With Advanced Micro Devices Inc. pushing out a slew of new products this month, its long-chilled chip war with Intel Corp. may just be heating up again, analysts say.

After struggling with delayed products and bad market and mind-share woes through 2007, a lot of industry pundits started writing off AMD. And while AMD struggled, Intel held strong over the past year and a half, coming out with quad-core chips and a 45-nanometer processor family and staying well ahead of AMD’s road map.

Recently, though, AMD has begun showing some signs of life, pushing out a graphics chip set early this month and a slew of new desktop processors this week. With the first AMD Barcelona-based systems expected to hit in April, and a 65-watt quad-core desktop chip and a triple-core desktop chip now in the mix, AMD may be starting to kick back into gear.

And that kind of renewed competition between the two processor giants can only be good for the industry, said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“It’s good to see AMD back in the game,” he said. “They’ve still got a lot of issues to handle, especially financially. I don’t know if I’d say they’re in fighting shape. Once you dig a hole, it’s hard to dig out of it. But they’re definitely back in the game.”

But as AMD picks up the pace, Intel isn’t giving it a steady target.

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Tech investors looking for a stock haven amid roiling markets of late have turned to industry consolidator Oracle. Shares of the software company rose nearly 14% over a three-week span in March as investors bet on Oracle’s formidable lead in database software and its aggressive acquisition strategy in business applications as an antidote to the economic malaise that’s throttling IT budgets.

Some of those shareholders reconsidered their strategy on Mar. 26 after Oracle (ORCL) released fiscal third-quarter results that fell short of analysts’ forecasts. Oracle reported sales of new business application software licenses, a barometer of future revenue, that were about $100 million less than Wall Street expected.

Total sales fell $70 million short of expectations in the period that ended Feb. 29, and Oracle shares fell in extended trading. “Our checks suggested [the results] were going to be pretty solid all around, so we’re surprised by this,” says Jeff Gaggin, an enterprise software analyst at Avian Securities.

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Rambus, the developer of memory chip technology, said Wednesday that it won an important ruling in a long-running patent lawsuit, sending its shares 39 percent higher.

The jury rejected claims by three large memory-chip makers — Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology and Nanya Technology — that Rambus deliberately misled the memory chip industry in the 1990s when new standards were being hammered out.

They claim Rambus failed to disclose it was seeking patents on the technology that was then being worked into standards for chip production.

Analysts have estimated Rambus, based in Los Altos, Calif., could eventually collect royalties of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars over the next decade. It is not yet clear when Rambus might receive any back royalties.

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Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Now Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors.

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Intel and Microsoft said Tuesday that they planned to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems intended to break the industry out of a technological cul-de-sac that threatens to end decades of performance increases in computers.

If the research efforts succeed, this would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music. For example, a music professor at the University of California, Berkeley, David L. Wessel, envisions a new era of digital musical instruments that would begin to match the rich versatility of acoustic instruments like violins and pianos.

The research grant, worth $20 million over five years, will create independent laboratories at Berkeley and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that will be charting a way to reinvent computing. Each will work on hardware, software and a new generation of applications powered by computer chips containing multiple processors. The University of Illinois plans to contribute an additional $8 million to the project and the Berkeley project is applying for an additional $7 million from a state-supported program to match the industry grants.

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As virtualization technology gains in popularity, it may bring with it new risks, said Don Simard, commercial solutions director at the U.S. National Security Agency, the electronic intelligence and cryptographic agency once so secret its very existence was a secret.

At the same time, virtualization technology may bring new protections, he noted.

One of the NSA’s roles is to work with technology providers to help them make their wares more secure, both to help government agencies using them and to reduce threats that could affect the commercial sector and thus the national economy. Sometimes, the NSA also wants to ensure it has back-door access to commercial systems.

In the case of virtualization, the NSA has worked with EMC’s VMware unit, IBM, AMD, Trusted Computing Group, and others for several years to identify potential threats and suggest workarounds. Later this year, chips from AMD and Intel will include technology that the NSA has helped develop.

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Information Support Concepts (ISC) has discontinued the monthly product special. Since we are now running weekly specials with much deeper discounts, it made sense for the monthly special to be replaced. We will now have a featured product each month, and direct our customers back to the weekly special for discounted items.

You can click on this link to see the current weekly product special!

This month we will highlight the value of keyboard/monitor drawers. Click here

RKP117, RKP1017 and RKP7 series keyboard/monitor drawers

The units pictured are some of the RKP series units. All units can be equipped with built-in KVM switches (see article below), and those switches can be USB, PS/2 or Cat5 capable. Keyboard/Monitor drawers provide outstanding features while only occupying 1U in a rack or cabinet. The RKP is the light duty unit while the N series is more solidly built and able to meet many of the standards associated with Mil-Spec.

As always, ISC personnel are ready to answer your questions, and can confirm what product will work for your specific application. If you have a question, just call us at 800-458-6255.

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Evidence that the U.S. economic slump is taking a toll on chipmakers came on Mar. 10 with a forecast of a sales-and-profit shortfall at Texas Instruments and news of a jump in stockpiles of unsold semiconductors.

Texas Instruments (TXN) said its first-quarter revenue and earnings won’t be as high as previously expected, citing disappointing wireless demand. That followed a Gartner Group (IT) report showing that semiconductor inventories rose to their highest level in two years in the last three months of 2007. “We started hearing rumors of a recession and indicators of a weak fourth quarter during the middle of 2007,” says Gartner analyst Gerald Van Horn. In the second half of last year, “we saw [inventories] rise on exuberant hopes for a strong holiday season. But the strong fourth quarter didn’t materialize.”

As a result, Gartner’s inventory index, which measures inventory throughout the chip industry’s supply chain, rose to 1.16 in the fourth quarter. According to the researcher, 0.95 indicates a slight shortage amid heavy demand, while 1.10 suggests slackening demand with a slight excess inventory. A higher reading falls into what Gartner calls the “caution zone,” where chipmakers should seriously consider cutting their inventory.

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Fewer global delivery centers were opened in India by the United Kingdom’s 20 largest IT services suppliers than in each of the three countries over the last year.

The competitive Indian labor market is driving companies to alternative destinations, say Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) in its report.

The 20 largest U.K. companies analyzed in the report included Accenture, BT Global Services, Capgemini, Capita, CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Logica.

Of the 21 centers opened since January 2007 by the big 20, only two were in India, while four were in China, with three were Eastern Europe and Morocco respectively.

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Chip-maker Intel Corp.’s CEO, Paul Otellini, vowed Wednesday to shore up the company’s defenses against steep drops in memory chip prices that forced it to lower its profit forecast for the current quarter.

Price erosion for NAND flash memory has been much steeper in the first quarter than Intel expected, Otellini said.

Otellini, speaking at an investor conference at the company’s Santa Clara headquarters, said the company plans to move aggressively this year into new markets to better insulate itself against plunging prices for a type of memory called NAND flash. One new market for NAND flash memory is solid-state computer drives, which store data on memory chips instead of spinning disks.

Despite the memory-market woes, Otellini says Intel’s core computing business is firing on all cylinders. Otellini said Intel is making rapid progress in shipping chips based on a new chip-making process.

The company is also re-evaluating how quickly it wants to increase its investment in NAND flash, Otellini said. Intel started making NAND flash in 2006 under a joint venture with Micron Technology Inc.

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