By Juan Carlos Perez, Feb 21, 2012

Microsoft will extend SkyDrive from being an online file storage service into what the company calls "a device cloud" that is closely integrated with Windows 8, the next version of the company's OS. The vision is for SkyDrive to become "a single drive" available across all the devices people use, giving them "instant, secure and private access to their files" and letting them share those files with others, Microsoft said in a blog post on Monday. In Windows 8, the "DNA" of SkyDrive and the Mesh file sync technology will merge into a single service, according to the post, published on the company's "Building Windows 8" blog and authored by Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, group program managers for SkyDrive. Specifically, SkyDrive will be included as an application on Windows 8, SkyDrive files will be accessible from the desktop via Windows Explorer and users will be able to "fetch" files remotely from their hard drive through SkyDrive.com. The SkyDrive application included with Windows 8 will be a Metro style one, meaning its user interface will be optimized for touch screen-based devices like tablets, and it will make it possible for people to access their SkyDrive accounts from any other Metro style application through Windows 8 controls for opening, saving and sharing files.

Read more here –>pcworld.com

Read More>

By Jesse Hicks on February 21, 2012

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market. With Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone gaining market share, the Waterloo, Ontario, company finds itself in a battle for relevancy. The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end. Last April, Mike Lazaridis sat in a BBC studio, holding his company's future in his hands: a svelte seven-inch tablet, black, with the word "BlackBerry" emblazoned across its front. The PlayBook. The company was Research In Motion, the Canadian firm whose BlackBerry virtually created the smartphone market. Success had come almost naturally to the company, until five years ago, when Apple released the first iPhone and upended RIM's long-held strategy of appealing primarily to email-addicted professionals. Apple expanded the market by building a smartphone not just for business people, but for the great mass of well-heeled, tech-hungry consumers. Apple's success opened the door for another large, deep-pocketed competitor: Google, with the acquisition and development of Android. The mobile landscape shifted dramatically — new players, new customers, and new alliances — and RIM made costly missteps scrambling to adjust.

Read more here –>theverge.com

Read More>

By Peter Clarke 2/21/2012

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has achieved the first commercial implementation of resonant clock mesh technology licensed from startup company Cyclos Semiconductor Inc. Cyclos said that the AMD has used the power-saving clock distribution technology in x86-compatible processor cores destined for inclusion in Opteron server processors and client Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Cyclos engaged with processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc in the early years of its existence driving an expectation that an ARM processor core would be the first commercial demonstration of the technology. However it is AMD's Piledriver 64-bit core, which operates at up to and in excess of 4-GHz clock frequency, that represents the first volume production-enabled implementation of resonant clock mesh technology, Cyclos said. Piledriver, fabricated in a 32-nm CMOS process, employs the resonant clocking to reduce clock distribution power by up to 24 percent, while maintaining previous clock-skew targets, Cylos said. The Cyclos resonant clock mesh technology employs on-chip inductors arranged to interact with the large capacitance of the clock signal distribution network to form an oscillating "tank circuit." The result is that Cyclos inductors and clock control circuits "recycle" the clock power instead of dissipating it on every clock cycle as conventional clock tree implementations do. The result is a reduction in total IC power consumption of up to 10 percent, Cyclos said.

Read more here –>eetimes.com

Read More>