Mobility

Fujitsu Ltd. is planning to construct a new semiconductor manufacturing plant in Japan to produce a range of integrated circuits, the company said Wednesday. The factory, which represents an investment of

While many thought the iBook would be the first Mac to have an Intel chip, the distinction instead went to the iMac and an entirely new laptop dubbed the MacBook Pro. Both machines run on Intel Duo Core processors.

The value of IT hardware products manufactured by Taiwanese companies grew by 10.5 per cent during 2005 to US$77 billion and that growth is expected to continue into 2006, with Taiwanese companies further expanding their dominance of the hardware manufacturing industry, according to Market Intelligence Center (MIC), a market research company in Taipei.

Apart from performance, a primary benefit of hardware acceleration for x86 virtualization is that it will be far easier for developers to work with than the torturous software-only approaches required for current x86 architectures. If you're looking at anything less than ESX Server's full enterprise solution, we recommend that you wait until AMD and Intel bake virtualization into their CPUs. When the hardware's ready, download a trial and see why we think 2006 will be the year of the virtual x86.

PC shipment growth next year will decline from its current heights, but should still remain strong as users continue to upgrade to notebooks, IDC said Tuesday.

Chipmaker Intel Corporation is giving mobile computing a boost in performance and much better power efficiency, with a goal of enabling eight-hour continuous battery life by 2008. Intel's sequel to the Centrino mobile platform, codenamed Napa, is equipped with its Yonah dual-core processor technology that promises to be nearly 40 per cent faster than the current Sonoma Intel Pentium M 780 processor.

IBM Corp. announced plans to provide free access for researchers and educational institutions to the specifications for its PowerPC 405 chip core. The move is yet one more way in which IBM is trying to widen the number of users of its Power processors.

Taiwan's Quanta Computer Inc., the world's largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab. Negroponte, who is also chairman of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) non-profit group, has said he expects the laptops to be available to governments next year at a price of US$100 each. The first notebooks are expected to hit the market during the fourth quarter of next year.