AMD's Notebook Line Up for the Back to School season looks sexyer than ever!
In a private event in San Francisco, Calif., yesterday, AMD showcased the Fall fashion lineup of notebooks and desktops based on its VISION technology; mostly dual-core machines with an integrated ATI graphics chips.
AMD designed the VISION programme to simplify the PC buying experience by making it easier for consumers to choose the right computer for them based on what they want to do with the product.
“It wasn’t so long ago that if you wanted to find notebook computer with an AMD processor they were all uniformally very plain – I would hesitate to say ugly but they were plain. But now, the system OEMs (like HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Acer…) have put much effort into designing really pretty boxes that have AMD processors as much as they have moved to have attractive designs around the Intel-based processors… It’s clear now that AMD is now equipped to compete non only the basis of their technology but also on the base of their OEMs design,” explains Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64.
AMD’s Vision strategy found useful in retail PC shopping
“I think it [Vision] has worked. It’s made it easier for people to go into a store and figure out what kind of computer they want. And to calibrate their own needs with the system capabilities,” adds Brookwood who finds AMD Vision most successful in retail. “The salespeople don’t get a lot of training… and the Vision programme guides people into making smart choices and not under buying or over buying… and from that standpoint I think it [Vision] had simplified the purchasing process and taken some of the mystery about multi-core and discrete GPU out of the equation. And that’s basically good.”
When Bill Gates made a widely publicized address at the TED conference last month, he discussed his investment in TerraPower, a nuclear-power start-up pioneering a new kind of micro reactor.
TerraPower has lots of challenges ahead, but is an idea worth exploring, says Bill Gates
Seems like the attention is paying dividends. Reports surfaced last night that the company is in talks with the Japanese giant Toshiba about jointly developing a new generation of nuclear plants.
TerraPower hopes to remake the nuclear power industry. The tiny reactors it plans to develop require only a small amount of enriched uranium to get started and then run on depleted uranium, helping to rid the world of its stockpiles of spent fuel. They also don’t need to be refueled for 60 or more years, making them safer.
Gates admitted that the new concept has hurdles to clear. Until recently, scientists didn’t have powerful enough computers to determine whether the plan would work.
“It’s through the advent of modern super computers that now you can simulate and see that with the right materials approach this looks like it would work,” he said. But “it’s got lots of challenges ahead.”
According to Gates, it is one of many promising approaches to producing carbon-free energy that need to be explored. Apparently, Toshiba agrees.
TerraPower was spun off in 2009 from Intellectual Ventures, an incubator run by former Microsoft brainiac Nathan Myhrvold. Its new reactors, called modular, or traveling wave, will put out only about 125 MW, relatively small by today’s standards. They can be strung together to create larger plants, but apparently that is big enough for Toshiba.
Optimistic forecasts have for several months predicted the LED lighting market has final come of age.
Sales will top $5 billion by 2012, crows Strategies Unlimited, and growth will amount to 28 percent annually. The LED chips alone could be $1.7 billion business.
The LED lighting market has attracted both Toshiba and Sharp, which will have products in the market by spring
The real proof comes from vendors willing to risk their time and money – and several big dogs have suddenly entered the kennel.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, both Sharp and Toshiba said they would begin selling LED bulbs and lighting in the U.S. market. For both companies, LED lighting serves as a complement to LED television businesses. With production volumes up, prices fall.
Sharp said it plans to launch products in March, though it declined to discuss pricing and other details. Toshiba also targets January shipments to customers and springtime sales to consumers. But while Sharp suggested pricing would be in line with the current market (LED bulbs are expensive), Toshiba indicated a more aggressive approach.
The company sells LEDs in Japan for the equivalent of $35 to $45, a seemingly attractive price if it carries over to the U.S.
“The market is definitely ready,” says Eddie Temistokle, manager of corporate communications.
Both companies suggest the most immediately market will be businesses, which are less price sensitive than consumers because they can save money on energy bills and on the labor costs of bulb replacement. LEDs last longer than other bulbs.
Objective Analysis believe SSDs will never reach prices of HDDs
In his presentation at the Flash Memory Summit today, Objective Analysis principal Jim Handy was quite optimistic on the future of the NAND flash memory market; for the near term.
Flash memory market business to remain viable until 2011
Handy pointed to current product shortages and price stability that will probably last until 2010-2011 due to growing demand combined with production and capital investments cutbacks; which is music to the ears for the 5 Flash memory makers left (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Toshiba) in the market which are still recovering from their deep losses in 2008.
Looking at SSDs, Handy believes this market is ripe for consolidation; which will go from the 171+ Flash-based drive makers of today to just a handful. “Remember that there were 282 companies that used to make disk drives before the market consolidates to about 5 today,” recalls DISK/TREND founder Jim Porter.
Handy also expects SSDs to stay weak in the PC market due to higher costs compare to hard-disk drives and the upcoming launch of Braidwood, the codename for Intel’s update of its Turbo Memory technology, a flash-based caching technology that should improve disk access performance which is scheduled to be featured on mainstream motherboards in 2010.
To add insult to injury, Handy doesn’t see a price crossover between SSDs and HDDs… actually this may never happen.
The personal computer market topped expectations in the second quarter as resilient consumers shopped for portables, and shipments to China and other Southeast Asian economies reversed course and grew.
The overall market continued to shrink during the three months. But the decline was smaller than anticipated and it gave some analysts hope the market would once again expand by the fourth quarter.
Research firms Gartner and IDC released quarterly numbers on Wednesday afternoon that offered similar market assessments. IDC said the global market fell 3.1 percent, or less than the 6.3 percent decline it expected. Gartner said the market slipped 5 percent, a better performance than the 9.8 percent drop it projected.
“The results can be interpreted as a small sign of a PC market recovery in terms of shipment volumes in some regions,” said Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa. Asia/Pacific and the U.S. came in better than forecast while weakness continued in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Hewlett-Packard widened its lead as the world’s largest PC vendor with almost 20 percent of the market. Dell saw shipments drop sharply, but held the number two spot with an almost 14 percent share.
Acer continued to rival Dell in size with its strategy of selling low-cost portables and netbooks. Toshiba also gained ground.
The two research firms offered differing views on Apple’s place in the U.S. market. Gartner said Apple advanced modestly to 8.7 percent of the market while IDC said Apple lost ground and held 7.6 percent of the U.S. market. Apple generally prices its machines above comparable Windows models.
Toshiba has sold netbooks abroad – a lot of them – but not in the U.S. Until now.
The company will begin shipping this month a colorful, streamline model for the crowded U.S. market that it says has been a long time coming.
The Toshiba NB205 claims a battery life of up to 9 hours
The NB205 boasts a battery life of up to 9 hours and will come in four colors.
In a briefing with reporters on Monday, Toshiba said the new consumer-oriented machine with have a 10.1-inch display and will ship on June 23. It will be sold at two price points: $349 and $399.
The NB205 will run Intel’s Atom processor and Windows XP from Microsoft.
DigiTimes is reporting that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and two of its subsidiaries have been picked been picked for roles in making Apple’s next generation iPhone.
The scheduled launched of the new product? Mid 2009, the Taiwanese publication says.
TSMC will manufacture a power amplifer, a Bluetooth chip and an image senor. It’s Xintec subsidiary will take on packaging and testing chores, and VisEra will manufacture color filters.
The companies did not comment.
Here is a list of companies making parts for the phone: Samsung, Toshiba, Numonyx, Silicon Storage, TriQuint, Skyworks, Infineon, NXP and OmniVision.
Intel is still by far the world’s leading chip company, representing 13.1 per cent of the semiconductor industry’s global revenue, iSuppli reports.
Far behind, is Samsung Semiconductor at 6.5 per cent, then Toshiba Semiconductor and Texas Instruments (4.3 per cent each) and ST Microelectronics (4 per cent).
According to the research firm, four of the top five vendors reported drops in revenue; only ST Micro sales rose 3.3 per cent last year.
The IC suppliers that significantly increased their revenue in 2008 were Qualcomm (+15.3 per cent), Broadcom (+23.9 per cent), Panasonic Semiconductor (+15.3 per cent), Kyoto-based Rohm (+27.2 per cent), and Taiwanese company MediaTek (+18.1 per cent).
With Fujitsu's drive business acquisition, Toshiba will lead the small form factor hard disk drives market
When it announced last month its biggest operating losses since it started reporting earnings in 1949, Toshiba said it was still betting on a rebound.
Today, in acquiring Fujitsu‘s money loosing hard disk drive business – under the nose of competitor Western Digital – Toshiba is putting its money where its mouth is.
The Japanese makers didn’t divulge the amount of the transaction but point out that the combine operations will propel Toshiba as the number one maker of 2.5-inch hard-disk drives with more than a 30% market share, surpassing Hitachi and Western Digital, which each a 22% market share.
Will Toshiba sell Fujitsu’s enterprise drives to Hitachi?
However, Toshiba will now have to decide if it keeps Fujitsu’s line of enterprise disk drives and enter this new market, or sell it to Hitachi, and stick on making drives for mobile and consumer electronics devices.
The Mobile World Congress just opened this morning (Europe time) in Barcelona, Spain, and the mood is still upbeat despite the recession.
Nokia, HTC and many other mobile vendors were inviting loads of reporters/bloggers to the event, all expenses paid of course!
The GSM Association which organizes the yearly event expects over 1,200 companies to show off their new wares in the Catalan capital and more than 60,000 attendees.
Smartphones: the bright spot in a declining mobile phone market
A slew of smartphones make up the main attraction of this year’s show. Gartner expects the smartphone category to grow 32% this year despite a 4% to 5% drop of the overall mobile phone devices market in 2009; the first in 10 years!
Here are some of the smartphones unveiled at the show: Sony Ericsson’s Symbian-based 10-megapixels prototype Idou; Acer’s first ever touchscreen smartphones; GPS smartphones from Garmin (Nuvifone) and Inventec; Toshiba TG01; HTC Touch Diamond 2 and Touch Pro 2; LG Arena; Nokia’s E75 and solar panel phones from LG and Samsung.
No words yet on Dell’s eventual entry in the smartphone business.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 3 months ago
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