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GM Adds IT Jobs
General Motors Co said on Monday it will add 1,500 jobs at a new software development center in Michigan as part of the U.S. automaker’s previously announced plan to move information technology work back into the company.
GM said it will hire the software developers, database experts, analysts and other IT positions over the next four years for the office in Warren, Michigan. It is the second of four software development centers GM plans to open, following one it announced last month in Austin, Texas.
In July, the Detroit automaker said it would reverse years of outsourcing IT work. GM now outsources about 90 percent of its IT services and provides the rest in-house, but it wants to flip those figures in the next three to five years.
The IT overhaul is spearheaded by GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott, who outlined the plan to GM’s 1,500 IT employees in June. The former Hewlett-Packard Co executive believes the moves will make GM more efficient and productive.
GM, which has not disclosed the cost or savings of its strategy, plans to cut the automaker’s sprawling list of IT applications by at least 40 percent and move to a more standardized platform. GM will also simplify the way it transmits data.
AMD And Oracle Join Forces
AMD is taking part in the OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle.
The project aims to bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for servers and clouds. It will look at how the Java virtual machine, language and APIs, can be spruced up to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD APUs.
Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD said that the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community, he said.
Are Microsoft and Intel Having Issues?
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Intel’s delayed software that conserves battery life is holding up development of some tablets running the latest version of Microsoft Windows.
Bloomberg said that Mirosoft hasn’t yet approved any tablets featuring an Intel processor codenamed Clover Trail because the chipmaker hasn’t produced necessary power-management software. This sort of news follows a statement by Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini that Windows 8 was not really ready to ship.
Alex Gauna, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco said that the PC channel is in chaos right now with no one knowing what to do. He said that the people don’t know what to design for, as they don’t know what the consumers are going to buy. Tablets have stolen their growth trajectory, plus the macro situation, plus Wintel has made a mess of their ecosystem.
PC makers, including HP, Dell and Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), are counting on the new version of Windows to help them compete in the $63.2 billion tablet market.
Oracle And Nokia Make A Deal
October 10, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Nokia Oyj has agreed to grant Oracle Corp’s customers access to its mapping products, as the wireless phone company attempts to expand its location services business.
The Finnish company, which bought the world’s largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business
and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.
In stark contrast with Nokia’s troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.
Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company’s business users to access the mapping services through its products.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would license Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.
“Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this,” CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.
Last week Apple publicly apologized after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc’s mapping service.
AMD And BlueStacks Join Forces
AMD has joined forces with BlueStacks in an effort to bring Android apps to Windows tablets. BlueStacks is the outfit behind Android App Player, a Windows app that enables users to run Android apps on tablets.
Since AMD is not in the ARM game, it could obviously benefit from bringing some popular Android apps to Windows, allowing users to play a few levels of Bad Piggies on Hondo tablets.
However, apps have to be vetted before users can take end up on the AMD AppZone, but it is also possible to install other applications.
The BlueStacks Android Player will also run on Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs, and it even supports Windows XP.
In the long run, the possibility of running Android apps could be very interesting for consumers thinking about getting a Windows 8 tablet, as it will combine Microsoft’s unmatched enterprise solutions with fun and popular Android apps. Provided the whole thing works as advertised, of course.
AMD Confirms Trinity’s New Specs
AMD has confirmed the specifications of its Trinity accelerated processor units (APUs), with the majority being quad-core units with 4MB cache.
AMD launched its mobile Trinity APUs earlier this year in a bid to cash in on “back to school” sales and now it has detailed the specification of Trinity processors that will slot into desktop systems. The firm confirmed that Trinity has moved from Socket FM1 to Socket FM2 and save for two A4 and A6 SKUs the chips will all be quad-core parts with base frequencies over 3GHz.
AMD stuck with its A4, A6, A8 and A10 branding with the dual-core A4-5300, base clocked at 3.4GHz with turbo mode pushing that up to 3.6GHz and 128 graphics cores clocked at 723MHz at the foot of AMD’s APU line-up. Next up the firm has the unlocked dual-core A6-5400K, which not only bumps the CPU clock speed by 200MHz to 3.6GHz and 3.8GHz for base and turbo modes, respectively, but increases the number of graphics cores to 192 and their frequency to 760GHz.
While AMD’s A4 and A6 Trinity processors are dual-core, the four other chips in the range are all quad-core parts, with the A8-5500 and A8-5600K sporting base clock speeds of 3.2GHz and 3.6GHz, respectively, with turbo mode boosting those to 3.7GHz and 3.9GHz, respectively. The firm has kept the number of graphics cores on both chips the same at 356 and clocked them at 760MHz, however the higher frequency on the A8-5600K means that the firm bumped up the TDP to 100W, though given it is unlocked, the factory TDP is largely academic.
AMD’s A10 chips follow in the same vein as the A8 parts, with the 65W A10-5700 part clocked at 3.4GHz, boosted to 4GHz while the 100W A10-5800K part has its clocks set at 3.8GHz and boosted to 4.2GHz. AMD has given both processors 384 graphics cores clocked at 800MHz.
Server 2008 Support Ends In 2015
Microsoft has extended support for Windows Server 2008 until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating system had been earmarked to enter the firm’s extended support phase on 9 July 2013, however the firm has moved that date back by 18 months. The firm said that it will keep Windows Server 2008 in the mainstream support phase until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft generally provides a decade of support for its high profile operating systems and software applications. The company said, “Microsoft policy provides a minimum of five years of Mainstream Support or two years of Mainstream Support after the successor product ships, whichever is longer.”
Of course Microsoft likes its customers to buy newer, shiner versions of its software whenever the firm releases it, but server operating systems customers are resistant to change in order to avoid any possible disruption in service availability. The company is desperately trying to get customers to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Windows 8, even though it extended support for the operating system until 8 APril 2014.
RedHat Takes A Fall
Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.
Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.
Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm’s earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, “This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter’s EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs.”
Red Hat’s $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.
RIM Says Subscriber Base Grew
October 2, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Research in Motion offered investors a glimmer of hope on Tuesday, announcing a surprise jump in subscriber numbers that sent its shares up 5 percent, even as the embattled BlackBerry maker worked hard to drum up enthusiasm for its new BB10 devices.
Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, once a pioneer in the smartphone arena, has rapidly lost market share in North America to Apple’s snazzier iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.
RIM is now attempting to reinvent itself through the launch of new line of totally revamped smartphones that will run on the new BlackBerry 10, or BB10, operating system. In an attempt to create a buzz around the new devices, RIM gave developers at a gathering Tuesday in San Jose, California, a sneak peek at the smartphone and its features.
At the event, the company also announced that its BlackBerry subscriber base has risen to 80 million from the 78 million it reported earlier this year, surprising many on Wall Street and sparking a jump in the company’s beleaguered share price.
In recent months, RIM has been completely focused on the launch its new line of revamped devices. In the meantime, its aging line-up of smartphones in the market have struggled to compete against the recently launched iPhone 5 and a slew of new Android devices. Most analysts had expected RIM to begin losing subscribers in the recently ended quarter, for the first time in its history.
Intel Changes Course
Intel has changed its strategy when it comes to talking about its next generation technology. Back at IDF 2012, the company mentioned Haswell second generation 22nm CPUs and even explained some of its core technology, although it didn’t actually show any demos.
People got excited about Core i5 and Core i7 next generation Haswell parts that can ship with 10W TDP, but Intel hasn’t actually shown anything. When we asked a few people inside the company, they said that Intel isn’t planning on revealing too much, as they want to surprise the competition a bit more than they used to.
It’s quite clear that Haswell has every chance to beat AMD’s including 2013 Vishera successors. Intel obviously wants to see the market’s reaction to many ARM competitors, since some of them run Windows 8 RT just fine.