For the fourth week in a row, prices on the Pentium 4 have had a nice price cut. Similarly, the 1GHz Pentium III has dropped below the price of AMD's 1.2GHz Athlon. For the fourth week in a row, AMD's prices have remained level - not necessarily bad since they have been exceptionally affordable. Things will change, though, when the 1.3GHz Athlon gets let loose. Check out our Weekly CPU Pricesfor more details!
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Japanese electronics manufacturer Hitachi Ltd. and U.S. data management software vendor Veritas Software Corp said on Wednesday they have formed a sales and services alliance for their data storage systems. The two companies and Hitachi Data System, a wholly owned unit of the Japanese firm, said they will cooperate in marketing and selling their corporate data storage solutions to companies around the world, as well as in providing support services to their customers.
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Microsoft Corp. has recently announced an alliance with two Japanese firms to spearhead sales of its new Xbox video game in a market at the heart of the global video game industry. Microsoft's Japanese unit said it would work with Softbank Commerce Corp. and Happinet Corp., aiming to outgun industry stalwarts such as Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Sony Corp. with its highly anticipated Xbox game player.
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Just nine months after its launch, Intel Corp. is quietly closing down a streaming media content business that the world's largest chipmaker said would serve an estimated $2.5 billion market by 2004. Intel Corp announced "Intel Internet Media Services" in May 2000 and said then it would spend $200 million to build an Internet media business that would allow customers to transmit everything from movies to conferences to online training via the Internet. But a subsequent oversupply of streaming media content providers, changing business plans of content start-ups that would use streaming to generate sales and the slowing economy meant it would take too long for the division to make money, said Intel spokesman Bill Calder.
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Microsoft gave a sneak peek of the next version of its desktop operating system, touted as the "most important" release since Windows 95, and showed off a new interface called Luna for home and business computers. But a lack of details raised as many questions as the company answered. At an unveiling held at the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle, Wash., Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates put a beta of Windows XP through its paces. [Source: ZDNET]
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ATI Technologies Inc. has announced its support for and planned incorporation of AMD's HyperTransport technology into future ATI graphics processor products, thereby helping to establish the technology as a future industry standard. HyperTransport is a new high-speed, high-performance, point-to-point link for integrated circuits. HyperTransport provides a universal connection that reduces the number of buses within the system, provides a high-performance link for embedded applications and is designed to enable highly scalable multiprocessing systems. It enables the chips inside PCs, networking and communications devices to communicate with each other up to 24 times faster than with existing technologies.
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Microchip Technology Inc. has introduced the world's first serial EEPROM supporting the Advanced Communications Riser Special Interest Group (ACR SIG) specification, providing the enumeration memory for next-generation PC Audio Modem Riser cards. The new 24LC09 serial EEPROM features a non-standard address that allows a computer to automatically detect and configure riser cards for industry-standard Plug-and-Play capability. The system bios of an ACR-compatible PC can communicate with the riser card, making it completely transparent to the computer's operating system. The 24LC09 meets the ACR SIG specification as a custom 8K I2C(TM) device, address of 1011xxx, 2.5V-5.5V operating voltage, and -40C to +85C industrial temperature range. Applications for the 24LC09 include PC Audio Modem Riser cards supporting modems, Local Area Networks (LANs), Wide Area Networks (WANs), Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), audio technologies and future wireless bus technologies.
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