David Needle

Analysis: SEATTLE — In launching its delayed but ambitious new operating system, Vista, and Office 2007, Microsoft faces the most daunting competitor in its history – itself. Windows XP and Office 2003 are well-entrenched and the “known quantity” corporate America, and IT departments specifically, feel safer dealing with the known rather than unknown of recently-released […]

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — It’s all about power — less power. Energy efficiency was the theme at In-Stat’s Processor Forum, where AMD kicked things off with a “less-is-more” announcement. The No. 2 chipmaker said its latest desktop processors, Athlon 64 X2 dual-core, AMD 64 and AMD Sempron, will be available in a more efficient, better […]

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK — IT managers need new weapons to battle the beast of rising energy costs as their data centers become an increasingly sore spot of higher bills and space constraints. Among the reasons for this negative turn is the growing cost of energy and the power required to cool the increasing […]

IBM has seen the future and it’s deeply rooted in technology from its legacy of mainframes: virtualization. Citing what it called an unprecedented demand for large scale x86-based virtualization technologies, Big Blue has announced the System x series of scaleable servers. Essentially a re-branding and extension of IBM’s xSeries, System x includes three high performance, […]

Sun made a big splash in December with the release of its first Sun Fire T2000 servers based on Sun’s Niagara eight-core UltraSparc processor. At the time, Sun said it would be expanding the product family in the first quarter of 2006 and it delivered on that promise this week. The new Sun Fire T1000 […]

UPDATED: Microsoft said yesterday that consumer versions of its next-generation version of Windows would not hit the market until January 2007, dashing plans that it would be on PCs for sale during the 2006 end-of-year holiday season. During a conference call today to detail the road map plans for Vista, however, Microsoft said it is […]

Just a week after saluting the virtues of Intel, Hewlett Packard is returning to the praises of its other partner, AMD. HP (Quote, Chart) is marking the 10-year anniversary of selling systems with AMD (Quote, Chart) processors by introducing new ProLiantservers today. They are based on the latest AMD chips as well as the first HP thin […]

SAN FRANCISCO — What do you do when you’re losing market share to a feisty competitor and your best competitive response is months away from shipping? If you’re Intel, you emphasize better chips will be here “sooner than you think.” That was one of the themes during morning keynotes by Intel executives here at the […]

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off a few of what he called “medium-scale” announcements at an event here at Apple’s headquarters. On the Macintosh side Apple (Quote, Chart) added to its Intel-powered lineup with a Mac mini based on Intel’s Core Solo processor and also a version based on Intel’s […]

PALO ALTO — HP celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its HP Labs facility by giving a small group of reporters a sneak peek at some of its cutting-edge research. One of the big areas of HP’s research is the so-called data center of the future that will include a utility computing model. John Sontag, director […]