Goldman on Intel: ‘Avoid the Stock’

Tablets are the real deal and they’re affecting the PC market, say Goldman Sachs analysts, in a note on Intel pithily subtitled “tablets impacting PC dynamics, servers slowing, avoid the stock.”

Goldman’s Intel analysts piggy back on a call from new Goldman hardware analyst Bill Shope who estimates that PC and server units will grow 8% and 5%, year-over-year, which is “well-below consensus estimates for low-teens PC growth.”

With PC [manufacturers] now engaged with [vendors that sell chips that rely on rival chip technology licensed by ARM Holdings] the software ecosystems at Apple and Android growing quickly, and Microsoft potentially enabling Windows for ARM, we believe Intel will face increased processor competition. Given Intel’s 3% dividend yield, resumed buyback, and the 81% increase in November short interest, we remain Neutral rated on the stock and prefer [Texas Instruments] in large-cap semis.

The Philly semiconductor index is down noticeable 0.8% Monday. As we’ve mentioned tons of times, the index of chip makers has long been considered something of a leading indicator for the broader markets. But notes such as Goldman’s seem to suggest that semiconductor industry leaders might be battling some structural shifts, which would seem to make us a bit more skeptical as to the measure’s usefulness on a cyclical basis.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/12/13/goldman-on-intel-avoid-the-stock/

AMD Cayman PCB naked shots

After some naked shots of AMD's so-close-we-can-smell-it Radeon HD6970? Look no further, below there are some shots of the card with it's cooler taken off and put on it's coat hanger.

There are also various spec details regarding the GPU and it's board design also.

To begin with, the GPU indeed has a 256-bit wide memory interface, counting the memory chips on the obverse side, and looking at the size of the GPU package.

The size of the die, and taken that Cayman is a 40 nm GPU, indicate that Cayman is not much bigger than Cypress, it should be about 400~500 million transistors higher compared to Cypress.

Given the roughly 2500 million transistor count, the stream core count of 1536 seems more realistic. AMD is said to be using an architecturally
superior VLIW4 stream processor design that increases performance per mm² die area.

The board uses a high-grade 6+2+1+1 phase digital PWM voltage regulation design, draws power from 8+6 pin power connectors.

The reverse side of the PCB has no memory chips, so AMD might be using 2 Gbit memory chips to get 2 GB of total memory.

Source: http://tweaktown.com/news/18020/amd_cayman_pcb_naked_shots/

Behind the decision to combine Lexmark's divisions

Lexmark International's recent decision to combine its laser and inkjet printer divisions was made to mirror the company's strategy of recent years, its chief executive said last week.

Paul Rooke is a firm believer that a company's management structure should follow its strategy, he said, and Lexington-based Lexmark's has been evolving to focus its inkjet division more on business customers, who are the core base for its laser division.

Lexmark has been radically realigning its inkjet division because the company found in recent years that the consumers who once bought their printers, which were sometimes bundled for free with computers, weren't buying enough of the highly profitable ink to meet profit expectations.



Since that time, the company has redesigned its inkjets to focus more on business customers, who print more than consumers. The printers now offer touchscreens and so-called "Smart Solutions" that allow companies to customize many settings and applications for individual users.

As the company evolved technologically to build those products, it already was consolidating technical functions because the laser and inkjet offerings were blending, Rooke said.

When the company began discussing the October retirement of CEO Paul Curlander and Rooke's elevation from inkjet leader to CEO, the latter said "it was a natural transition point, if you will ... to transition the rest of the organization."

"Structure follows strategy," he said. "I looked at our strategy and how it was evolving. As ... inkjet and laser's strategies were converging, it made sense to therefore converge the structure."

The combination of divisions didn't mean any job losses, the company has said, other than the position of inkjet leader, which wasn't filled after Rooke's promotion. Marty Canning, who led the laser division that was previously overseen by Rooke before he took over the troubled inkjet unit, leads the combined division.

The move will help Lexmark's salespeople, as the combined division will mean "a broader and better set" of offerings for customers as the development teams work united instead of as part of two divisions, Canning said.

"The sales organization was already representing both of these product portfolios," he noted. "They just didn't have a product development organization as aligned as we will be ...

"We can solve a larger set of their business problems because of this."

Rooke added that the combination of divisions also will mean "more consistency across the full breadth of technologies addressing business customers' needs."

"That will be a powerful statement for us," he said.

Employees have been receptive to the change, Rooke said, as many already had seen the shift coming since the inkjet strategy change in recent years.

One group of employees that will still be a standalone division, though, is Lexmark's recently acquired Perceptive Software unit. The Kansas-based company develops software that helps businesses manage content.

"We intentionally kept it separate because it's a smaller piece," Rooke said. "A lot of times if you try to combine a smaller piece with a bigger piece, it can get squashed, and we didn't want that to happen."

Perceptive Software CEO Scott Coons said the key is that Lexmark's reorganization hasn't changed its strategy.

"The goal is to grow Perceptive Software and leverage all the great things Lexmark brings to bear to grow our business," he said.

Reaction to the reorganization has been positive from the analyst community, Rooke said. Among those who find it encouraging is Ed Crowley, founder of Versailles-based printer industry research firm The Photizo Group.

"That's really going to be a big positive for them," Crowley said. "I think it's a smart move."

He said it didn't make sense at this point to have a full division and the infrastructure that comes with it to go after the business customers for inkjet.

"It really brings them to a singular focus," he said.


Source: www.kentucky.com/2010/12/13/1564495/behind-the-decision-to-combine.html

Gyration Air Mouse Elite Works with Mac

The wireless mouse world gets a new boost with the entry of Gyration Air Mouse Elite.

This mouse proves to be a great possession for the travelers and businessmen who often need to travel and use their laptop in public meetings and project sites. Although there is nothing much new in this air mouse, there are some functions that will be helpful for the users.

The air mouse concept has already made it clear that no wired connection between it and the PC is required; it frees the user from getting hassled in the hotspots of the cables. The installation of the air mouse is just very simple, though at present, the Gyration Air Mouse Elite is compatible with the Mac computers only. The cost of the mouse also is pretty reasonable, only $80, something which anybody can afford.

The function of the Gyration Air Mouse Elite is just like a regular computer mouse and there is nothing new add-on. The only visible difference is that you can carry it without any hotspots and you will not have to look for any port to put its cord. Simply by placing it within the contact area of the PC, you can run it. It has 8 buttons, 3 are which programmable. This works only on OS X. The configurations might not have something new and innovative in it but again, that is not the issue as it works smoothly.

The good thing about the Gyration Air Mouse Elite is that it is very much user-friendly and responsive. Every command of the user is promptly followed and most of those are accurate enough.

Although there are drawbacks, these are just very common with some other optical mouse as well and hence, these can be ignored. The cons of the air mouse are that it does not respond to some software and sometimes, it creates problem in double-clicking. Another thing about the mouse is that even though it is portable by nature, still you can stretch it to a limit where the cradle charger works.

But in spite of all those pros and cons, at first look and a demo of the Gyration Air Mouse Elite will inspire you only to go for it and use it for your computer works.

Source: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2010/11/08/gyration-air-mouse-elite-works-with-mac/

Hard drives and storage: 250GB Maxtor Momentus XT 2.5 inch Hard Disk Drive - ST92505610AS on CCL now

The new 250GB Maxtor Momentus XT 2.5 inch Hard Disk Drive - ST92505610AS is now available for order on CCL, offering super-fast loading times for power users.

Seagate's new solid state hybrid drive is designed to rival high-end SSD gaming drives for performance and in company testing the new Maxtor Momentus easily outstrips 10,000 RPM and 7,200 RPM disk drives in OS loading and program launches.

In further testing, the drive also scored highly in the PCMark Vantage benchmark for heat output and vibration.

The speed performance of the new drive may be of particular interest to gamers and users of other graphic-intensive applications.

Seagate adds: "The Momentus XT drive is designed for all standard laptop PCs and is OS-, driver- and software-independent, making this drive easy to integrate and easy to use."

Source: http://www.cclonline.com/news/newsArticle.asp?articleid=800211122&headline=Hard%20drives%20and%20storage:%20250GB%20Maxtor%20Momentus%20XT%202.5%20inch%20Hard%20Disk%20Drive%20-%20ST92505610AS%20on%20CCL%20now&tid=cclnews

New Marvell Quad-Core CPU Is Aimed at HPC and Servers

After a fairly long time during which ARM stated its intention to power processors aimed at the enterprise market, Marvell seems to have finally turned this goal into a reality with the ARMADA XP.

So far, the x86 architecture has practically owned not just the consumer, but the enterprise market as well.

This is quite obvious from the fact that servers, data centers and HPC (high-performance computing) systems, supercomputers as it were, use either AMD or Intel chips.

Now, Marvell has issued a press release to announce that it has completed the very first ARM-based chip that is to be used in the making of such applications.

It is known as ARMADA XP and, on just 10 watts of power, provides a performance of 16.600 DMIPS.

It is a quad-core chip whose frequency can go as high as 1.6 GHz and which has 2 MB of L2 cache and a memory interface of 64 bits, with support for DDR3, DDR3 and DDR3L memory, plus ECC.

Said chips also has the benefits of four PCI-e Gen 2.0 units, multiple USB ports, up to 16 high-speed multi-functional Marvell SERDES lanes (PCI-e, SATA, SGMII, QSGMII) as well as four Gigabit networking ports.

The Marvell ARMADA XP is already sampling to customers.

"Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution - cloud computing mobile servers like those powered by the ARMADA XP are the key link in what I envision to be a seamless, unified ecosystem of mobile connected devices, information appliances and smart 'furnishings,'" said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell.

"Marvell's leadership in mobility, consumer, storage, enterprise networking and Wi-Fi products completes the circuit, delivering a powerful end-to-end total solution to anyone connected to the new global mesh, from consumers to small business and the enterprise," Dai added.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Marvell-Quad-Core-CPU-Is-Aimed-at-HPC-and-Servers-165338.shtml

Toshiba-Made MacBook Air SSD Hardware Now Available to All

If you were wanting to get your hands on some of the Toshiba-made SSD hardware that found its way into the latest MacBook Airs, you’re in luck. Toshiba has announced that their Blade X-gale SSDs are now available for the masses. Offering up speeds of 220MB/s read and 180MB/s write, the X-gale hardware will certainly add some pep to your computer’s step. Though not the fastest SSD on the market, they are certainly faster than your standard platter-based drives.

The X-gale SSD drives will come in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities. Pricing is not yet available.

Source: http://gadgetsteria.com/2010/11/08/toshiba-made-macbook-air-ssd-hardware-now-available-to-all/

Mobile modems and routers

Modems which use mobile phone lines (GPRS, UMTS, HSPA, EVDO, WiMax, etc.), are known as cellular modems. Cellular modems can be embedded inside a laptop or appliance, or they can be external to it. External cellular modems are datacards and cellular routers. The datacard is a PC card or ExpressCard which slides into a PCMCIA/PC card/ExpressCard slot on a computer. The best known brand of cellular modem datacards is the AirCard made by Sierra Wireless.[citation needed] (Many people just refer to all makes and models as AirCards, when in fact this is a trademarked brand name.)[citation needed] Nowadays, there are USB cellular modems as well that use a USB port on the laptop instead of a PC card or ExpressCard slot. A cellular router may or may not have an external datacard (AirCard) that slides into it. Most cellular routers do allow such datacards or USB modems, except for the WAAV, Inc. CM3 mobile broadband cellular router. Cellular Routers may not be modems per se, but they contain modems or allow modems to be slid into them. The difference between a cellular router and a cellular modem is that a cellular router normally allows multiple people to connect to it (since it can route, or support multipoint to multipoint connections), while the modem is made for one connection.

Most of the GSM cellular modems come with an integrated SIM cardholder (i.e., Huawei E220, Sierra 881, etc.) The CDMA (EVDO) versions do not use SIM cards, but use Electronic Serial Number (ESN) instead.

The cost of using a cellular modem varies from country to country. Some carriers implement flat rate plans for unlimited data transfers. Some have caps (or maximum limits) on the amount of data that can be transferred per month. Other countries have plans that charge a fixed rate per data transferred—per megabyte or even kilobyte of data downloaded; this tends to add up quickly in today's content-filled world, which is why many people are pushing for flat data rates.

The faster data rates of the newest cellular modem technologies (UMTS, HSPA, EVDO, WiMax) are also considered to be broadband cellular modems and compete with other broadband modems below.

RS-232

In telecommunications, RS-232 (Recommended Standard 232) is a standard for serial binary data signals connecting between a DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) and a DCE (Data Circuit-terminating Equipment). It is commonly used in computer serial ports. A similar ITU-T standard is V.24.



The standard does not define a maximum cable length but instead defines the maximum capacitance that a compliant drive circuit must tolerate. A widely-used rule-of-thumb indicates that cables more than 50 feet (15 metres) long will have too much capacitance, unless special cables are used. By using low-capacitance cables, full speed communication can be maintained over larger distances up to about 1,000 feet. For longer distances, other signal standards are better suited to maintain high speed.

Since the standard definitions are not always correctly applied, it is often necessary to consult documentation, test connections with a breakout box, or use trial and error to find a cable that works when interconnecting two devices. Connecting a fully-standard-compliant DCE device and DTE device would use a cable that connects identical pin numbers in each connector (a so-called "straight cable"). "Gender changers" are available to solve gender mismatches between cables and connectors. Connecting devices with different types of connectors requires a cable that connects the corresponding pins according to the table above. Cables with 9 pins on one end and 25 on the other are common. Manufacturers of equipment with 8P8C connectors usually provide a cable with either a DB-25 or DE-9 connector (or sometimes interchangeable connectors so they can work with multiple devices). Poor-quality cables can cause false signals by crosstalk between data and control lines (such as Ring Indicator).

DDR3 SDRAM

In electronic engineering, DDR3 SDRAM or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory is a random access memory interface technology used for high bandwidth storage of the working data of a computer or other digital electronic devices. DDR3 is part of the SDRAM family of technologies and is one of the many DRAM (dynamic random access memory) implementations.

DDR3 SDRAM is an improvement over its predecessor, DDR2 SDRAM, and the two are not compatible. The primary benefit of DDR3 is the ability to transfer at twice the data rate of DDR2 (I/O at 8× the data rate of the memory cells it contains), thus enabling higher bus rates and higher peak rates than earlier memory technologies. There is no corresponding reduction in latency, as that is a feature of the DRAM array and not the interface.[citation needed] In addition, the DDR3 standard allows for chip capacities of 512 megabits to 8 gigabits, effectively enabling a maximum memory module size of 16 gigabytes.

With data being transferred 64 bits at a time per memory module, DDR3 SDRAM gives a transfer rate of (memory clock rate) × 4 (for bus clock multiplier) × 2 (for data rate) × 64 (number of bits transferred) / 8 (number of bits/byte). Thus with a memory clock frequency of 100 MHz, DDR3 SDRAM gives a maximum transfer rate of 6400 MB/s.

It should be emphasized that DDR3 is a DRAM interface specification; the actual DRAM arrays that store the data are the same as in any other type of DRAM, and have similar performance.