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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - Posts
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The world has gone on too long without a high quality arcade stick, at least in North America. Until now, you could import, you could build your own, or you could settle for something less than optimal... but now you'll finally be able to walk into a store and pick up an arcade-quality joystick for your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The amazing thing? It took Mad Catz to do it. It must be pretty chilly in hell right now.
The company was nice enough to send us review samples of its two controllers, which will be released to coincide with the launch of Street Fighter IV, perhaps the most-hyped fighting game release of the last five years. Street Fighter fans, especially those being asked to spend $150 on an arcade stick, have high standards. The best players smell bullshit a mile away, and are more than willing to spread the word about any product that doesn't meet their exacting standards. After playing with these sticks, not to mention ripping them apart and putting our own stamp on the design, we're ready to tell you that Mad Catz has nothing to worry about.
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Once it completes its surprise $4 billion debt offering, networking giant Cisco Systems will have more than $30 billion in the bank. That's more than Apple at $27 billion and Microsoft at $20 billion, and within sight of Exxon Mobil... 
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After weeks of nothing but bad news from the semiconductor market, Intel's investment announcement and roadmap updates on Tuesday were a
welcome blast of fresh air. Company executives acknowledged the state of the economy, but took the opportunity to
affirm the manufacturer's commitment to investment and innovation over the long term. In this case, Intel wasn't just talking—the company plans to
accelerate the ramp of its 32nm process, bringing it to market more rapidly than originally anticipated. Roadmap goodness awaits.
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The same day the Windows 7 beta was released, the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta went public as well, and the same goes for the Windows 7 Ecosystem Readiness Program. Server 2008 R2 will be the first operating system Microsoft ships that will not come in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors: only a 64-bit version will be released. Furthermore, as Microsoft Evangelist Volker Will notes, 32-bit support will not be installed by default for Server Core, a significantly scaled-back installation where no Windows Explorer shell is installed.
"With Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core we will ship the first operating system with optional 32-bit support. You will have to explicitly enable 32-bit application support," notes Will. "WoW64, the 32-bit app support layer, is not installed by default. This reduces the attach surface, helps saving memory and makes the whole OS, when running native 64-bit apps only, leaner. The only person impacted by this change is most likely the system administrator."
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Over a year after acquiring Fast Search & Transfer ASA in January 2008 for $1.2 billion, Microsoft has finally outlined what it plans to do with the company's resources.
First, the software giant plans to release FAST Search for SharePoint, a new search server that includes the high-end search capabilities of FAST ESP as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, with Office 14. For customers who can't wait, Microsoft made ESP for SharePoint available today, along with a licensing path to FAST Search for SharePoint when it becomes available.
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Nomura analyst Richard Windsor sounded an alarm this morning. While most cell-phone manufacturers still expect smartphone sales to grow 10% to 20% this year, he believes that they will hardly grow at all. "I find that the industry view that there will be good growth in smartphones in 2009 to be fundamentally flawed," Windsor writes. "I see 2 years of almost no growth before a strong bounce back in 2011." Could this be right? 
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This month, the US Patent and Trademark Office awarded Microsoft its 10,000th US patent, in part thanks to Curtis Wong, the same researcher that helped the company grab its 5,000th US patent. The news follows Ballmer's announcement last week that the software giant would continue to spend $9 billion+ a year in R&D. Just two months ago, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ranked Microsoft's patent portfolio first across all industries in terms of its power and influence for the second year in a row. It's not just new patents though; Microsoft has been striking more patent cross-licensing deals as well—just last week the company struck one with Brother Industries, which included compensation from the printer-maker.
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The global DRAM industry, battered in early 2008, was positively crushed during the fourth quarter, industry analysis group iSuppli announced today. They expect the DRAM industry's woes to extend through all of 2009, which is projected to see a 15% drop in revenue due to falling prices and flat demand with ever-escalating supply.
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At an ISSCC session Monday, Intel went into new detail on its forthcoming 8-core, 16-thread Xeon processor, a 64-bit processor that's a member of the Nehalem family. Much of the session was focused on the packaging and power aspects of the device, so I'll recap some of the more interesting parts of that here.
The Intel presenter explained that the Xeon has three different clock and voltage domains: the core region, the uncore region, and the I/O region. (You may recall from previous coverage of Nehalem that the "uncore" region of the processor is so named because it's the area that doesn't have a processor core in it; this area is mostly cache.)
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