Infrastructure

The Federal Trade Commission has started a formal inquiry into the pricing practices of leading chipmaker Intel, a move that rival Advanced Micro Devices has long requested. The FTC recently opened the formal investigation by issuing subpoenas to Intel and AMD, as well as other parties, including th...

Electronics retail giant Best Buy has announced plans to try out a free electronics recycling program at 117 of its stores. The initiative will start in three cities and could spread to others if it succeeds. Best Buy is launching its new program in Baltimore, San Francisco and Minnesota, with up to...

Dell turned in a strong first quarter, beating Wall Street forecasts and prompting investors to buy up its shares on the hopes that the founder's turnaround plans are beginning to bear fruit. Thanks largely to vigorous sales of notebook PCs in the U.S. as well as international sales, Dell posted rev...

HP's now officially pending EDS buy for just shy of $14 billion positions the combined companies to organize and manage the hosted/on-premises mix to maximum efficiency and lowest total cost of ownership. It's a great goal to shoot for because all they have to do is beat IBM. With this merger, the I...

It's a phrase that we hear all too frequently: "We're moving off our mainframe." Yet virtually anyone who has ever had a mainframe continues to utilize it in some fashion. These robust and highly functional legacy systems contain years and years of data, and when you're talking about abandoning t...

Intel has signed a multiyear agreement with supercomputer vendor Cray. The deal gives microchips from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel an avenue into Cray supercomputer systems that serve some of the most highly advanced computing applications in the government, military and engineering sectors. The ...

AMD on Monday launched a new line of PCs targeting small and medium-sized businesses. Through its business class initiative, the chipmaker aims to provide desktop solutions to customers stuck between consumer PCs and enterprise-class systems. "Often, SMBs don't need all the higher level performance ...

Japan-based Toshiba reported a 95 percent drop in profit in the January-March fiscal fourth quarter, blaming its loss in the high-definition format war that pitted its HD DVD format against Sony's Blu-ray. Toshiba reported a profit of about $12 million for the quarter, compared with approximately $2...

Sales of personal computers continued their growth trends in the first quarter despite the U.S. economic slowdown, according to studies released simultaneously by Gartner and IDC. Notebook sales are driving the PC market worldwide, according to the reports, and there are sharper PC sales in developi...

Benefiting from strong overseas sales and a weak U.S. dollar, IBM posted strong quarterly results and raised its guidance, adding to what's becoming a winning streak for technology stocks. On the heels of a strong report from fellow tech bellwether Intel, IBM beat expectations for its first quarter,...

Intel posted first-quarter results Tuesday that met or slightly beat expectations -- the chipmaker lowered its own targets last month -- and posted record revenue for the seasonally slow time of year. The company's results were a win for the tech sector, with investors driving Intel shares up about ...

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology is taking solid state drive manufacturer STEC to court over patent infringement. In a suit filed Monday in Northern California's U.S. District Court, Seagate claims STEC has violated four patents that Seagate had registered between 2002 and 2006. The battle is foc...

Phil Hester has exited the chief technology officer post at Advanced Micro Devices, according to reports, and he won't be replaced. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based manufacturer of computer processors, which reported more than $6 billion in revenue in 2007 and trails only Intel in that market, reportedly...

Plunging prices in a glutted memory-chip market served as a weight on semiconductor sales worldwide, although sales did increase by 1.5 percent in February, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Fueled by sales of computers and mobile phones outside the U.S., global year-on-year semic...

The stock price for Texas Instruments dropped nearly 6 percent -- and sent a minor shock wave through its biggest customer's stock -- on news that the company had lowered its profit forecast on Monday. Dallas-based TI, which supplies chips to about half the wireless handsets worldwide, saw its share...