AMD Makes Gains

Worldwide processor shipments grew during the third quarter this year and Advanced Micro Devices gained market share from Intel over last year despite being plagued by manufacturing problems, according to a study released by Mercury Research on Tuesday.

Shipments of processors during the third quarter went up by just 5% compared to the same quarter last year, according to Mercury Research. Chip shipments have grown despite flat-to-slow growth in PC shipments worldwide over the past year, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at the research firm.

Intel held an 80.3% market share, a small drop from 80.6% market share during the third quarter last year. AMD’s market share was 18.8%, growing from 18.3% market share last year.

Mercury Research’s numbers cover all x86 systems including laptops, desktops and servers. The company did not provide full microprocessor shipment numbers.

AMD’s Fusion mobile chips for netbooks and laptops are doing much better this year compared to last year, which helped the company gain year-over-year market share over Intel, McCarron said.

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Blackberry Delays Update

Last week at its BlackBerry DevCon conference, Research in Motion tried to get developers excited about the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 mobile operating system, to spur developers to create applications for RIM’s BlackbBerry PlayBook tablet, released last spring to poor reviews and low sales. But yesterday, RIM wrote in a blog post that it was delaying the release of the PlayBook 2.0 OS “until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers, and users.”

PlayBook OS 2.0 was originally promised for October 2011, but RIM has now set a target of February 2012. To meet the new February 2012 release date, RIM said it was dropping a key feature originally promised for PlayBook OS 2.0: its popular BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service.

Developers were looking forward to the promised October PlayBook 2.0 OS release in hopes it might spur sales of the poorly selling tablet, especially as the original timing would have taken advantage of the holiday sales season that will also see the release of the unified tablet/smartphone Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system and a bevy of new smartphones using Microsoft’s recently released Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” operating system, in addition to Apple’s strong-selling iPad and new iPhone 4S, both featuring the recently released iOS 5 operating system.

The PlayBook OS is based on the QNX operating system that RIM bought in spring 2010 to be the basis for its tablets and, sometime in the 2012-13 timeframe, be the basis for a new operating system for its BlackBerry smartphones. Last week, RIM said that it will provide a unified tablet/smartphone operating system called BBX, based on the QNX/PlayBook platform. It said that applications developed for the PlayBook OS would be compatible with BBX, but did not make the same promise for BlackBerry OS apps.

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WIN 8 To Hit Ultrabooks Next Year, Says Intel

Ultrabooks with Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 OS will reach market next year, and the OS could help propel demand for the devices, an Intel executive said this week.

More than 60 ultrabook designs could become available next year and “11 or so designs” will be unveiled by the end of this year, said Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel, in an interview following the company’s third quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

Windows 8 could help drive up ultrabook demand in the second half of next year during the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, Kilroy said.

In addition to Windows 8, ultrabooks will have the next-generation of Core processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which will have performance and graphics improvements, Kilroy said. Some four of 10 laptops sold by the end of next year will be ultrabooks, he said.

“Judging by the excitement, that’s a realistic goal,” Kilroy said.

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Will Cortex A7 Accelerate Android?

Texas Instruments (TI) said ARM’s heterogeneous ‘Big.little’ architecture helps it accelerate Google’s Android operating system.

TI, which designs the popular range of OMAP system-on-chip (SoC) processors found in many smartphones told The INQUIRER that ARM’s newly unveiled Big.little architecture will help improve overall performance of the Android operating system.

Avner Goren, GM of OMAP Strategy at TI told The INQUIRER that ARM’s Big.little architecture, which uses Cortex A7 and Cortex A15 cores, addresses a different need than that of multi-core processors made up of identical cores.

Goren said, “We have been using heterogeneous multi-cores since 2002, we always had an ARM CPU coupled to accelerators for video, graphics, DSPs, image processing. This [Big.little] doesn’t change anything in this idea. On the contrary, it builds on this concept and it is another dimension. None of what was held here changes what we are doing in the rest of the system.”

Goren continued by saying that Big.little is a natural progression from the multi-core, accelerator-aided processors of yesteryear. “What we have held today doesn’t change the fact I would continue doing accelerators, DSPs, video accelerators and use [Cortex] M3s inside, but it changes what I’m doing on the high-level Android side.”

When ARM’s multi-core processors tipped up at Mobile World Congress earlier this year firms were banging on about it would be a golden age of power efficiency due to being able to run multiple cores at lower frequencies. Now less than a year later and with dual-core smartphones still having relatively poor battery life, it looks like that strategy has gone for a Burton. Goren admits that homogenous multi-core architectures do have a problem.

“Multicores give you scalability in a range, performance goes up and down within this range based on how many cores are active and what is the voltage level for these cores. On the other hand it has a floor, this floor is when you have one core running at the lowest voltage. What we have identified is a need for general processing power, meaning running Android, even at a lower [power] level,” said Goren.

Goren said ARM’s A7 processor will allow TI to ramp up the Cortex A15 core without hurting the ‘idle’ performance of the more frequently used Cortex A7 core.

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Oracle Vs. Google Gets Postponed

The US Court has postponed the trial that could see an agreement reached between Oracle and Google over the use of Java in the Android operating system.

The case has been in court for over a year and was expected to finish at the end of October, but yesterday US District Judge William Alsup put it on hold.

According to Reuters the decision had been expected, but perhaps less likely was the judge’s other bit of news, that he might hand the case over to another judge.

Perhaps no one expected the case to go on this long, or perhaps it was just whoever controls Alsup’s diary, as he explained that he has another criminal trial to deal with, one that might last until February next year.

“Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can,” Alsup said, despite his familiarity with the case.

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Will Android Tablets Get Ice Cream Sandwich?

Google just held its Galaxy Nexus event in Hong Kong and we read just about every report and release in detail, only to find that Google didn’t even mention Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0 for tablets, which is somewhat surprising.

At this time, there is no official information if and when Android 4.0 comes to tablets. Since Android 4.0 looks like the lovechild of Gingerbread and Honeycomb and gets a few new options, it’s likely that we will see Android 4.0 on tablets, with a few tweaks of course.

Google just don’t want to talk about it, at least not yet. Since Google chaps already said that Android 2.3 capable phones should be able to run Android 4.0 this definitely applies to any Android 3.x tablets since most of them have dual-core processors and quite powerful hardware to back it up.

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Will Help Desks Become Extinct?

Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.

NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.

Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.

And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.

The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.

And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.

“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.

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Apple Scores A Victory

A court imposed a temporary ban on the sale of Samsung Electronics’ latest computer tablet in Australia on Thursday, delivering rival Apple another legal victory in the two firms’ global patent war.

Resolution of the case could take months — unless Samsung takes the potentially risky option of an expedited hearing — which, in the fast-moving industry, could mean the new Galaxy tablet is never launched in Australia. The Galaxy is the hottest competitor to Apple’s iPad, which dominates global tablet sales.

“The ruling could further extend Apple’s dominance in the tablet market as it widens a sales ban of Samsung’s latest product,” said Lee Seung-woo, an analyst at Shinyoung Securities in Seoul.

Whilst the ruling is a blow for Samsung, the Australian market is not large. A more important legal battle starts later on Thursday, when a Californian court begins hearing Apple’s bid to ban sales of Galaxy products in the United States.

The two technology firms have been locked in an acrimonious battle in 10 countries involving smartphones and tablets since April, with the Australian dispute centering on touch-screen technology used in Samsung’s new tablet.

The Federal Court in Sydney, in granting the temporary ban, ruled Samsung had a case to answer on at least two of Apple’s patents. The ban applies on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet until the same court rules on the core patent issue.

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Lenovo Passes Dell, Becomes No. 2 PC Vendor

Lenovo surged past Dell to become the world’s second largest PC vendor at the end of the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner.

Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard also saw its worldwide PC shipments grow by 5.3 percent in the quarter, despite reports that the company may spin off its PC business.

Both research firms said growth for the quarter failed to reach earlier projections. IDC said at the end of the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6 percent year-over-year, below its earlier 4.5 percent growth projection.

Gartner said PC shipments grew by 3.2 percent year-over-year, which was lower than the research firm’s original projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter.

Analysts have pointed to sluggish spending because of weak economic conditions as a key reason behind the slowdown in PC growth. The rise of tablets has also hurt shipments.

“For the moment, PCs have taken a backseat to a range of other devices competing for shrinking consumer and business budgets,” said IDC analyst Jay Chou in a statement.

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WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

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