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<p>It's in the air, big changes are afoot. Yeah, tech stocks remain in the toilet, but underdog companies and technologies are beginning to make significant inroads, and the established superpowers are feeling less secure every day. Is this news? Not really, because it's been happening slowly over time, and certainly many ET readers have been closely following and even promoting these changes. Big power shifts are underway. The signs have been subtle and cumulative, but the one that put me over the top was IBM's recent national TV ad pushing their enterprise Linux solutions in a big way (more fervently than any past IBM ads I can remember).</p>

Dell Computer is seeking alliances with mom-and-pop shops to further its growth in the PC market. Dell will begin offering on Friday an unbranded, low-priced desktop PC to distributors that cater to small businesses--typically companies with fewer than 100 employees, the computer maker confirmed Tuesday. The Round Rock, Texas-based company is embarking on the new plan as a way to enter the "white box" market, which it estimates to be worth $3 billion annually. White-box PC sales have grown quietly over the last five years to represent roughly 30 percent of the market, according to a recent report from...

A small group of PC owners has quietly filed a class action lawsuit against Intel, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard alleging the companies misled them into believing the Pentium 4 was a superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon. The complaint--Neubauer et al v. Intel et al--was filed June 3 in the Third Judicial Circuit in Madison County, Illinois. The case is in limbo awaiting a ruling on whether it belongs in a state or federal jurisdiction, and has not yet achieved class action status. It came to light this week after a copy of the complaint was...

As with many rumors about Apple Computer, this one started with a single sentence uttered by Steve Jobs. The setting was an analysts meeting in July, where the Apple chief executive outlined his company's financial condition and discussed future plans. He took a question about the possibility that Apple might one day use chips from Intel instead of the Motorola chips now in its computers. The answer was classic Jobs: careful, noncommittal and just vague enough to keep people guessing. First, he said, Apple would have to complete its transition from using OS 9, its older, "classic" operating system,...

<p>Going where the federal government has stepped aside, Intel Chairman Andy Grove has pledged $5 million to help launch a new embryonic stem-cell program at the University of California-San Francisco.</p> <p>The money, the first step toward an ambitious $20 million fundraising goal for the university, will offer scientists unfettered access to this promising field of investigation -- and give UCSF's stem-cell programs a competitive boost in the hottest new field in biomedicine.</p>

Intel set to announce accounting changes Grove refuses to call stock options an expense By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 08 August 2002, 10:35 REPORTS STATE THAT INTEL is set to buck the trend relating to the reporting of stock options in its accounting procedures. Reuters says Intel will announce today that it will not count stock options as an expense. Instead, the company will seek to provide a different level of detail about its stock-option programmes, which, the chipmaker reckons, will help make executives’ remuneration packages more transparent to shareholders. Company chief Andy Grove reckons that calling stock options an expense...

Intel to start fab plant in China Compelling reasons to shift By Mike Magee: Wednesday 07 August 2002, 11:10 RELIABLE SOURCES TELL the INQUIRER that by the year 2005 there's likely to be an Intel fabrication plant located in mainland China. And the firm is also planning on boosting its presence in Malaysia and another unnamed Asian country, we have learned. Intel already has a Chinese research centre in Beijing, to which it is actively recruiting staff, and a flash memory factory in Shanghai. But a fab in mainland China has obvious advantages. It would give Intel direct access to...

Intel says nothing these days THE EDITOR of the High Tech Strategist claims that AMD's Hammer chips will give the firm as much as a three to four year lead over competing technology from Intel. Fred Hick is quoted in the the August 5th edition of the Wall Street financial weekly, pushed out by Barron's. His argument is that the AMD Hammer family is backward compatible with 32-bit applications as well as having the ability to run specially compiled 64-bit code. Intel's Itanium, by contrast, has a special instruction set and while it will run 32-bit instruction code this is...

AMD's new chip can help it gain on Intel--Barron's Last Updated: August 04, 2002 02:49 PM ET NEW YORK, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N is hailed as having the "next big thing" with its upcoming eighth-generation microprocessor, and this could make the depressed stock a long-term winner, Barron's said. The Aug. 5 edition of the Wall Street financial weekly cites Fred Hick, publisher of the newsletter High-Tech Strategist, as saying AMD's next line of microprocessors, code-named Hammer, can give AMD a multiyear lead on arch-rival Intel Corp. INTC.O . AMD's edge could lie in the move...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - U.S. chip behemoth Intel Corp said on Wednesday China will overtake Japan as the world's second biggest PC market this year, earlier than expected and underscoring the weak demand in Asia's most mature market. Intel is the number one maker of microchip processors, the brains inside a personal computer or PC. But Christian Morales, Intel's vice-president of Asia Pacific, said the outlook for the semiconductor industry remained bleak despite bright spots in emerging markets. "The trend is the same worldwide, with matured markets flat or down and emerging markets still growing," Morales told a news conference...

AMD confirms IBM DB2 Hammer support Corporate migration easier, says IBM By Mike Magee: Tuesday 30 July 2002, 20:58 IBM'S DB2 DATABASE for Linux will be supported on AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors, confirming benchmarks posted on c't magazine a few weeks back. AMD confirmed the story in a release which said a DB2 database using SuSE Linux was successfully ported to X86-64 technology in just a few days. The news is good for AMD and indicates positiive application software support for its Opteron servers, due to be launched next year. The chip firm said that using X86-64 architecture will mean...

Breaking Performance Bottlenecks of SMP Systems with Opteron By Spencer Kittelson Date: July 29, 2002One of the most wonderful performance enhancing features of the forthcoming [AMD] Opteron (Hammer) are the multiple independent direct memory channels that are built into each CPU.  This is a huge, huge difference from the shared memory (actually, shared everything) approach of Intel symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems.  Given the limitations of today's memory technology, this was an exceedingly smart move on the part of AMD and will likely change the way we design some of our applications in the very near future. Intel SMP systems exhibit...

Intel owns Inside (true) By Drew Cullen Posted: 07/30/2002 at 06:03 EST Intel's fearless intellectual property lawyers have wrested the word 'inside' from a rival US firm, after an epic battle. The heroes in suits successfully completed a dawn raid on Town Graphics, a small mapmaker based in Woodinville, Washington state. No casualties are reported. It's a different story at Town Graphics. The company printed a map and stuffed copies into envelopes carrying the legend "map inside". It sent these out in mailshot. So far, so ordinary. Then it tried to trademark the expression 'map inside'. Big mistake. Intel sent...

Linus Torvalds prays Intel will adopt Yamhill And so adopt AMD's X86-64 By INQUIRER staff: Monday 29 July 2002, 11:26 A POSTING BY Linus Torvalds on the LINUX KERNEL newsgroup yesterday has him praying that Intel will adopt its secret "Yamhill" project and turn to the ways of X86-64 righteousness. Torvalds, who had a key part to play in Transmeta's fortunes at startup, says in the post that Linux developers are "generally praying that AMD's X86-64 succeeds in the market." That, he says, would force Intel to make Yamhill its standard 64-bit platform and allow for improvements in the Linux...

Desktop Roadmaps 1066 validation, price cuts, Springdale, and more By Mike Magee: Tuesday 23 July 2002, 10:57 THE LATEST INTEL ROADMAPS show the Prescott 90 nanometer processor appearing in the second half of 2003. Prescott will be introduced at 3.20GHz in the second half of next year. And Intel will introduce hyperthreading in desktop CPUs at speeds of 3.06GHz and bove. While Intel will also introduce a 3.20GHz Pentium 4 in Q2 of next year. As we said earlier, Intel will introduce its Pentium 4 2.80GHz processor this quarter – it will cost $508 at launch, the 2.6/2.66 Pentium 4s...

Why the Buzz on Hammer Just Won't QuitJust in case you haven't been paying attention, AMD's upcoming 8th generation processor has been generating a steady buzz of discussion almost since the first of the year.  This has led to an occasional outburst of exasperation from editors at various websites, some of whom have complained the web community in general is too focused upon Hammer.  Hammer is, their argument goes, an unproven product with a distant and uncertain launch date, and should not be focused on so heavily.  It's also been suggested by some that much of the Hammer hype itself...

Advanced Micro Devices is building a 64-bit field of dreams. As Intel accelerates the launch date of its 3GHz Pentium 4 chip, arch rival AMD continues to build the foundation for "ClawHammer." The 64-bit Athlon processor is expected to come out early next year, giving desktop PCs a performance similar to that of workstations used in research labs at DaimlerChrysler or NASA. To make sure ClawHammer arrives on solid footing, AMD is working with a long list of partners who will build that hardware and software that can take advantage of such a chip. The company has already sent tens...

Intel's Rio Rancho fab hit by Act of God Wafers toasted, roasted by lightning By Mike Magee: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 09:49 LOCAL NEWSPAPER the Bradenton Herald reported Monday that Intel's Rio Rancho plant in Albuquerque was hit by a bolt from the blue, temporarily shutting down production at the leading fab. The report said that Intel lost $800 million worth of chips because of the lighting strike. That sounds like an overestimate to us, unless the lightning strike really ripped through the facilities. The paper quotes a fire expert from the US National Lighting Safety Institute as reporting that...

Hollywood adopting Linux Rendering, cheap and fast By Egan Orion: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 06:09 BIG MEDIA COMPANIES have a well-deserved reputation for being deeply clueless about information technology. Studio executives view it as a necessary evil, albeit useful for padding byzantine accounting in order to pay their actors and investors as little as possible. But the smaller studios producing the computer animation wizardry driving many popular movies are more sophisticated. They are moving to Linux on x86 platforms, and are realizing both lower costs and higher performance. Thus Cnet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic(ILM), the operation responsible...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. is moving up the introduction of its Pentium 4 processor running at 3.0 gigahertz, an industry source said on Monday, as the world's largest chipmaker looks to tap the benefits of efficiencies in its chip manufacturing. Santa Clara, California-based Intel, the world's No. 1 chip maker, now plans to have the processor to PC makers in time for the year-end holiday shopping season, the source said. Intel had planned to introduce the 3.0 gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, the brains of a personal computer, by the end of the year. In additional, Intel also...