AMD, Intel do battle

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has delivered its Barcelona quad-core processor, says PC World.

In 2003, AMD released the Opteron, a 64-bit x86 processor, into a world dominated by Intel's 32-bit chip. Opteron was a hit. Hardware vendors added it to their server lines, high-performance and businesses users adopted it, and Intel faced its biggest challenge yet in the business server market.

But Intel has responded ferociously to this challenge. Today, AMD is nearly one year behind Intel in releasing a quad-core processor, and its server market share is now in retreat, according to market research company IDC.

HP has purchased Neoware, a provider of thin client computing and virtualisation solutions, at a price of $16.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash) of approximately $214 million on a fully diluted basis, says Albawaba.

The acquisition is part of HP's strategy to expand in growth markets and further its leadership in personal computing. Acquiring Neoware is intended to accelerate the growth of HP's thin client business by boosting its Linux software, client virtualisation and customisation capabilities, expanding its regional sales footprint and broadening its hardware portfolio.

"Our objective is to become the preferred brand of thin clients and software for virtualised client computing," said Anil Kumar, consumer and commercial category manager, of Personal Systems Group at HP.

Today's database-driven applications are a world apart from the green-screen terminal apps of decades past, says Infoworld.

And yet, in this age when "the network is the computer", more and more data processing tasks are handed off to remote resources. Server-based applications, centralised content management, service-oriented architecture, and software as a service (SaaS) are all part of this trend, and all put increased burden on enterprise network links.

Unfortunately, the network isn't always up to the task. Last year, top SaaS CRM provider Salesforce.com stumbled with a series of intermittent outages that deprived customers of access to their data.