Monday, January 29, 2001		Latest in IT world

Pentium processors to cost less

There is a lot of action expected in the hardware market as the world’s largest chipmaker Intel is planning aggressive pricing of its premium processor range in order to boost the bottom line of the company. The computer hardware market is witnessing a slowdown since the past few months and this resulted into sagging sales and piled-up inventories. This has affected the king of the market also in a big way. Now Intel is planning a substantial price reduction on its desktop and mobile processor range. The chips, whose prices are expected to come down include, Pentium-4 1.5 GHz and 1.4 GHz, higher range of Pentium –III and Celeron processors. This will bring down the prices near the rival AMD’s product range, which includes Athlon and Duron. The prices of AMD products have traditionally been lower, which has further dented the market of Intel. The cut in the prices will be in the range of 20 to 40 per cent and the prices of Pentium –III 1 GHz processors would be substantially lower. The prices of other Pentium III processors like 933 MHz will also be reduced by around 30 per cent. The discounts in the mobile range of processors are likely to be in this range, which is likely to strengthen the position of Intel that continues to be the market leader in this segment also.

After the Federal Communications Commission’s conditional approval of the merger of the Internet giant America Online Inc and cable and media conglomerate Time Warner Inc, now called AOL Time Warner, there were fears that the new company would cut jobs. The historic coming together of old media and new, that created waves a year ago has made it the largest media company in the world. This has also brought about a need for consolidation and thus various job cut plans. First came the news of the 400 jobs that are to be cut in CNN.com. The latest is that the cost-cutting measures being adopted by the new company would include the elimination of 2,000 jobs out of 85,000 employees that the conglomerate has on its rolls, a 3 per cent cut. According to news reports, besides cutting jobs, AOL Time Warner also intends to shut down or sell its 130 Warner Brothers retail stores. If the stores are sold, roughly 3,800 persons who work in them would become employees of another company. If the stores are simply shut down, those jobs would be eliminated.