Ben Ames

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) will launch a family of networked storage products in September to compete with EMC Corp. for small and medium-size business customers.

Intel Corp. executives told employees they would cut 1,000 management jobs in an effort to rebound from poor profits in recent quarters, the company said. The layoffs will be complete by the end of July, and will be spread across Intel divisions worldwide, said company spokesman Bill Calder.

Intel Corp. launched its "Montecito" dual-core Itanium chip on Tuesday, in an effort to improve its third-place position in the high-end server market. The Dual-Core Itanium 2 design is the first to bring hyperthreading, virtualization and multiple cores to the Itanium line.

Intel Corp. is set to launch its often-delayed

Sun Microsystems Inc. launched three Opteron-based servers Tuesday, positioning them as midrange servers to be used for network computing in data centers.

Corporate IT managers have about five years to prepare for a shock wave of technology change that will sweep across the global economy and drive unwitting CIOs crazy.

ClearCube Technology plans to launch two PC blade servers, in a bid to compete with Hewlett-Packard Co. for customers in finance, insurance, hospitals and the military. Both blades will use Intel Corp. chips and will have enough power to run Microsoft Corp.'s pending Vista operating system, which has large processing requirements to support the translucent windows in its graphical interface.

Researchers at Intel Corp. have found a better way to insulate circuits, enabling them to save energy as they pack more transistors onto each processor. Intel could start building chips with these new "tri-gate transistors" by 2010, enabling either a 45 percent increase in speed or a 35 percent reduction in total power used, compared to the company's current 65-nanometer process transistors.