Mobility

Cisco Systems Inc. has agreed to acquire Scientific-Atlanta Inc. in a deal valued at US$6.9 billion, it said. The combination offers Cisco the fourth component of what the company is calling a quad play -- data, video, mobility and voice convergence. Cisco already has products that let service providers deliver data, voice and mobility. Scientific-Atlanta, a maker of cable set-top boxes, adds the video component.

AMD will introduce a new core design in 2007 that is similar to the core used by the company's Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. The new processor will incorporate four cores connected together by a new version of the Hypertransport interconnect technology, and will support DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory.

Intel Corp. is expected to unveil two new desktop processors that come with hardware support for virtualization technologies, but users won't be able to take advantage of that technology for some time.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is due to take the wraps off its new UltraSparc T1 chip. Previously code-named Niagara, the company's multithreaded, multicore processor had been slated to appear early in 2006. Unlike previous chip launches, Sun isn't planning to announce specifics on the servers the chip will power; instead the company is unveiling UltraSparc T1 on the day it talks up eco-friendly chip design at an event in San Francisco.

A startup is launching an appliance that lets help desk staff take control of remote computers without the time-consuming tasks of installing and maintaining...

Chip-making underdog Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) edged past Intel Corp. last month in supplying processors for the U.S. retail PC market, according to a study by research firm Current Analysis Inc.

Wyse Technology Inc. is set to unveil a wide-ranging set of products and partnerships as it tries to jump-start the concept of server-based computing. The company's new Streaming Manager software can be deployed on servers with the Windows Server 2003 OS to deliver unique sets of applications that run on Windows client operating systems to users across a company's network.

Engineers working on a chip-enabled soccer ball are optimistic about the technology being used at the FIFA (F