Stories by: Maureen O'Gara

With $12 million in funding and a consulting chief scientist from Los Alamos whose research field is efficient computing, high-performance networking and bioinformatics, two of Transmeta's co-founders have reinvented the technical workstation, coming up with a completely new kind of box that's actually a "Personal Cluster" or even a "Personal Supercomputer" - a widget that puts 12 nodes in the space of a classic desktop or 96 nodes in a knee-knocking deskside - both configurations playing to the emerging rage for commodity Linux clusters.

Claiming it had showed off a dual-core x86 90nm Opteron at its facilities in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, AMD tried to steal the thunder of Intel, which claims to have laid the multi-threaded foundation needed for operating systems and applications to make the leap to multi-core with its HyperThreading widgetry and has been saying it will trot out a dual-core Xeon at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum.

There's been no one to challenge IBM's unprecedented mainframe monopoly since Big Blue ran off the last of the PCMs years ago when it got light years ahead of them on the silicon front, forcing them to close up shop and slink away.

Compuware, which claims IBM stole its source code and charges it with unfairly using its mainframe monopoly, is afraid it's being "sandbagged" by Big Blue with "additional burdens and delays" in a software piracy case that's due to go to trial in three months. Is there a lesson here for SCO, in its own US$6 billion suit against IBM?

Computer Associates has contributed a significant piece of widgetry it calls K-Gem to the Linux kernel that should put Linux in the running for B1 security clearance by "hardening" it.

It's dawned on Computer Associates International that IBM pays it royalties for the SMP technology in AIX, IBM's version of Unix, because of the work done long ago by Unix icon Locus Computing Corporation.

According to industry veteran Maureen O'Gara Sun has a surprise up its sleeve for its Sun Network confab tomorrow. It appears, she says, that a plain vanilla Linux x86 desktop - reportedly dubbed the Java Desktop - is going to be announced.