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Just fresh from its triumphant Third quarter where AMD finally outsold Intel in the US consumer market, the company has slashed the pricing on its Turion 64 Mobile CPUs by up to 25 per cent.

Pricing has been cut on the Turion 64, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 for full-size notebooks, Sempron, and mobile Sempron CPUs for desktop PCs and notebooks, but the biggest cuts of all were saved for the mobile chips.

The company held its pricing on the recently popular Opterons, the Athlon 64, and Athlon 64 FX lines.

The company is on a roll at the moment with a commanding performance lead over rival Intel that has helped it drive revenues to new heights in Q3. The quarter to September 25^th saw AMD post revenues of US$1.5 billion and net income of US$76 million a 23 per cent growth in sales over the equivalent period last year and 21 per cent sequentially from the second quarter this year.

The price list is here.

Optima has set a new price point with its KN Series 15.4 inch widescreen notebook selling with an RRP of only $1,799.

The Centrino notebook is a balance between power and cost in a package that delivers surround sound and widescreen viewing in a very affordable package that illustrates what we can expect form other vendors in the near future.
Optima lists the battery performance of the new model at up to four hours of continuous usage. Optimised for media graphics are handled by an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900 supporting up to128 MB of memory.
Using the Mobile Intel 915GM Express Chipset, supporting up to 2GB of DDR2 memory, integrated high-definition 5.1 Channel surround sound and an LCD with 1200×800 resolution the notebook should handle DVDs with ease. The DVD spindle in the KN Series is a Dual Layer DVD+/-RW Burner.
Henry Lee, Notebook Product Manager, Optima said: “Our latest feature-rich Centrino notebook is a strong and responsive unit that hits the market at a sub-$2,000 price point, ensuring that customers get real value for money.”

With thin client systems growing at 13 per cent per annum IT vendors would be Wise to take notice says IDC.

Looking at the thin client market over the next four years, a recent IDC study shows that while the market for thin client devices was only 59,000 units in 2004 growth in firms adopting the technology and increased acceptance by Australian CIOs looks set to propel the market forward.

Over the last few years there has been a lack of understanding about thin clients amongst IT managers, however this is now being overcome as organisations are becoming more mature and intelligent with their IT budgets and find it difficult to overlook the inherent ROI that a thin client device environment offers, says IDC.

“The thin client market has continued to post growth rates that most hardware vendors would salivate at the mere mention of. Despite this market growth only one vendor effectively saw growth during 2004,” said Michael Sager, IDC Senior Analyst for PC Hardware.

The local market is dominated by Wyse as it gained over 15 points in market share from 2003 and almost single handedly drove growth in the thin client device market. Hewlett Packard was able to maintain in second position despite decreasing by almost 7 per cent in terms of market share. Ironically, rounding out the top three was Sun Microsystems who finished with 4 per cent share of the local market.

The forecast through 2009 has the market shipping over 126,000 devices with a CAGR of 13 per cent from 2004. Comparing these figures to the PC market forecast shows that there is expected to be almost one thin client device for every ten commercial desktops sold in 2009.

“What is truly amazing about the growth in the market during 2004 was that it was effectively spearheaded by a lone vendor. The economic, geographic, and organisation dynamics of Australia make it a prime market for thin client devices. In light of this, perhaps it’s time for IT suppliers to start paying attention,” stated Mr. Sager.

Top 5 Vendor Market Share

Wyse 80.5%
HP 8.1%
Sun 4.4%
VXL Instruments 2.7%
Maxspeed 1.1%
(Others 3.2%)
Total 100.0%

HP has made it easier to manage Linux blades with the release of Control Tower. It acquired the technology last year when it bout RLX.

The software works in conjunction with HP Systems Insight Manager to provide customers with simplified lifecycle management of blade servers running Linux by using familiar open-source tools.
The Control Tower software offers powerful deployment and monitoring capabilities and is set up in less than 30 minutes, says the company.

“With our acquisition of RLX last year, HP continues to expand its enterprise management offerings for customers,” said Tony Parkinson, VP and General Manager, Industry Standard Servers, Technology Solutions Group, HP Asia Pacific. “HP Control Tower allows customers to deploy and manage blades in a Linux-centric environment quicker and with greater ease than any other solution in the marketplace”.
HP Control Tower is available as a standalone product and can co-exist with HP Systems Insight Manager, which ships with all HP server and storage systems. Insight Manager addresses mixed platform and operating system environments, while HP Control Tower is an HP BladeSystem-specific and Linux-optimised management and deployment solution.

HP Control Tower is expected to be available in May.

More information on HP Control Tower is available at www.hp.com/go/controltower.