If the HP folks in Palo Alto were hoping to see a chink in Lenovo's armour on its latest quarterly financials they will be sorely disappointed - a double-digit growth fest was banked by the Chinese dragon AGAIN today.The company has its portfolio limitations but it made the most of the sectors in which it operates to push up year-on-year revenues 13 per cent to $9.8bn, with pre-tax and net profit up 30 and 36 per cent respectively to $265m and $220m.It shipped 29 million devices in the quarter ended 30 September, which equates to: 315,217 devices a day; 13,134 an hour; 218 devices a minute; and 3.6 devices a second.In PCs, Lenovo said market doldrums were lifting, but despite this laptop shipments declined 12 per cent. The value of those sales was however eight per cent higher than a year ago at $5bn, or 51 per cent of total group turnoverThe opposite was true of desktops, where unit sales edged up one per cent but revenues decreased three per cent to $2.7bn.
Lenovo may be the largest PC maker on the planet - it is number one in five of the top largest PC consuming countries - but it was slabs and smartphone that fuelled most of the sales hike in the quarter.The Mobile Internet Digital Home which houses smartphone and tablets was up 106 per cent to $1.5bn as shipments expanded 78 per cent.Some 2.3 million tabs were flogged, up 4.2 times year over year with 77 per cent sales driven outside China. Smartphone shipments were up 78 per cent but Lenovo did not confirm the unit or revenue number.An ebullient Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, boasted not only was his business perched at the summit of the PC industry but it had become the world's fourth biggest shifter of phones and slabs of the fondling variety.And he reckons the dark clouds are parting above the traditional computing markets, voicing some optimism.“Benefiting from corporate refresh and China market improvement, the PC market is recovering, and tablet growth continues shifting to mainstream and entry-level segments, as well as emerging markets, said Yanqing.
Lenovo may be moving beyond just PCs but it still lags established enterprise rivals, including those watchful peeps at HP, whose portfolio is much wider.This was a point magnified by a senior HP exec at last month's Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona.Jos Brenkel, global senior veep of sales for Printers and Personal Systems (PPS), conceded Lenovo had done well in their sphere but accused the rival of renting market share by low-balling prices.What we've got that they don't have is sustainability in the corporate enterprise… I can sell a whole portfolio of products and I can leverage my whole sales force, he told El Chan.HP brought on board new PPS chief Dion Weisler in the summer and Brenkel said he is taking a more disciplined approach to the cost base that will enable HP to much more aggressive.HP's PC PPS biz in fiscal Q3 ended 31 July swelled 10.8 per cent to $7.7bn and operating profits crashed nearly 44 per cent to $228m.
Intel has set up an entire business unit to make sure that it doesn't miss out on the the whole internet of things movement.The chipmaker wants to make sure that it's not behind the curve on efforts to create a vast army of network-connected gadgets and sensors – ideally everything from remote-controllable toasters to your nose-hair trimmers. Thus, Chipzilla is building an entire division devoted to making money from the trend.[Chief exec Brian] Krzanich is saying, 'I want a higher level of focus on this to help us grow it and put the level of attention on it that it deserves', the new internet-of-things solutions group boss Doug Davis told Reuters.Although it's a whopping great big company with fingers in a lot of pies, like many other tech firms, Intel was a bit slow to pick up on the consumer switch to mobile and kept trying to push laptop tech such as its Ultrabooks. Since Krzanich came in as chief in May, the company has made building chips for portable devices a higher priority and it has started work on power-sipping microchips suitable for use in wearable devices including smartwatches. Review It’s true, as Rik Myslewski pointed out recently, that the two new MacBook Pro with Retina Display models aren’t drastically different from their predecessors. However, the eye-gasmic, 2880 x 1800 hi-res screen of the original 15-inch model helped it to win El Reg’s Laptop of the Year for 2012, so you could argue that it ain’t broke and it don’t need fixing.
The main difference between the previous 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro and this year’s update is simply that the 2013 model gains Intel’s new Haswell processor along with some housekeeping updates such as the inclusion of 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Thunderbolt 2.0 and a PCI Express (PCIe) interface for the solid-state storage.The external design is essentially unchanged and there’s still no denying that the screen remains its outstanding feature. The 15.4-inch IPS LCD panel may no longer be unique, but its resolution and 220 pixels per inch dot-density ensure that it remains one of the sharpest, brightest and most colourful displays I’ve ever seen on a laptop.By default, Mac OS X presents the screen as a 1440 x 900 panel, using extra pixels to smooth the image, a trick it pioneered with the iPhone 4 and, later, the iPad 3. Those devices have fixed screen resolutions, but the MacBook Pro lets you trade that higher image quality for greater screen space, with the screen running to an effective 3840 x 2400 resolution if you want the maximum amount of display real estate.
That 4K-plus resolution - it’s virtual; the image is, of course, scaled down to the screen’s native 2880 x 1800 resolution, not that that you’d notice - makes the display ideal for graphics and video-editing work, huge spreadsheets and programming IDEs. I liked the fact that I could have Apple’s website sitting comfortably on screen alongside Microsoft Word in order to check specs while writing this review.My one complaint here is that the glossy screen coating remains annoyingly reflective, causing distracting glare in broad daylight – as well as making it darn difficult to take photos of the screen.The laptop’s thickness and weight remain the same as before: 18mm and 2.02kg, respectively. But, to be fair, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display is still one of the lightest 15-inch notebooks currently available. I can pick it up with one hand, and I didn’t find the weight particularly troublesome when I slipped it into a shoulder bag and ventured down to my favourite Wi-Fi equipped watering hole.
I was also reminded of the laptop’s impressive build quality. The aluminium-backed screen panel feels very firm and rigid – no tittering at the back, please – but is just flexible enough to absorb the occasional bump when you’re carrying it around. Apple craftily runs a large cooling vent right along the back of the bottom half the maching, where it is hidden from sight by the hinge of the screen panel. That said, the MacBook Pro ran cool and quiet throughout all my tests.The downside of that elegant, minimalist design is that the MacBook Pro with Retina Display provides no scope whatsoever for upgrades. You can’t even get at the RAM slots, prompting the teardown team at iFixit to award the MacBook Pro just one out of ten for upgradeability.Video pros and storage nuts will perhaps appreciate the new pair of Thunderbolt 2.0 ports, which now provide maximum throughput of 20Gbps, but Thunderbolt drives remain very expensive, leaving the two USB 3.0 ports as the primary option for adding storage and connecting peripherals.
There’s no Ethernet interface either, so you’ll have to pay £25 for an optional Gigabit adaptor if you need a wired network connection. It connects to the Thunderbolt port, which keeps the two USB ports free for other things. TV fans will appreciate the HDMI port, however, and there’s the usual SD slot for folk with digital cameras.But that’s all business as usual for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, so it’s the new Haswell processor that is the real focus of attention this time around. Prices now start at £1099 for the 13-inch model, which comes with a dual-core Haswell Core-i5 running at 2.4GHz, 4GB memory and 128GB of Flash storage. That’s down from the £1249 which Apple wanted for last year’s previous model, although that model’s Ivy Bridge chip ran at 2.6GHz.
The 15-inch model I have here gets a price cut too, down by £100 to a new starting price of £1699 with a quad-core Haswell i7-4750HQ running at 2.0GHz, 8GB memory and 256GB of flash storage. However, there’s more – or less – to that price cut than meets the eye. The clock speed this time around has been reduced from 2.4GHz to 2.0GHz, and the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M discrete graphics chip of last year’s model has been jettisoned altogether, leaving the machine to rely solely on the Haswell integrated graphics, an Iris Pro - aka GMA 5200 - in this case.SCC 2013 The new Commodity Track of the upcoming SC13 Student Cluster Competition has hit a chord with cluster competition aficionados worldwide and Register readers alike.I laid out the terms of this competition in a recent story, and plenty of you weighed in with recommendations on how these kids could get the most HPC bang out of their $2,500 bucks.These teams have a unique challenge. While the students in the Standard Track big iron competition design their own systems, they are limited by what their vendor hardware partners donate.But the kids who are competing in the Commodity track can do anything they want, as long as they spend less than $2,500 and stay under the generous 15 amp (120 volt) power cap.
One problem with covering this pre-competition phase of the event is that the specifics of the team configurations are confidential – no secret weapons can be revealed. Also, there’s quite a bit of variation between what the students think they’ll be bringing to the competition and what they actually show up with.As only sublimely confident undergraduates can do, my team decided last night to scrap the design we've been working for the whole summer and take a radical left-hand turn using hardware we don't actually own yet. It made me so proud! These five guys are mastering so much material and digging into technical specs in a way I'd never get if they were just taking a class.
With that, let’s take a closer look at the Commodity Track teams...
Bentley University is a small, business-oriented university founded in 1917. It’s located in Waltham, Massachusetts and, according to Wikipedia, is accessible via the MTBA 554 bus. The University of Massachusetts is also assisting in the design of the cluster and staffing the travel team.