Business Tech

Advanced Micro Devices' manufacturing spinoff got an all-clear from the U.S. government on Tuesday.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), part of the U.S. Treasury Department, gave the green light to AMD and the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) to create The Foundry Company, the manufacturing operations that AMD spun off back in October.

CFIUS has also determined that "the proposed additional investment in AMD by Mubadala is not a covered transaction subject to CFIUS review," according to AMD.

ATIC will own 65.8 percent of The Foundry Company and AMD 34.2 percent, according to a revised statement from AMD in December.

ATIC is a technology investment company wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. The Foundry Company will be a U.S.-headquartered chip manufacturing company with manufacturing facilities in Dresden, Germany. Future plans call for manufacturing facilities in Saratoga County, New York.

Both SanDisk and Samsung announced solid-state drives on Tuesday--though that's where the similarity ends. SanDisk's SSDs are aimed at Netbooks, while Samsung's new SSDs are for the high-performance server market.

SanDisk Gen 2 pSSD drives for Netbooks are available in capacities up to 64GB

(Credit: SanDisk)

SanDisk is debuting its new 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB pSSD-P2 and pSSD-S2 solid-state drives at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Samsung's 100GB SS805 drive, on the other hand, is being introduced on Tuesday at the Storage Visions 2009 Conference, also in Las Vegas.

The second-generation SanDisk drives, designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives, use the Serial-ATA or SATA interface. First-generation drives were based on a slower Parallel-ATA or PATA interface.

New Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and the HP Mini 2140 use the SATA interface. (Many ultraportable notebooks, like the first-generation MacBook Air and HP Compaq 2510p, however, used the slower PATA interface.)

"Netbooks represent the fastest growing PC segment in 2009 and 2010 yet widespread adoption of SSDs in netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constraints," Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for solid-state drives at SanDisk, said in a statement. "With the significant improvements in performance, capacity and low pricing, these SSDs are a perfect fit for the exploding Netbook market."

SSDs are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at booting and launching applications, taking about half the time of an HDD, according to SanDisk.

SanDisk's drives, slated to be available in February, 2009, are built using the company's 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash memory. MLC technology generally yields lower-cost SSDs compared with more traditional Single-Level Cell or SLC technology. SanDisk manufactures the flash memory in Yokkaichi, Japan with its partner Toshiba.

SanDisk did not provide pricing information but said its 32GB modular SSD is "priced at parity" with 80GB 2.5-inch HDDs in OEM quantities. HDDs with this capacity range in price from about $50 to $100 (depending on speed) so this is rather vague pricing guidance.

Unlike SanDisk's consumer SSDs, Samsung's SSD is targeted at the very-high-end corporate enterprise market. Samsung uses more pricey (and faster) SLC technology since its drives are targeted as a replacement for the high-performance 15,000 rpm hard-disk drives that are the staple storage device of large corporations. These drives are typically used for applications such as video on demand, streaming media content delivery, internet data centers, virtualization, and on-line transaction processing.

Samsung claims its 100GB Enterprise SSD can process IOPS (input/output per second) more than 10 times faster than the fastest 15,000 rpm SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) HDD available for transactional data workloads.

The high-performance 2.5-inch enterprise drive reads data sequentially at 230 megabytes per second (MB/s) and writes sequentially at 180 MB/s, Samsung said. The 100GB SSD's performance is derived from an 8-channel controller, improved NAND flash and special drive firmware, all developed by Samsung.

The 2.5-inch drive will be available this quarter.

Samsung did not provide pricing information.

With the overall economy slumping, the tech industry is taking its fair share of hits. We'll keep updating the chart below as news of company changes comes in. See our complete coverage of how the tech sector is faring here: Tracking the tech downturn.

Know of a layoff not listed here? Let us know on this form or e-mail us.

See also: The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring.

More than half a million of India's small businesses that have never owned PCs before will acquire their first computers this year, according to a new study released Monday.

According to Access Markets International Partners (AMI-Partners), nearly 22 percent of small businesses, or companies with up to 99 employees, in India have plans to invest in computers for the first time over the next 12 months.

While buying their first PCs, these small businesses will also boost spending in other IT sectors in India, such as software, services, and security, the research house said.

Dipendra Mitra, an analyst at AMI-Partners, said small businesses in India that already own PCs will extend the lives of their existing personal systems as they try to cut costs during the economic downturn.

As such, "non-PC-owning businesses hold the key to growth in India," Mitra said in a statement. "Even if a fraction of the 2.5 million non-PC-owning businesses buy a PC, it will provide a considerable boost to the Indian IT industry."

Although small and midsize businesses are a vital part of India's economy and a major contributor to its gross domestic product, only a little more than a third of all small businesses actually own a PC, AMI-Partners noted. A reason for this is their lack of awareness of the benefits PCs can provide, the research firm said.

A separate AMI-Partners survey found that more than 55 percent of small businesses see PCs as having no relevance to their business, and nearly a third have not even considered buying one.

However, Mitra said, this attitude is changing.

"About a quarter of non-PC (small businesses) say PCs will make their business look more professional," he said. "One-fifth of these non-PC SBs say PCs will increase the productivity of their employees, and the resultant business automation will boost efficiency."

Sol E. Solomon of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.

Correction at 8:00 a.m. PST: Logitech employs over 9,000 people.

Swiss peripherals manufacturer Logitech plans to cut approximately 15 percent of its salaried workforce. Logitech has more than 9,000 employees worldwide.

In a statement Monday, the company cited the deepening economic gloom as the reason for the cut.

"During the December quarter, the retail environment deteriorated significantly," Logitech Chief Executive Gerald Quindlen said. "We experienced varying degrees of weakness across all geographies and channels, as our customers reduced inventory levels in the face of weaker consumer demand. Moreover, we expect the economic environment to worsen in the coming months, and we are therefore taking significant actions to align our cost structure with what is likely to be an extended downturn."

Logitech, which has offices in Silicon Valley, Switzerland, and Asia, makes products such as keyboards, mice, Webcams, headphones, and remote controls. On Tuesday, it introduced several products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Logitech has sales offices in major cities in North America, Asia, and Europe, including in the United Kingdom.

In its announcement about its restructuring, the company withdrew its growth targets for sales and operating income in its fiscal year 2009, and did not provide any new estimates.

Logitech will give details of the job cuts and restructuring with its fiscal third-quarter results, due on 20 January. It expects savings from the restructuring to begin to show in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2010.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Updated at 11:05 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Another Netbook? No, not exactly. Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable, thank you. And the new Athlon Neo silicon inside from Advanced Micro Devices will try to prove that point.

AMD is introducing new chips at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that target the no-man's land between Netbooks and notebooks. Typically, these designs are referred to as ultraportables--the most salient examples being Apple's MacBook Air, the Toshiba Portege, and the Sony Vaio TT series.

So what makes AMD's platform different? In one word, price. Ultraportables fall into the boutique category of laptops: very stylish, very slim, very light--and very expensive. Usually ranging between $1,500 and $3,000. HP's notebook with Athlon Neo silicon cuts the price in half. The Pavilion dv2 will start at $699 and top out at $899 for standard configurations.

HP 12-inch Pavilion dv2 ultraportable starts at $699, at least half the price of traditional ultraportable notebooks like the MacBook Air, Toshiba Portege, and Sony Vaio TT series.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The dv2, at 3.8 pounds, is slightly heavier than ultraportables that typically weigh between 2.5 and 3 pounds. It is 0.9-inches thick, slightly thicker than more expensive ultraportables like the MacBook Air.

But the Pavilion dv2 will pack features such as an AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 separate (discrete) graphics chip, a relatively large hard disk drive (HP lists drives up to 500GB), and a 12.1-inch LED screen. Features that differentiate it from Netbooks and put it squarely into ultraportable territory.

AMD Athlon Neo silicon details

(Credit: AMD)

The dv2 will also come with WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) options as well as standard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Bahr Mahony, AMD's manager of mobile products, said in an interview that one of the few ultraportables available today with discrete graphics is the MacBook Air, but this starts at a whopping $1,800. (The Air uses Nvidia's GeForce 9400M graphics and Intel's Core 2 Duo low-voltage processors.)

The Athlon Neo platform can handle 1080p HD playback and a "casual" gaming experience with realistic 3D graphics, using the optional ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 graphics chip.

AMD's Athlon Neo processor--formerly code-named "Huron" under the platform codename "Yukon"--runs at 1.6GHz and has a power envelope of 15 watts, comparable to Intel ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) Core 2 Duo processors that power ultraportables today.

AMD's Neo does fall short in one respect, however. Currently it is only single-core, whereas Intel ULV processors are dual-core at a comparable power envelope, and, moreover, typically integrate 6MB level-2 cache memory to boost performance. AMD's Neo has only 512K of cache memory.

A dual-core chip, code-named "Conesus," will come in the second half of this year, according to AMD's Mahoney.

The first HP Pavilion dv2 ultrathin notebook is expected to be available from HP in the second quarter.

Amid current pessimism over the global economy, more reports of layoffs have surfaced online.

PC manufacturer Lenovo is reportedly laying off 200 staff in its Beijing-based headquarters, of which 10 or so are senior management, China Tech News reported Monday.

The report quoted an inside source as saying official cuts are still going through government channels for approval, but added Lenovo "may conduct large-scale adjustments in the Asia-Pacific region" as well.

A Lenovo representative dismissed the reports as rumors, telling ZDNet Asia the company could not provide additional information as it does not comment on speculation.

Software giant Microsoft has also been in the midst of layoff rumors. A CNBC report appeared Monday, saying the company would embark on a "significant" initiative "which might begin as early as this month to offset a global slowdown in sales."

Over the last week, similar reports have appeared, saying the company would undertake a massive global layoff that would take out 17 percent of its workforce. Adding to speculation was a statement released the prior week by Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Brad Reback, saying the company's profitability would be improved by a 10 percent reduction of its full-time global workforce.

Microsoft also declined to comment, noting in an e-mail reply to ZDNet Asia that it does not comment on "speculations or rumors".

An increasing number of multinational corporations in recent months have announced plans to reduce their headcount. Japanese electronics giant Sony announced in December it would lay off 8,000 full-time workers and another 8,000 part-time and contract-based workers globally. It employs a staff of 160,000 overall.

Dell, which had in 2007 set the goal of lowering headcount globally by 8,900, completed the exercise by its third quarter last year.

According to a December report, IBM plans to cut 2,600 jobs across its Asia-Pacific operations in a companywide "reorganization," with Japan hit hardest at 1,000 jobs set to be axed.

Eileen Yu reported for ZDNet Asia.

Intel and Adobe Systems on Monday announced that they're working to adapt Adobe's Flash media technology, widespread on PCs, to work in TV-focused devices.

The two companies will work on fine-tuning the Flash Player and Flash Lite for Intel's Media Processor CE 3100. The goal is for Intel to ship the first CE 3100 chip with Flash Lite support before the middle of this year.

A Flash-CE 3100 combo would give consumers a better viewing experience of Web-based and other videos via digital TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, cable set-top boxes, and audiovisual devices, the companies said.

"Our effort with Adobe is poised to accelerate a rich yet relevant Internet experience on the TV that will provide consumers with access to a growing number of Flash-based applications that will ultimately be enjoyed across a number of screens seamlessly, from the laptop to a MID and now the TV," William O. Leszinske Jr., general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group, said in a statement.

Intel says the Media Processor CE 3100 is the first to come in a lineup of system-on-chip offerings for consumer electronics. The CE 3100, earlier known by the code name Canmore, also factors into software work that Yahoo is doing for Internet-enabled TVs with its Yahoo Widget Engine.

Televisions aren't the only non-PC devices that Adobe has in its sights. In November, the company said it is in the midst of "evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile."

Freescale Semiconductor is expected to launch new silicon for Netbooks--devices that it believes will come in below $200--at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

The ARM chip architecture-based i.MX51 processor is designed to enable "low-power, gigahertz performance netbooks at sub-$200 price points," according to Freescale, formerly Motorola's chipmaking arm.

Freescale envisions sub-$200 Netbooks

(Credit: Freescale Semiconductor)

The definition of a Netbook seems to get redefined every month, as different companies push their distinct vision of the device. And Freescale is no different. While Freescale, like Intel, believes the Netbook is a companion device to the PC, it envisions devices that are more frugal with power consumption and run the Linux operating system. Intel-based Netbooks using the Atom processor typically offer better performance than ARM-based devices and run the Windows XP operating system.

"Because the primary function (of a Netbook) is accessing the Internet, Linux and Firefox are a good operating system and application for that purpose," Glen Burchers, director global marketing for Freescale's consumer products group, said in an interview.

He doesn't see ARM competing directly with Intel Atom processors, which target a higher-end Netbook segment. "ARM based processors can have a play, in addition to x86 (Intel)," Burchers said. 'We don't believe ARM processor will replace x86, but will augment them for a certain segment of the market." Ideally, the Freescale chip would be used in Netbooks that get about eight hours of battery life and sport an 8.9-inch screen.

And ABI Research, a market research firm, forecasts that there should be plenty of space for competing visions of the Netbook over the next several years. ABI expects consumers to purchase 60 million netbooks in 2013, compared with only 182,000 sold in 2007.

Freescale has been working with Pegatron, a wholly owned Asus subsidiary, to develop a reference design that features the 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based i.MX51 processor, Canonical's Ubuntu operating system, Adobe's Flash Player software, a new power management chip, and the SGTL5000 ultra low-power audio codec.

Freescale's netbook reference design is available now. The company says it is currently sampling the i.MX51 processor and MC13982 power management device to tier-one Netbook customers. Volume production for the i.MX51 device is planned for Q2 2009 to power netbooks designed for the 2009 holiday shopping season, Freescale said.

(Note about Apple Netbook speculation: Freescale says that the "speculation is inaccurate" that its i.MX51 chip will be used in an Apple Netbook, as some reports have stated. "Freescale's netbook approach is unambiguously an ARM/Linux play, and any suggestion otherwise is inaccurate," a Freescale spokesman said Sunday night.)

TechFlash is reporting that EMC has purchased SourceLabs for an undisclosed fee. The unanswered question in TechFlash's report is why EMC would buy SourceLabs, a provider of support tools for Linux and other open-source software.

It's not that SourceLabs isn't a good company. I have followed SourceLabs since its inception, meeting with founder and CEO Byron Sebastian back at OSCON (in 2003) before the company was founded in 2004, and spent some time in the SourceLabs office in 2004 getting a demo of its technology. It was cool back in 2004, and has improved since then.

In addition, SourceLabs has managed to pull in some big-name customers like Fidelity and Merrill Lynch, demonstrating that it offers real value to real customers. Unlike some competitors like Spikesource, SourceLabs focused early on big enterprise needs and arguably did a better job of tailoring its products to meet those needs than its competitors, notwithstanding its share of financial struggles, which TechFlash details.

No, my question is what EMC, largely a provider of storage solutions, gets from a relatively broad-based open-source support technology company. TechFlash points to Swik.net, SourceLabs' open-source news and information repository as a source of value for the company, but I'm guessing that EMC didn't buy SourceLabs for Swik.net, given that the company had been contacting potential buyers just a few weeks ago to gauge interest in buying Swik.net, likely because EMC wasn't interested in that part of SourceLabs' business.

No, I don't think EMC is interested in an open-source community site, but it's clearly interested in the core SourceLabs technology. I'm struggling to understand the fit. Is EMC hoping to tap into expertise in various open-source technologies? If so, to what end?

I've asked SourceLabs' executive team for comment but, in the interim, anyone care to venture a guess as to what EMC is hoping to get from SourceLabs?