Intel will be introducing optical Thunderbolt cables later this year, an Intel spokesperson says-- allowing longer data transfer distances (with potentially greater bandwidth) for the connection standard.

The news joins the earlier announcement of Intel adding Thunderbolt support to PCI Express 3.0.

What are the differences between copper and optical? Copper handles data transfers for up to 6m (with sufficent bandwidth) while optical technology allows for tens of metres-- making it particularly useful for enterprise applications.  However, copper c Read more...

Intel reveals an update on the Xeon processor line with the E5-2600 series, saying it is designed to address the growth in cloud data traffic with "the best data centre performance per watt."

The latest Xeon chips carry up to 8 cores per processor and up to 768GB of system memory while supporting Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX)-- an instruction set Intel says doubles the speed of heavy-duty operations such as financial analysis, media content creation and scientific simulation.

The company claims the new series improves performance by up to Read more...

MSI launches a range of consumer and professional all-in-one PC models at CeBIT 2012-- specifically the Wind Top AP16 and AP2011 business models.

The AP16 is a 16" mode with x2 built-in COM ports (making it ideal for cash registers or barcode readers), while the AP2011 is 20" in size. The AP16 supports fast boot from USB stick (allowing users to quickly switch between operating systems) while the AP 2011 features an adjustable stand and carries a second-generation Intel Core processor.

Both carry specially designed LED backlighting MSI says gives Read more...

AMD cements its entry in the cloud server business, buying microserver specialist SeaMicro for around $334 million. 

SeaMicro builds space- and energy-saving servers by using hundreds of "wimpy cores"-- ultra-low-power processors-- specifically Intel chips, including Atom and Xeon processors. The company will continue making servers using Intel chips (for now) before it transitions towards AMD-based solutions sometime around H2 2012. 

AMD also hopes to license SeaMicro "supercompute fabric" technology (the means connecting 1000s of processor cores, Read more...