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.

A LOT OF readers didn't like the quality of the last Llano wafer shot, so we got some better ones. Not much more to say, just much prettier pictures than last time. Enjoy. S|A

GLOBAL FOUNDRIES KICKED off their Global Technology Conference, aka GTC, with a bit about the company itself. While there were no big bangs, there were a lot of little things in the slides worth talking about.

THOSE OF YOU that have been waiting for more details on Intel's mobile Sandy Bridge processor are in luck, as thanks to Anandtech we now have quite a few additional details of what will be on offer. One of the main missing pieces of the puzzle was the clock speeds of the integrated graphics, but it turns out that there's another surprise on store for us that had yet to be revealed.

THE FIRST IN-DEPTH benchmarks of Sandy Bridge have appeared courtesy of Anandtech and it looks like Intel has done more than just a few tweaks to Clarkdale and has managed to come up with something quite impressive. Not only is the new CPU core a big improvement over Clarkdale, but Intel has really delivered on its promise to boost the graphics performance by two times that of Clarkdale. Some explanations as to how Sandy Bridge will overclock is also provided, but this is unlikely to make everyone happy.

AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about Bulldozer, the upcoming new desktop and server core. It is the largest architectural jump in standard x86 cores in a long long time.

INTEL HAS FINALLY unveiled its dual core mobile Atom N550 processor and the netbook manufacturers are jumping at the chance of getting something new into the market. However, don't expect to see a raft of new designs, as instead it'll be pretty much the same old chassis with slightly different bits inside.

THERE HAVE LONG been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.

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.

AMD'S 3DNOW! INSTRUCTION set was never as big of a hit as Intel's MMX or SSE and it now seems like AMD is getting ready to drop support, sorry, that's deprecate support for 3DNow! This means that most new AMD processors will no longer have support for 3DNow! but judging by AMD's blog post on the subject, it's hardly going to have any effect on the performance of its future processors.

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.

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, March 4, 2009 at 7:58 AM.

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.

INTEL'S ATOM PROCESSORS are slow to evolve, as Pineview didn't bring with it much in terms of new features of performance enhancements, but there's hope on the horizon. Well, that is, if you have time to wait, as all the good stuff is set to happen sometime in the second half of 2011 when Intel is set to launch the Cedar Trail Atom core.

TODAY WE FOUND out some details about changes to Intel's upcoming Patsburg chipset for Sandy Bridge LGA-2011 processors and we were slightly surprised at what we heard. What struck as very unusual is the fact that Intel is developing a single chipset that is intended for at least both the high-end desktop Sandy Bridge B2 processors and the Xeon destined Sandy Bridge EN processors. Traditionally Intel has developed these types of chipsets separately, but apparently this is no longer the case.

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.

INTEL'S ROADMAPS NEVER tend to stay secret for long and this time around details of its entire upcoming Sandy Bridge desktop CPU line-up have turned up online, alongside some details of some of the mobile Sandy Bridge processors. This is not quite the entire desktop CPU range for next year from Intel though, as there's no word on what processors we'll see for socket 2011.

AFTER ESCAPING THE FTC lawsuit with just a small dent in its cash position, Intel is back to the acquisition market and their next target is the wireless division of the German company Infineon. This division is responsible for the design of 3G modems and RF transmitters.