Items tagged with santa clara
John Carmack's annual Quakecon keynote is one of the most interesting events of the entire year. The man is incredibly intelligent and understands programming and development to a degree that very few people can match. id may have struggled to replicate the gameplay successes of its early years, but Carmack's understanding and perspective on the technical issues surrounding gaming is second to none. This year, he kicked off by discussing the upcoming consoles, their hardware capabilities (very similar) and the long-term impact on AMD. Carmack believes that having everyone standardized on the same architecture with very few differences will make it much easier for developers to build better products...
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Intel's Itanium has spent the past year in an unwelcome spotlight. The war between HP and Oracle over whether or not the latter had an obligation to support HP servers after publicly promising to do so dragged Intel's Itanium roadmap into the limelight. Ultimately, the judge found that Oracle had to live up to its contractual obligations and concluded that the case was brought for personal reasons, but the damage to HP was done. Disclosures that came to light during the trial indicated that HP had paid Intel a sizeable sum of money to continue developing Itanium past the point when Intel would've otherwise canceled the project. There's nothing unusual about paying a company to build a processor,...
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When AMD told investors that its second quarter results would be significantly lower than anticipated, the company's stock price went into a skid. Historically, AMD's quarterly warnings have been followed by ugly earnings calls, filled with enough red ink to drown a small army of accountants. It is, therefore, a pleasant surprise to see that while the company took a nasty hit to overall revenue, with sales down 11% sequentially and 10% year-on-year, it managed to keep its head above water with a net income of $37 million. One of the keys to that achievement was the company's gross margin, which held steady at ~45%. While that's a poor second to Intel's percentage, which hovers in the mid-60s,...
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It's a rumor no longer. Intel has been trying and trying to get a chip ready for smartphone use, and while trade show after trade show brought us demonstrations of Medfield and the like, there's still no smartphone shipping today with Intel Inside. Now, the company's ready to step up to the plate and offer up some serious competition for Qualcomm, NVIDIA and the other smartphone powerhouses. According to a Reuters report, France Telecom's own "Orange" will soon offer an Intel-powered smartphone in France and the UK, with "this summer" pegged as the availability date. With PC sales slowing giving up ground to more mobile, powerful handhelds, Intel has to make a serious play here in order to keep...
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Intel's results for the second quarter of 2011 are a model of strong execution, high performance, and continued market dominance. So much so, in fact, that writing these reports has actually become a teensy bit boring. (Note to Intel: We expect precious little sympathy.) The nature of some of the records has changed, and a few key figures have fluctuated, but if you don't care about the details you can stop reading now, secure in the knowledge that Intel spent Q2 earning revenue hand over fist. Intel reported $13 billion in revenue this past quarter, up $2.3 billion and 21 percent from Q2 2010 and two percent from Q1. The company's gross margin fell to a healthy 61 percent (down 6.6...
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This afternoon, AMD announced that its current CEO, Dirk Meyer, would be resigning immediately. Dirk, who took the helm of AMD on July 18, 2008, has guided the company through the difficult 18 months since. As AMD's Board of Directors notes, "Dirk became CEO during difficult times. He successfully stabilized AMD while simultaneously concluding strategic initiatives including the launch of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the successful settlement of our litigation with Intel and delivering Fusion APUs to the market." What makes this situation unusual are all the things AMD doesn't say. The press release neither gives reason for Meyer's departure nor explains why Dirk is being ousted immediately after launching...
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Microsoft's demonstration of Windows 8 running on ARM processors may have been one of the major events of CES, but the OS's 2012/2013 release date has been criticized as a day late and a dollar short. One of the tidbits that slipped out of CES is that IT analysts aren't the only ones frustrated with Redmond's timetable. Intel Senior VP and general manager of the sales and marketing group, Tom Kilroy, revealed at CES for a long time. Us, and others like Dell...We’re very bullish on the tablets segment. It’s very good for the industry as a whole." It was Microsoft, ironically, that put a major push behind tablets back in 2001, but the resultant market flop and the need to focus on other...
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AMD announced its second-quarter earnings yesterday and the company's results, while not perfect, imply continued strong execution. The company's revenue was up 40 percent year-on-year on strong demand for server and mobile parts. Total revenue was $1.65B, up five percent from the first quarter. "Robust demand for our latest mobile platforms and solid execution drove record second quarter revenue and a healthy gross margin," said Dirk Meyer, AMD President and CEO. "Our unmatched combination of microprocessor and graphics capabilities resulted in customers launching a record number of new mobile and desktop platforms. We added Sony as a microprocessor customer and continue to see our existing...
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The biggest thing that happened at Santa Clara University (from a national perspective) was that season opening win over the UNC-Chapel Hill basketball team that eventually went on to win a National Championship in NCAA Men's Basketball. The biggest thing to happen at Santa Clara University this decade is most likely this: a complaint that's gaining all sorts of national attention. According to a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a slew of iPhone owners at the school are fed up with AT&T's poor reception on campus. So fed up that they have organized a "day of complaint" to push for better coverage. To be honest, the main reason this little demonstration is picking up so much...
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