Computer Industry Updates: 04/06/09

 

IT INDUSTRY URGES STEPS TO BOOT CONSUMPTION
Bhaskar Hazarika, New Delhi
Financial Chronicle  The Asian Age  

Recession-hit IT industry is seeking long-term growth-oriented policy to boost the IT hardware industry. The Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) has submitted a pre-budget memorandum to the finance ministry urging a stable policy regime for the IT hardware industry to boost domestic consumption.

The industry body urged the government for continuation of 8 percent excise duty/ countervailing duty (CVD) on all IT products including computers, peripherals and components. Vinnie Mehta, executive director, MAIT stressed on providing appropriate incentives for IT manufacturers - finished products and components in India, as in the case of semiconductors, which would have a positive impact on IT manufacturing investments.

“The 4 percent special additional duty (SAD) should be abolished on all IT products and components. The SAD was introduced on imports to balance the impact of local taxes on domestic-manufactured products. With central sales tax being phased out, the SAD should, therefore, be abolished or at least be made at par with it,” the recommendations stated.

The IT hardware industry has witnessed a decline during the last couple of quarters due to the global credit crunch. The desktop sales witnessed a slump decline and growth of the notebooks have slowed down.

INTEL SEES HIGHER LAPTOP SALES
Financial Chronicle

Chip giant Intel on Wednesday said it sees solid global sales of consumer laptops and expects its new processors to put it in good stead for an expected boom in the ultra-thin laptop segment.

POWER TO CHANGE FROM HP
The Financial Express

HP has announced the launch of Power To Change, a campaign that encourages personal computer users around the world to make behavioral changes in support of the environment. The campaign encourages users to download a new desktop widget that tracks the cumulative energy savings associated with participants turning off idle PCs when not in use. The Power To Change widget is available for download by individuals and companies across the globe and is compatible with Macs and PCs.

INTEL TO RIDE TAIWANESE TECH MIGHT INTO INDIA
C Chitti Pantulu, Bangalore
DNA

Intel's Project Blue, which aims to increase PC and broadband Internet penetration in ten-fold in India by 2012, will bank heavily on the Taiwanese tech ecosystem to achieve the target.

Given the current 3% PC and 2% broadband penetration in the country, that is a stupendous task. But the world's biggest chipmaker says this digital divide will be bridged thanks to the advent of cheap netbook and nettop PCs riding on the success of its Atom chips and the business acumen of Taiwanese manufacturers who are gunning for the Indian market in a big way.

"The most encouraging aspect of the current drive is that the Taiwanese ecosystem has joined in for this India initiative," Prakash Bagri, director sales Asia Pacific, Intel, told DNA Money.

While the Atom chip which power these low-cost gizmos were introduced in India last June 2008, most significantly Intel feels PC and broadband penetration will increase manifold with the introduction of its latest Pine Trail platform for small formfactor devices which was unveiled at Computex in Taiwan on Tuesday.

AMD DARES INTEL WITH A SIX-CORE OPTERON
C Chitti Pantulu, Bangalore
DNA

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the world's second-largest chip company, has promised to come out all guns blazing to grab a larger share of the market from Intel Corp, the world's largest chip-maker.

The Austin, Texas-based company on Tuesday announced the availability of its six-core AMD Opteron processors, codenamed Istanbul, for the high-end server market, taking the battle to the next level.

Istanbul is the world's first six-core server processor with direct connect architecture for two, four and eight socket servers, AMD officials said in Bangalore. The company also claimed the chip wrings out 34% more performance-per-watt over the previous generation quad-core processors in the exact same platform.

Original equipment makers like Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems will sport the AMD six-core Opteron or Istanbul. Three more versions of the six-core chip are planned for the second half of 2009.

But AMD's joy could be short-lived, with Intel announcing, just ahead of AMD's Istanbul launch, its own plans to launch an eight-core Nehalem EX early 2010 aimed at servers with four or more sockets.

"What you should note about AMD is that we talk about today and not about the future. When Intel has the eight-core chip, we will have our 12-core chip out," responded Ramkumar Subramanian, vice-president, sales and marketing, AMD India.

HANDS- FREE GAMING
Mail Today

Microsoft sparked a games console war when it unveiled a revolutionary new control system for the Xbox 360 that banishes the need for a hand- held controller.

A 3D motion- sensing camera tracks players’ movements and projects them straight into the game on the screen.

The player of a football game, therefore, simply needs to swing a foot to kick the ball on the screen, while a boxing game will see legions of living room fighters dodging, weaving and throwing punches at invisible foes.

The motion- sensing technology goes much further than that currently available on the Nintendo Wii, which uses motion sensors within controllers that must still be clutched by the player.

The new Xbox 360 system, named Project Natal, will also have a voice recognition system allowing the player to speak directly to the machine and to characters within games.

The system will be so sensitive, according to Microsoft, that it will be able to recognise different family members and automatically log them into their Xbox profile.

It can even read facial expressions. The gadget could spell the beginning of the end for the traditional hand- held joypad controller which has dominated console controls since Sega and Nintendo developed early gaming machines in the 1980s.