Palm Computing gave out a little more information on its upcoming IPO on Friday when it made its latest filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to the filing, Palm's parent, 3Com, intends to issue 23 million shares in its subsidiary, previously revealed to amount to around four per cent of the company. The shares will be priced between $14 and $16, the latter resulting in a valuation of $368 million.

Given how the share price is likely to rise once the stock goes on sale, we expect that valuation is going to increase by a very healthy margin indeed. The filing says Palm will use its IPO proceeds to fund a dividend payment, debt repayments to 3Com, and increased spending on its own infrastructure, R&D and marketing.

All of which will leave 3Com, which will be left with just over 93 per cent of Palm, looking very healthy indeed -- it will end up with $8.57 billion on paper, assuming Palm's shares stay at $16. However, 3Com still plans to offer the bulk of its stake to 3Com shareholders six months from the IPO.

Compaq has outlined plans for almost half of its corporate PC sales to be direct by Q4, while slashing prices on its business desktops.

The vendor today cut prices by up to a third on its Deskpro EP, EN and Workstation AP lines, including discounts of 19 per cent on the 550MHz EP, 20 per cent on the Workstation AP250, and 30 per cent on the EN Space Saver 600MHz.

Meanwhile, Compaq's CEO Michael Capellas has admitted the company's ailing corporate PC business needs to be turned on its head and will not be profitable until at least September.

Chipzilla's follow up to the Merced-Itanium platform, McKinley, is likely to beat its predecessor to the market, informed sources told The Register late today.

McKinley is close to taping out and the IA-64 development team believes that limited clock speeds on Itanium yields have forced Intel to this conclusion.

The Merced-Itanium has so far failed to achieve over 600MHz clock speeds on the part, although Intel and its partners want it to clock at at least 1GHz. Official HP charts show that they want 800MHz from Itanium-Merced before it can be a viable microprocessor for the competitive 64-bit market.

In part, that is prompted by AMD's success with its 64-bit chip, codenamed Sledgehammer.

Chip giant Intel is set to make a major revision of its .18 micron Coppermine cores on the 7 April next, according to internal documents we have seen.

The product change notification (PCN 904), dated the 27th of December last, will affect both SECC2 (Slot One) and FC-PGA (Flip Chip) packaging.

Intel cites the reasons for the changes to improve product performance, allow the introduction of higher CPU frequencies, to change the microcode, and to correct errata discovered since it first started shipping the .18 micron Coppermine processors sometime towards the end of last year.

Chip maker's inability to fulfill unanticipated orders is costing box makers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Intel Corp.'s failure to keep up with customer demand -- coupled with product delays and abrupt changes in product direction -- is costing OEMs hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues.

Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) last week preannounced a revenue shortfall of as much as $300 million in its fiscal fourth-quarter sales due in part, officials said, to chip shortages.

Similarly, Gateway Inc. (NYSE: GTW) last month publicly blasted Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) for chip and motherboard shortages, saying they cost the company up to $250 million in sales.

New game console offering giga-computing power is the talk of microprocessor conference.

Microprocessor engineers, analysts, and journalists gathered for an industry dinner here Thursday night to talk about recent triumphs and future milestones. They discussed the highly regarded Athlon chip from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's groundbreaking new Itanium processor, and the impending release of 1-GHz chips. But the real buzz was about something completely different: a game machine.

Specifically, the story of the day was Sony's upcoming PlayStation 2, and the Emotion Engine processor that will run it. Developed by Sony and Toshiba, experts predict the high-tech processor will offer unprecedented gaming power. More importantly, it could provide the processing power for the PlayStation 2 to challenge cheap PCs as the entry-level device of choice for home access to the Web.

Powerful and traditionally inexpensive, game consoles and their processors haven't had anywhere near the power of even a low-end PC. The Emotion Engine and its accompanying processing chip change all that by excelling at a processing function called floating-point performance, which can help it handle graphics.

Net connections between machines may automate all aspects of our lives.

"In the bowling alley of tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer." -- Dave Barry

A lot of people have predicted that a time will come when machines become more important than humans. What few predicted was that machines would seize power on the Net.

Intel's embarrassment over the i820 chipset looks set to be resolved at last. Maybe.

Sources close to the company's plans have informed us that Intel will ship an updated chipset for sampling to mobo vendors in mid-February which will, at last, support both Rambus memory and synchronous DRAM memory on the same planar.

The boards will have support for two Rambus sockets and two additional SDRAM sockets, and also will include a revised, B2 stepping of the memory translator hub (MTH) which is now called the memory conversion hub (MCH).

Reviews of machines using the existing MTH on i820 mobos have revealed a dramatic slow down on performance.

Disk drive giant Seagate has coughed up $45 million (£27 million) to settle a seven-year-long row over patent infringements with one-time drive maker Rodime.

Rodime claims it pioneered the development of the 3.5in drive in 1983 and that Seagate had used it without paying royalties. A Californian District Court dismissed the case in 1997 but an Appeal resurrected the claims.

Despite issuing denials that it had infringed any patents, Seagate settled out of court yesterday after the Supreme Court rejected a petition to quash the case.

The price of Dell shares fell by nearly $3 on Wall Street yesterday after it issued a report the evening before that shortages of Intel processors combined with Y2K pressures would dent its profits.

But that does not mean that Dell will start using AMD parts, according to reports on various news wires across the globe.

Dell is following in Gateway's footsteps only to the extent that shortages of some members of Intel's processor family, coupled with a shortage of Rambus RIMMs, had a negative effect on its sales in the leadup to Yule.

As predicted, Palm Computing will ship its first colour handheld next month, just in time for the 3Com subsidiary's upcoming IPO.

According to readers of Apple-oriented Web site MacInTouch, US retail chain Best Buy has added the colour Palm IIIc to its product database, which describes the device as possessing a colour screen, 8MB of memory and a price tag of $449.99.

Best Buy's database also mentions the upcoming IIIxe, apparently an upgraded IIIe with 8MB of RAM and a $259.99 price tag, all the better to compete with the similarly-specced Handspring Visor.

Giant memory supplier Kingston Technology has teamed up with Gateway in a campaign to inform the general public that when Microsoft Windows 2000 is launched you will need a lot of memory.

And both companies do not really care whether it is synchronous memory or Rambus RIMMs you require, although the chances are that you're going to find more of the former than the latter, and much cheaper.

The joint promotion is intended to tell the world that W2k is a super-duper OS and everyone will want a machine with a super-fast microprocessor and stacks of memory.

Although Microsoft documentation says that W2k will run on 32MB or 64MB of memory, Kingston said last month that the MS sales force is recommending 256MB as a base configuration, as reported here.

Back in 1981 a 300-baud modem was top-of-the-line, and would cost you approximately $500; today that same amount buys you a cable modem capable of over 5 Mbps of throughput. This may not sound too exciting, as it is the natural course of things, as electronics tends to gradually become better and faster. But bear with me, because there’s more to the story than you might think.

Almost a decade later, in 1989, a 14.4 K modem was the fastest available, and another six years later, in 1995, ISDN became widely available. For the first time we were able to use 64 Kbps ISDN at home, a big improvement over the modems then obtainable.

However, we are about to enter the 21st century, and cable modem is the fastest connection publicly offered. Looking back on all of this makes you realize that we’ve gone from 300 to 14400 bps in eight years, from 14400 to 64000 in six years and to 5 Mbps in four years. If this trend continues, we’ll have 25 Mbps before 2002.

With the development of the 840 chipset, Intel has introduced yet another high performance architecture.

The 840 allows workstation and server solutions to extend far beyond standard desktop configurations. It provides increased performance, high scalability and a number of compelling new features such as support for the 133 MHz system bus, dual RDRAM memory channels and AGP4X, as well as dual CPU support.

With Rambus-based systems still too expensive for mainstream desktop PCs, Intel next quarter said it plans to release its Solano chip set, supporting 133-MHz synchronous-DRAM technology.

But Intel's chip set operation is playing catch-up to Via Technologies, which this week began shipping its Apollo KX133 chip set for Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon processor.

The chip set supports PC133 memory, an AGP-4X graphics port, and AMD's 200-MHz front-side bus.

The joint founder of AMD Zone, Chris Tom, has been forced to find a new job because his former employer, Dell, considered his interest in the Athlon was a conflict of interest.

Chris Tom, who, together with his brother, built the hardware site into one of the most regularly visited AMD spots on the Web, was called into Dell's HQ in Austin at the beginning of last month to explain his actions, The Register is given to understand.

Although Chris Tom has consistently refused to comment on the exact circumstances of the meetings with Dell, we understand that he was informed that the Athlon AMD Zone and its companion Slot A site conflicted with Dell's interests.

The chip maker is expected to announce the first SpeedStep mobile chips; Celeron prices trimmed.

Intel Corp. next Tuesday is expected to announce the first mobile chips that make use of the SpeedStep technology for saving battery life in notebook PCs.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is introducing two new Pentium III chips next week, according to sources.

The first runs at 650MHz when the notebook is plugged into an outlet or a docking station, and at 500MHz when running on a battery. The second runs at a maximum of 600MHz and powers down to 500MHz on battery, the sources said.

Company officials would not comment on the speeds of unannounced chips but did acknowledge that the chips they are announcing next week will incorporate SpeedStep.

Scientists transfer DNA molecules from the test tube to a glass plate -- show DNA computing can be used to process information and solve mathematical problems.

Scientists in the United States have taken a major step forward in using DNA, the building blocks of life that carry the human genetic blueprint, to process information and solve mathematical problems.

DNA computing has sparked intense interest because more information can be stored on molecules of DNA than any silicon computer chip. Scientists estimate that a dried gram of DNA can store more information than a trillion CDs.

In a report in the science journal Nature, Lloyd Smith and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison described how they have transferred a set of DNA molecules from the test tube to a glass plate.

For the first time in years, prices of low-end PCs increase as competition drops and the economy rocks.

For the first time in years, the cheapest home computers are getting more expensive.

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (NYSE: HWP) lowest-priced Pavilion today costs $100 more than an equivalent did four months ago. Compaq Computer Corp.'s (NYSE: CPQ) lowest-priced Presario desktop now costs $200 more than its predecessor did last fall.

All together, average personal computer selling prices rose in November and December, according to market researcher PC Data Inc. After dipping below $800 from August through October, the average price for consumer computers reached a six-month high of $844 in December, the market research company said.

Driving the price hikes are a huge drop-off in competition, a healthy economy and the PC's growing role in home entertainment. The increases are particularly unusual for January, a month when computer makers routinely cut prices to generate new sales. What's more, newer business PCs are cheaper than their home counterparts, due to a more-competitive corporate market. Compaq's new iPaq business PC costs less than its consumer version.

Intel Corp. today announced the first of its Coppermine microprocessors in the Xeon family, an 800-MHz product for workstations and servers.

The chip, which integrates 256 Kbytes of on-chip cache, is designed for "two-way" systems that pair two processors, either in traditional minitower configurations or in new rack-mounted chassis.

Existing Xeon products for 4-, 8-, 16-, and 64-way systems use up to 2 Mbytes of discrete Level 2 cache for increased performance. Anthony Ambrose, director of marketing for IA-32 products at Intel's Microprocessor Division, said similar Coppermine products would be forthcoming during 2000. "It's going to be a busy year," he promised.

The new Xeon drops the Single-Edge Cartridge Connector version 2 (SECC2) packaging in favor of a 330-pin version, dubbed SE330, which Intel will also use for 4- and 8-way Xeon configurations, Ambrose said.

Mystery surrounds a Web site which Intel appears to still own and which is selling PC kit over the Internet.

The site, called PC Com, appears to belong to a Singapore company, but information at WHOIS shows that it is an Intel-owned domain name, with the entry last updated on the 6th of January 2000. The domain name was first registered by Intel in 1996.

Further evidence that this is, indeed an Intel site, can be obtained by clicking on the FTP root at PC COM, which includes a read me file containing this information (and more):

"Welcome to ftp.intel.com! For Intel product questions/comments/requests, please send mail to support@intel.com For issues or problems with this FTP Server, please send mail to ftp-admin@intel.com" &c.

The site acts as a merchant site for a number of third party companies, and sells PCs, some Intel networking equipment and notebooks. The only microprocessors the site sells with the PCs are Intel CPUs.

The results of Apple's co-development partnership with Palm Computing look set to emerge in the very near future, now that early samples of an Apple-branded PalmOS-based device have already started coming off Taiwanese production lines.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself confirmed the two companies' close ties this week, during his keynote at Macworld Expo, held in San Francisco. Introducing Palm CEO Carl Yankowski, Jobs told the audience Apple had been "doing a lot of work with these guys lately".

A few weeks ago, AnandTech had it's first experience with the ATI Rage Fury MAXX. That first article focused primarily on performance, and as such, a few issues were left out for the time being.

In our second look, we'll be looking at these issues, which include the "theoretical lag" that results from ATI's AFR technology, driver features, DVD support, and more.

Also since that first article, GeForce DDR boards have found their way into the AnandTech lab, so we've included updated benchmarks as well.

On Monday, Gateway will resurrect its Gateway Select line of PCs with new models that offer AMD's Athlon processor.

The Select PC line, which will be for consumers and small businesses, will offer a range of Athlon speeds, sources said. However, details on the exact configurations and pricing were not available at press time.

The announcement will give consumers a wider range of choice among vendors from which they can purchase Athlon-based PCs. At the same time, it renews the relationship between AMD and Gateway, giving Gateway a second source for high-performance PC processors.

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