Mark Hachman

LOS ANGELES—Microsoft formally unveiled its “Digital Entertainment Anywhere” strategy here on Tuesday, part of the company’s plan to manage multimedia content at home, on the road and in portable devices. As expected, the linchpin of the announcement was Windows XP Media Center 2005, together with a Media Center Expander Device that will push a home’s […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Tuesday unveiled its dual-core architecture here at In Stat/MDR’s Fall Processor Forum and provided the first estimates of the chip’s performance. As the company previously stated, AMD’s first dual-core chips for one to-eight way servers will be “first to market” in 2005. Company executives said client-specific versions are […]

Intel Corp. has decided not to enable the wireless access-point functionality in its Intel 915/925X “Grantsdale” chipset, a company spokesman confirmed Friday afternoon. Intel decided to phase out the once heavily-touted feature because of the prevalence of low-cost access points available from third parties, spokesman Dan Snyder said. Snyder called the move a business decision, […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—The disk-drive industry faces a dilemma: It should be thriving, but it’s not. But while analysts say the industry would be better off with fewer competitors, none seems ready to throw in the towel. That hasn’t stopped drive makers from pointing fingers at one another. In fact, analysts say that’s part of the […]

Maxell said Tuesday that it believes rising costs and shrinking margins will make a price increase “inevitable” on all magnetic tape products. The company is evaluating when to hike prices, by how much and for which products, Don Patrican, executive vice president at Maxell, said in an interview. Maxell Corp. of America, based in Fairlawn, […]

Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are revving up for what they see as the next big step in the evolution of x86 processors—the introduction of dual processing cores. Both companies are demonstrating technology that puts two processing cores on a single chip, providing users with almost double the processing power in the same […]

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s famous law will be re-examined again next week, as Intel shifts away from pure speed to the more efficient utilization of silicon. Moore’s Law, which generally states that the number of transistors will double every twelve to eighteen months, has been used as a rationale to explain the perpetual increases in […]

STANFORD, Calif.—An interconnect chipset permitting server vendors to design up to 32-way Opteron systems will be available later this year, executives from Newisys Inc. said Monday night. Newisys, started as an Austin, Texas, startup in July 2000, was acquired by contract manufacturing giant Sanmina/SCI in July 2003. In 2003, before the Sanmina/SCI acquisition, Newisys executives […]

Western Digital Corp. has designed a disk drive specifically targeted for RAID and other heavy-duty cycle applications. WD, based in Irvine, Calif., said Tuesday that it has begun shipping the WD Caviar RAID Edition (RE) drives, a family of three 3.5-inch, 7,200-RPM drives ranging in capacity from 120GB to 260GB. Click here for the rest […]

LAS VEGAS—A German consultant has released a tool that its creator says will allow modifications of the code stored within RFID tags, theoretically allowing consumers to wreak havoc in future retail deployments. The RFDump software allows a user equipped with an RFID reader, a laptop or PDA, and a power supply to rewrite the data […]

Seagate Technology has increased the warranty of almost all of its hard drives to five years, reversing a trend toward shorter-period warranties. The warranties will apply to all of Seagate’s internal desktop, mobile, and enterprise hard drives that buyers purchase today, excluding external drives, Seagate executives said. For the past year, the warranties on hard […]

Iomega Corp. this week said it plans to wind down its DCT small-form-factor storage operation, failing to find enough customers to keep the operation afloat. On Thursday, Iomega reported a net loss of $19.8 million for its second quarter on revenue of $77.6 million. Revenue dipped by 23 percent from a year ago, largely from […]