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Competition over average selling prices of chips has eased; now Intel and AMD battle on microprocessor features and functionality instead
Pinched by microprocessor price wars, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are trying to move away from competing over prices, to competing on microprocessor features and functionality instead, according to a study released by iSuppli.

Though Intel has a sizeable lead over AMD in global microprocessor revenue market, both companies recently noted that competition over average selling prices of chips has eased, which could signify the beginning of the end for the x86 microprocessor pricing war, iSuppli said in a statement.

Samsung looks ready to make good on its plan to release a dual-format Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD player in time for the year-end holidays.
The company, which has been a strong backer of the Blu-ray Disc format, said on Tuesday that its BD-UP5000 player would launch in mid-December. The machine was first announced in April, when Samsung said it would be available in North America and Europe by the end of the year.

Microsoft announces beefed up remote Windows Mobile management capabilities that allow administrators to remotely secure and manage mobile phones
Microsoft plans to announce beefed up remote Windows Mobile phone management capabilities with the introduction of System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 on Tuesday.
The software will allow IT administrators to remotely secure and manage mobile phones much the same way they manage PCs and laptops, said John O'Rourke, general manager of Microsoft's mobile communications business.

Airtel further strengthened its non-mobile services today by introducing 8Mbps broadband Internet access in India targeting mass customers, retailers and SMEs.

“Non-mobile part of Bharti is a strong engine of growth. Over the years we have invested around over a billion dollar in non-mobile service and it is a critical part of our operations now. We continue to further strengthen the Internet space,” said Atul Bindal, president, Bharti Airtel Limited, briefing the media here today.

Symantec has announced the launch of an India-only Hindi-English packaging for Norton Internet Security 2008 and Norton AntiVirus 2008, security solutions that have been enhanced to provide computer users with protection against new and emerging online threats, including disguised attacks used by drive-by downloads.

In addition, Norton Internet Security 2008 will also feature a new Norton Identity Safe to protect users’ identities when they buy, bank or browse online. The company has also optimized each product for "greater performance, improved technical support and reduced user interruption".

Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd and Board for Information Technology Education Standards’ (BITES) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to address the training requirements of technology students in the state.

According to the MoU the training program would be open to all final-year and pre-final-year engineering graduate (BE) students of computer science and information science; as well as final-year students of the Masters Program in Computer Applications (MCA).

Intel Corp, the world's largest chipmaker, is on the verge of making its biggest push yet into mobile consumer electronics, seeking to replicate its success in mobile personal devices, as well as personal computers long before that.

In the first half of next year, Intel will deliver its Menlow platform, a collection of chips and other components to power so-called Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, said Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group at the company's twice-annual technical show, on Wednesday.

Sun Microsystems Inc. will start selling its lineup of 64-bit PC servers preinstalled with the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft Corp. within 90 days, the two companies said today.
The two longtime rivals also said they will cooperate on technical development of Microsoft's server operating system on Sun Fire hardware, as well as making Sun's Solaris Unix operating system fully manageable under Microsoft's recently introduced System Center Virtual Machine Manager software.

Sony Corp said it will launch four models of new Blu-ray high-definition optical disc recorders in November in Japan, as its format battle with the HD DVD camp heats up.

Sony, along with Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd promotes the Blu-ray technology, which competes with the HD DVD format, backed by Toshiba Corp and Microsoft Corp.
The new models, capable of storing up to 16 hours of high-definition programmes on a dual-layer, 50-gigabyte (GB) Blu-ray disc, will go on sale on November 8.

Intel Corp on Thursday introduced high-end processors for computer servers to compete with an upcoming new product from Advanced Micro Devices Inc

Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, said the six new Quad-Core Xeon 7300 series processors can deliver more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt over its previous-generation dual-core products.

AMD is also preparing to launch a new processor, code-named Barcelona, next week. Like Intel's new line, Barcelona features four processing engines on one piece of silicon.

As it trumpeted news of Vista SP1's scheduled release yesterday, Microsoft Corp. also quietly said it would delay Windows Server 2008, the next version of its server operating system.

Helene Love Snell, a senior product manager on the Server 2008 team, broke the news on the group's blog. "This seems like the best place to let you know that Windows Server 2008, which we have been saying would Release to Manufacturing (RTM) by the end of the calendar year, is now slated to RTM in the first quarter of calendar year 2008," she said yesterday.

Intel Corp unveiled its new vPro chip technology aimed at making business personal computers more secure, as the world's largest chipmaker seeks to solidify its brand.

vPro is a collection of a Core 2 Duo processor, chipset and other elements that together the company calls a platform. Intel's first platform technology was Centrino, which it announced in 2003.

Since then, under Chief Executive Paul Otellini, the company has moved from selling and branding discrete processors and chipsets to selling them together as related technologies, or platforms, in a bid to sell more chips overall.

Toshiba Corp. will start producing a 320G-byte hard-disk drive for laptop computers before the end of this year, the company said.

It is the first 2.5-inch drive to be announced at that capacity, with production to begin in the fourth quarter, according to Toshiba. Pricing was not announced.

The drive is one of a series of five that make up Toshiba's new MKxx52SX family of hard-disk drives. The 320G-byte model will contain two platters -- the circular disks on which data is recorded. Other drives in the range will offer between 80G bytes and 250G bytes of storage space. They will connect via a 3G bps (bits per second) serial ATA (SATA) interface.

Adobe Systems Inc.'s upgrade for its Flash Player, released on Tuesday, adds support for one of the latest video encoding standards as well as new audio support.

The upgrade, called Moviestar, applies to Adobe's latest Flash Player, version 9. A beta of the upgrade will be available for download later in the day, with a final version to be ready in the third quarter, Adobe said.

Moviestar supports the playback of video encoded using the H.264 standard, which allows for greater compression of video files than previous standards while maintaining quality. Adobe already supports H.264 encoding in products such as Premiere Pro and the After Effects video editing software. Moviestar also includes High-Efficiency AAC support, an improved audio compression technology.

Microsoft Corp. is working on a "service in the sky" for unified communications, an executive said Tuesday at the VoiceCon conference in San Francisco.

The company's current focus for the fast-growing trend of combining voice, video, text and other forms of communication is Office Communications Server 2007, which Microsoft said it will unveil Oct. 16 at a San Francisco event featuring Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates. But at the same time, it is working on providing these capabilities as a service, said Warren Barkley, a principal group program manager at Microsoft. He mentioned the project in passing at the end of an early-morning panel session at VoiceCon. He didn't give a timeline for availability.