Server

Intel announced its first Atom chip for microservers at a major company confab in Beijing today.

The new Atom, codenamed Centerton, is a system-on-a-chip, which makes it even more power efficient than less-integrated older Atom chips.

Centerton's power envelope -- what the industry sometimes calls TDP or thermal design power -- is six watts. While not as low as the power envelope for Intel's smartphone Atom, six watts is still a lot more power efficient than Intel's more mainstream chips. Those have power envelopes of 15 watts or higher. To date, Atom has been aimed at small … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices will acquire server vendor SeaMicro in an attempt to make a run at Intel in the microserver market.

AMD said it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a company that supplies energy-efficient microservers, for approximately $334 million.

To date, SeaMicro servers have been using Intel's Atom and Xeon processors. Future plans call for SeaMicro to build servers with AMD's Opteron chips.

"AMD plans to offer the first AMD Opteron processor-based solutions that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology in the second half of 2012. The company remains firmly committed to its traditional server … Read more

Intel will have to slog through a tough 2012 before it sees any real windfall from Windows 8, according to investment bank Piper Jaffray.

"We believe CY12 (calendar year 2012) is shaping up to be a difficult year for Intel.... We expect 2H12 (second half 2012) to be weak ahead of the launch of Windows 8, the most significant upgrade to the operating system since Windows 3.0," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard wrote in a research note today.

Intel traditionally benefits from Microsoft operating system upgrade cycles as companies and consumers buy new Intel-based PCs along with … Read more

Intel's market-moving statement today that it expects a fourth-quarter revenue shortfall of roughly $1 billion has crystallized the impact of the hard disk drive shortage. So how bad is it?

A report last week from IHS-iSuppli said it's pretty bad--a preview of what Intel said today. That is, the flooding in Thailand will hit PC shipments in the first quarter. iSuppli says the shortfall will be about 3.8 million PCs.

And it will knock down PC numbers for the whole year. Global PC shipments for the whole of 2012 are now expected to expand by only 6.… Read more

Hard disk giant Western Digital said today that it has partially restored production at a facility that had been shut down because of the flooding in Thailand.

The world's largest HDD manufacturer in terms of volume, Western Digital was one of the hardest hit by the flooding. The company has 37,000 workers in Thailand, and production in the country accounts for 60 percent of the company's total capacity, according to IHS-iSuppli.

WD restarted production of hard drives this week in one of its buildings in Bang Pa-in, Thailand, one week ahead of internal schedules, the company said. … Read more

After Hewlett-Packard reported earnings today, CEO Meg Whitman said that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are coming to HP to get servers because of the dearth of hard disk drives.

Whitman was responding to a question from an analyst during today's earnings conference call about companies like Google and Facebook building their own servers and not getting them from the traditional sources--PC makers like HP and Dell.

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said.

Whitman continued. "[But] … Read more

Wondering how high hard disk drive prices are rising because of the flooding in Thailand? Computer retailer Newegg offers a quick way to track HDD pricing.

For example, a search on a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM, model ST31000524AS drive shows that the price jumped to $149.99 from $49.99 a couple of weeks ago.

(And that same drive is $179.99 at major reseller CDW. And see Nextag price history of drive here.)

Or check out a Western Digital 1TB 7200 RPM, model RE4 WD1003FBYX. That drive jumped in the same time frame to $249.99 from $107.… Read more

Intel is trying to overhaul the supercomputer. The idea is to pack more processing power into less space. The 50-plus core Knights Corner processor is how Intel hopes to make it happen.

Let's be clear. It's not that Intel is necessarily losing the supercomputer race--its Xeon processors still power the vast majority of the world's supercomputers--but supercomputing is changing. And the chip giant's arch rival Nvidia is leading the way, with newfangled supercomputers that increasingly rely on its graphics processing units (GPUs) to do supercomputer calculations more efficiently.

Intel's Knights Corner processor is … Read more

Micron Technology has prevailed in an important multi-billion dollar lawsuit brought against it and others by Rambus, a company not shy about suing memory chipmakers. Rambus saw its stock price nosedive as a result.

Boise, Idaho-based Micron, one of the world's largest memory chipmakers, said today that a jury in the California state court antitrust trial of Rambus v. Micron Technology reached a verdict in its favor, clearing it of all liability.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Rambus, a chip design house, alleged that Micron, Hynix Semiconductor and others conspired to keep Rambus-designed DRAM (RDRAM) chips out of the memory market. … Read more