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Is Windows 8 In High Demand?
Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Monday demand for the company’s new Windows 8 operating system, that went on sale last Friday, was running at a higher rate than its last release, Windows 7.
“We’re seeing preliminary demand well above where we were with Windows 7, which is gratifying,” Ballmer said at an event launching new Windows phones.
Windows 7 is the best-selling version of Windows so far, selling more than 670 million licenses in three years since release in 2009.
“Over the weekend we saw an incredible response around the globe to Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface,” said Ballmer, referring to Microsoft’s first own-brand tablet, designed to challenge Apple Inc’s iPad. He did not give out any sales figures.
On Friday, there were moderate lines at Microsoft’s 60 or so stores across the United States for the Surface.
Ballmer was in San Francisco speaking at an event showcasing phones running its new Windows Phone 8 software, which go on sale this weekend.
Microsoft has struggled to make headway in the smartphone market, holding just 3.5 percent of the worldwide market, compared to 68 percent for Google Inc’s Android devices and 17 percent for Apple’s iPhone, according to tech research firm IDC.
The company highlighted how the new phones make use of Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service, enabling users to sync and transfer music, documents and photos between PCs, tablets and the Xbox game console. Microsoft added that it now has 120,000 apps in its online store for phones, still far fewer than the number available for iPhone and Android users.
AMD Goes Piledriver
AMD has released its Piledriver desktop
processors codenamed Vishera.
AMD showed off Vishera at IDF last month, an overclocked chip running at 5GHz. Now the company has taken the wraps off its eight-core Vishera chip, a processor that it hopes will finally bury memories of its disappointing Bulldozer Zambezi chip.
AMD’s Vishera processors will continue to use Socket AM3+, meaning it is a drop-in upgrade for those customers lumbered with Zambezi processors.
The firm announcing four models all branded with the FX moniker. The low-end Vishera chip is the quad-core FX-4300 clocked at 3.8GHz boosted up to 4.0GHz, with 4MB of Level 3 cache.
The firm has kept feature parity throughout its Vishera FX range aside from core count and total Level 3 cache. Therefore AMD’s six-core FX-6300 still sports the same 1MB of Level 2 cache per core but has a total Level 3 cache of 8MB and is clocked at 3.5GHz that can be boosted up to 4.1GHz.
AMD’s top two Vishera parts, the FX-8320 and FX-8350 sport eight cores and have 8MB of Level 3 cache. The difference between the two chips is their clock frequencies, with the FX-8320 running at 3.5GHz and boosted to 4.0GHz while the FX-8350 is clocked at 4.0GHz and is boosted to 4.2GHz.
The firm’s decision to clock its FX-8320 and FX-8350 so closely is largely academic, as all Vishera chips feature an unlocked multiplier. AMD even plays up the overclockability of Vishera and touts 5GHz as being reachable with water cooling. Insiders have even said it can reach 5GHz with strong air cooling.
As for AMD’s Piledriver architecture, the firm claims it offers improved branch prediction and improvements to Level 2 cache efficiency and scheduling. Overall the company is sticking to its longstanding line that Vishera is a 15 percent performance increase over Bulldozer, and while that might well be true, Bulldozer was so far behind its competition in single-threaded performance that a 15 percent gain is needed simply to achieve parity, let alone a lead.
AMD Adds On For GPU
AMD is offering a new games bundle with HD 7000 series cards and oddly enough, the games on offer are pretty good.
Anyone who goes for an HD 7900 series card is looking at Farcry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. Buyers of two HD 7800 cards or a dual-headed HD7770 GHz edition can expect Farcry and Hitman, while those less fortunate, who end up with a single HD 7800 or HD 7770 series card will get just Farcry.
Still, this is pretty good value for money and the choice of titles is just as good. Bundled games tend to be somewhat older, less popular titles, so AMD’s new Never Settle bundle seems like a welcome breath of fresh air.
Will ST Micro Break-up?
ST Microelectronics reportedly is considering breaking itself up in order to offload its system-on-chip (SoC) business.
ST Microelectronics has been losing sales as its traditional customers such as Nokia and Research in Motion struggle in the smartphone market, which has tended to favour chip vendors such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia in recent years. Now Bloomberg is reporting that ST Microelectronics is considering breaking up to allow it to offload its SoC business and concentrate on the profitable analog business.
According to Bloomberg’s report the firm is mulling the division of the company into two distinct parts, the analog business and the digital business that designs chips for use in set-top boxes, televisions and smartphone handsets. ST Microelectronics’ analog business includes chips that end up in cars and white goods, areas where there is expected to be significant growth in the coming years.
ST Microelectronics moved quickly to try to put a lid on the report by denying “the existence of initiatives which can compromise the unity of the company”. Nevertheless, the firm’s stock price rose sharply on the rumour, suggesting that the market would welcome such a move and perhaps giving the firm’s board the incentive it needs to put through such a plan.
AMD Makes Cuts
AMD has cut its third quarter revenue and gross margin forecasts citing weak demand.
AMD’s lacklustre Bulldozer processor line has left the firm desperately trying to compete with Intel in the desktop market while its more impressive accelerated processor unit (APU) range has been rebuffed by Intel’s multi-million dollar ultrabook marketing push. Now AMD has revised down its estimate of third quarter revenues, which it says will be around 10 percent lower than the previous quarter.
Even more worrying for AMD is its lower forecast for gross margin, the difference between selling an item and the cost to make it, down from 44 percent to 31 percent. Effectively AMD said its cost of doing business has risen considerably higher, although it laid most of the blame on an $100m inventory writedown.
AMD couldn’t avoid admitting the blindingly obvious and said that its writedown of inventory was due to “lower anticipated future demand for certain products”. The firm has suffered through a disappointing 2012, and earlier this year it announced a $580m loss back in April.
Tegra 3 No Match For Adreno 320
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-cores are slowly starting to show up in new phone and tablet designs, and in case you’ve been following the market, you know they will be the fastest thing around until A15 parts appear.
But aside from the custom Krait core, Qualcomm’s new chips feature new Adreno 3 series graphics and judging by some early benchmarks, this is a match made in heaven.
Tom’s Hardware put the new graphics core to the test, with some very impressive results. Basically Adreno 320 blows the competition out of the water. However, it does not manage to surpass the huge SGX543MP4, used on the third generation iPad.
In GLBenchmark 2.1 the SGX543MP4 ranks first, with 251 and 139 points in Pro and Egypt tests. Adreno 320 comes in second, with 191/137, the SGX543MP2 scores 147/90, while the Tegra 3 TL30 scores 82/63. However, in fill rate tests Adreno 320 trails both the SGX543MP4 and SGX543MP2, but it is still miles ahead of the Tegra 3, SGX540 and Adreno 225.
However, in off-screen GLBench 2.5 Adreno 320 manages to squeeze ahead of SGX543 parts and the rest of the competition, but once again it loses in fill rate tests.
Are Microsoft and Intel Having Issues?
Comments Off on Are Microsoft and Intel Having Issues?
Intel’s delayed software that conserves battery life is holding up development of some tablets running the latest version of Microsoft Windows.
Bloomberg said that Mirosoft hasn’t yet approved any tablets featuring an Intel processor codenamed Clover Trail because the chipmaker hasn’t produced necessary power-management software. This sort of news follows a statement by Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini that Windows 8 was not really ready to ship.
Alex Gauna, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco said that the PC channel is in chaos right now with no one knowing what to do. He said that the people don’t know what to design for, as they don’t know what the consumers are going to buy. Tablets have stolen their growth trajectory, plus the macro situation, plus Wintel has made a mess of their ecosystem.
PC makers, including HP, Dell and Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), are counting on the new version of Windows to help them compete in the $63.2 billion tablet market.
AMD And BlueStacks Join Forces
AMD has joined forces with BlueStacks in an effort to bring Android apps to Windows tablets. BlueStacks is the outfit behind Android App Player, a Windows app that enables users to run Android apps on tablets.
Since AMD is not in the ARM game, it could obviously benefit from bringing some popular Android apps to Windows, allowing users to play a few levels of Bad Piggies on Hondo tablets.
However, apps have to be vetted before users can take end up on the AMD AppZone, but it is also possible to install other applications.
The BlueStacks Android Player will also run on Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs, and it even supports Windows XP.
In the long run, the possibility of running Android apps could be very interesting for consumers thinking about getting a Windows 8 tablet, as it will combine Microsoft’s unmatched enterprise solutions with fun and popular Android apps. Provided the whole thing works as advertised, of course.
Server 2008 Support Ends In 2015
Microsoft has extended support for Windows Server 2008 until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating system had been earmarked to enter the firm’s extended support phase on 9 July 2013, however the firm has moved that date back by 18 months. The firm said that it will keep Windows Server 2008 in the mainstream support phase until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft generally provides a decade of support for its high profile operating systems and software applications. The company said, “Microsoft policy provides a minimum of five years of Mainstream Support or two years of Mainstream Support after the successor product ships, whichever is longer.”
Of course Microsoft likes its customers to buy newer, shiner versions of its software whenever the firm releases it, but server operating systems customers are resistant to change in order to avoid any possible disruption in service availability. The company is desperately trying to get customers to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Windows 8, even though it extended support for the operating system until 8 APril 2014.
RedHat Takes A Fall
Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.
Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.
Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm’s earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, “This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter’s EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs.”
Red Hat’s $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.