GLG News by Semiconductor Evaluators (North America)

MAXroam is providing a solution to one of today’s biggest problems in mobile phones – the cost of International roaming.  They are offering both data and voice Internationally at reasonable rates.  They are potentially the next Skype, with a similar value and impact on the carriers.

Microsoft’s latest virtualization announcements are another nail in VMWare’s coffin  The key fact is not so much that Microsoft is offering this capability, since everyone knew it was coming.  The key fact is how soon and how cheaply it is available.   “Free” is always a compelling...

Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet will strengthen their virtualization offerings, thus providing more competition for VMWare and Microsoft.  Qumranet’s technology will move Red Hat significantly forward, particularly on desktop virtualization.  This is starting to raise the question of whether...

§ By some estimates there are over 50 companies currently offering products that they call solid state drives (SDDs)  §  Many of these products have been designed hastily and some of them show no improvement in benchmarking tests vs. hard disk drive metrics  §  There...

* There are rumors that Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor drive  * Other HDD companies such as Seagate, Fujitsu and others are also working on improving rotational as well as track change drive latencies  * SSDs are starting to compete against HDDs for performance oriented...

Both the server and PC markets seem to have held up very well during the past months, and barring a catastrophic collapse of the economy, likely will continue to do well.  Credit must go to the innovations in both technology and business processes achieved primarily by HP, Dell and Intel.

The next evolution of Xen software puts further pressure on VMWare’s market share and margins.  This is a clear indication that VMWare’s business model will require a major overhaul sometime in the next year or two.  Microsoft will be less impacted since they have less today. 

* Nintendo and InPhase are apparently doing some joint work on holographic storage  * InPhase has been pursuing a holographic storage system (primarily for write once archive applications) for several years  * Any holographic storage product likely will not be in a Nintendo game system for...

* SanDisk recently revealed a proposal for creating a single metric representing the expected lifetime of a solid state drive  * The SanDisk metric is called “Longterm Data Endurance” or LDE  * The SanDisk proposal comes at a time that several organizations such as IDEMA and JEDEC are discussing...

Intel’s next-gen Nehalem processor ups the performance bar, making it increasingly difficult for AMD.  Server manufacturers and software vendors will also be impacted, positively or negatively, by this generation of processors, which will also provide further impetus to cloud computing.