inventory days were almost the same and their debt is hedge only.
HARD DRIVE DATA density has taken another leap forward, although this time it's thanks to Samsung, of all companies, as it latest EcoGreen F4 2TB hard drive features no less than 667GB of storage space per platter. That means that you only need three platters to create a 2TB drive, something Samsung's competitors have yet to accomplish.
IS THAT 32GB SSD getting a bit on the small side? Not to worry, Super Talent has announced that it's getting ready to ship its new UltraDrive MX range which tops out at no less than 480GB. That should be enough space to compete with most notebook hard drives at least, but the real question is, can you afford one?