Big Blue says that the shiny new System z10 you just installed in your basement yesterday is officially obsolete and should be relegated to household media streaming/torrent duty in the wake of its replacement.  Behold the zEnterprise System, and its central compute server the zEnterprise 196, capable of processing more instructions than your puny humanoid mind could ever dream of issuing.  Don't look now, but your girly-man netbook just peed itself.

Back in the good old days paint chips contained healthy quantities of lead, cars ran on leaded gasoline, and a lead foot directly pulled open the throttle of your hot-pink '59 Cadillac without any pesky computers interfering.  It also meant that 'hackers' were limited to methods such as bricks and slim jims to steal your music.  Well, the times, they are changing.

Happy Friday everyone, aNd what a decisiVely glorious day it is turning out to be. It has been reporteD that people who feel the irresistible urge to be antagonIstic may in fact be whittling hours off their life spans faster thAn a chain-Smoker rUnning with sCissors through an airport security checKpoint.  So pop a couple quarters into the troll food machine, and let the feeding frenzy begin.

Editors Note: From time to time, SemiAccurate will be republishing some older articles by its authors, some with additional commentary, updates and information.  We are mainly reprinting some of the oft referenced articles that originally appeared on the Inquirer. Some will have added content, but all will be re-edited from the originals as per contractual obligations. You may see some slight differences between the two versions.

This article has had some of the original links removed, and was published on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 at 10:07 AM.

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.

Brethren, the CPU cooling gods are smiling down upon us today.  For it is so written that he who crameth many GHz into small spaces must surely encounter heat dissipation problems.  Enter our merciful savior CoolIT Systems, whose compassion for the cooling challenged ends at 100 people... on August 18th.

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.

INTEL AND GE have are doing something with healthcare today, and there is a webcast going on as this is written. Thoughtfully, Intel and GE have saved us from the excitement of that webcast through advanced technical features.

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.

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.

Recently hard drives and the storage industry in general has been a tough thing to write about, because frankly, nobody really cares!  It’s much more fun and exciting to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest multi-core CPUs running at orgasmic clock speeds, or exotic video cards that need their own power reactors but have enough FLOPs under the hood to calculate the single precision meaning of life.  In fact the only time we give our trusty storage things a second thought (and exhaust our dictionaries of naughty words) is when they die and take our data along with them.  Well, to help remedy this journalistic conundrum, we've developed a drinking game to aid in your consumption of this article.  Every time you see a storage related suffix (MB, GB, TB, etc.) you take a shot.  Ready?  Good, because you’re up to three already.

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Another day, another quarterly earnings conference call.  AMD came in with their latest and greatest batch of numbers, tidbits of product information, and future guidance for the company.  While your man was unable to squeeze any questions in this time around, (and apparently vuvuzelas are frowned upon during these conference calls for some reason) there were still plenty of interesting nuggets of information dropped along the way, so let’s begin.

While listening in on hour-long industry financial conference calls should be the most fulfilling part of any geek's day, for some reason people expect outfits like us to break it all down into nice bite-size chunks that they can assimilate over morning coffee. Whatever, who are we to judge?  Bottom line, Intel is on a tear this year and has just announced record quarterly; revenue ($10.8B), gross margin (67%), operating income ($4.0B), and earnings per share ($0.51).

THE ANNUAL RUNNING of the moles in Santa Clara yesterday had some surprising results, not just in the record number of IC engineers gored, but also the information leaked by those trying save their backsides. One of them even leaked some details about the upcoming PSP2's CPU, but it didn't save him.

Editors Note: From time to time, SemiAccurate will be republishing some older articles by its authors, some with additional commentary, updates and information.  We are mainly reprinting some of the oft referenced articles that originally appeared on the Inquirer. Some will have added content, but all will be re-edited from the originals as per contractual obligations. You may see some slight differences between the two versions.

This article has had some of the original links removed, and was published on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 10:37AM.

The year was 2000.  Will Smith's horrid "Will 2K" jam was finally fading from the radio waves and the scarred minds of millions across the globe.  In March, CPU underdog AMD dropped the gigahertz bomb on us, sending shockwaves throughout the tech community, and lighting a fire under Intel's ass so intense, the heat wasn't fully dissipated until the last Prescott chip rolled off the assembly lines.  AMD had (inadvertently or not) ignited what we all came to know as the GHz war, with Intel fighting for consumer mindshare by turning the GHz dial up to 11 (well, 3.8 anyway), while AMD desperately tried to keep up by ratcheting up their own clock speeds, and slapping on performance rating numbers to show the average Joe that they could still play with the big boys.

NVIDIA JUST HAD one of their most sleazy marketing tactics exposed, that PhysX is faster on a GPU than a CPU. As David Kanter at Real World Tech proves, the only reason that PhysX is faster on a GPU is because Nvidia purposely hobbles it on the CPU. If they didn't, PhysX would run faster on a modern CPU.

THE SMUG ONES from Cupertino have finally done the right thing for iPhone 4 owners with reception problems, that would basically be everyone who owns one. No, they didn't fix the design flaw, but they did issue a sickly self-congratulatory press release, publicly blame their customers, then deny that the problem is real. How typical.

It seems that Verizon's rabid pet wolf was able to sink its teeth into Microsoft's 'Kin' phone not even two months after Arlis traded in his prized horny toad, $49.99 and a home-cooked meal for the privilege of owning one.  This unfortunate turn of events prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer to don his executioner's mask and place a 12-gauge slug between the eyes of the hydrophobic phone series.  When asked to comment on the sudden death sentence, we couldn't quite make out his reply due to all the laughter and bad music coming from the Apple camp across the street, but it sounded something like, "developers, developers, developers, developers…"

APPLE INC., ESTEEMED purveyor of glass-covered shiny objects, has launched its latest salvo against the pornography industry with the release of its new “retina-display” packing iPhone 4.  The all new fingerprint collector has the highest pixel-density of any phone to date, offering a 4X improvement in areolic-clarity compared to previous models.  The appeal of this feature is immediately apparent, however Lord Steve-o has built in a special surprise for his right-handed lackeys.

THE SECOND TO last part of the Epic debate/casual conversation between Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards gets a bit testy at times, to the point of making the camera man nervously pan to the provided weapons. The two also talk about tech as well, and in the end, no one dies, that has to wait for Part 6.

IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.

Gas up the Delorean (premium Libyan plutonium only please), make sure you have enough road to get up to 88 MPH, and get ready to see some serious shiitake mushrooms with bacon sauce.  In a blog post from the future (seriously), Google announced that today officially marks the public opening of its Voice service (formerly Grand Central) to any life form with a Google account currently living in the U.S.  So if you’re a fan of time-travel and (mostly) free stuff, you can get started right here, right now.

HOW DO YOU follow an 8-core Nehalem-EX server chip? If you are Intel, you do it with more cores, and that is exactly what Westmere-EX does.

A LOT OF people are talking about Nvidia's new GPUs, the GF104, GF106, and GF108, but very few people understand why the parts are going to underwhelm. The reason is simple, the architecture is broken, and hasn't been changed much.

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