“We have declared victory and the activities of the MPEG Industry Forum are now being wound up,” says the MPEG Industry Forum. By the end of this month all remaining assets will be put into the hands of the Open IPTV Forum.

The MPEG Industry Forum began in June 2000), a time of great fragmentation in the industry. As silicon continued to advance, alternatives to MPEG-2 emerged in many forms.

Their task at the Forum was to educate and evangelize an emerging standards based solution that became known as MPEG-4 Part 10, aka AVC, aka H.2 Read more...

Intel hopes to achieve exascale-level computing by 2018-- with the first step being the "Knights Corner" coprocessor, the first commercial product from the Intel Xeon Phi family. 

Xeon Phi is the new name for Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture-based products. Successor to the Xeon E5-2600/4600 product lines, the Phi family aims for use in industry-standard servers, in combination with fabric technologies through purchases from Qlogic and Cray.  

The Knights Corner chip carries more than 50 cores and supports over 8GB of GDDR5 memory Read more...

IDC forecasts the WW PC market will grow by 5% Y-o-Y in 2012, a "challenging year" with shipments reaching 383 million units amidst intense competition from mobile devices, global political uncertainty and bumpy economic roadmaps.

Headwinds from the Euro crisis are even affecting the outlook for emerging markets, including CEMA territories.

Mature regions such as W. Europe also face rising consumer saturation-- most consumers and businesses already have PCs, and see no reason to upgrade or expand their devices.

Will Windows 8 help reinvigorate Read more...

According to Business Insider, the PC market looks "flat and mature" as after "decades of sustained growth" WW shipments are grinding down to a halt.

The reasoning behind the gloomy forecast goes as follows-- global 2011 PC shipments are up by only 4% Y-o-Y, the slowest growth rate since 2001. In comparison, 2010 PC shipments grew by 14%.

The reasons for such a slowdown are both various and well known by now. A "choppy" global economy (affecting both consumer and business spending), longer PC upgrade cycles (especially in the enterprise segment) Read more...