AMD starts shipping rivals to Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs to OEMs-- specifically the 7th generation Bristol Ridge-based A-Series featuring the AM4 platform aimed at desktop system use.

The CPUs support DDR4 memory and next-gen I/O standards, including PCIe Gen 3, USB 3.1, NVMe and SATA Express. They also promise high-speed processing, smooth gaming and enhanced media streaming (with 4K/UHD video support in both H.264 and H.265 formats) capabilities. The chips carry up to 4 Excavator cores and come in 65W and 35W versions.

Meanwhile the AM4 socket is a unified socket infrastructure providing compatibility between A-Series processors and upcoming "Summit Ridge" CPUs.

Intel invests in improving the way computers see the world as it acquires Movidius, a machine vision specialist whose technology is found in products from the likes of DJI, Lenovo and Google.

The financial details of the deal are not available.

One might recall Chipzilla already has an interest in machine vision, having developed the RealSense depth-sensing camera system. As such, Movidius technology will surely be integrated with the Intel offering, not to mention other recent Chipzilla acquisitions in the field such as machine-learning startup Nervana systems.

“The ability to track, navigate, map and recognise both scenes and objects using Movidius’ low power and high performance (chips) opens up opportunities in areas where heat, battery life and form factors are key,” Intel says. “Specifically, we will look to deploy the technology across our efforts in augmented, virtual and merged reality, drones, robotics, digital security cameras and beyond.”

HP Enterprise (HPE) is in talks to sell its software unit to buyout firm Thoma Bravo, Reuters reports, a deal the company hopes is worth anything from $8 to $10 billion.

According to the usual "people familiar with the matter" HPE boss Meg Whitman wants to restructure the company to focus on networking, storage, datacentres and other rrelated services. Software fails to slot neatly in either unit and as such it means it has to go, preferably to a buyer with at least some experience in running software companies.

Thoma Bravo actually fits the bill, since it already owns Dynatrace and Compuware. It apparently wants to combine these companies with HPE assets in order to produce cost savings and efficiencies. News of HPE wanting to sell at least "some" software assets emerged back in July 2016, with a Bloomberg report claiming the sales process was still in the "preliminary stages."

Intel announces the first CPUs in what it describes as the "7th generation Core" family-- Kaby Lake, a mid-generation 14nm Skylake refresh bridging the gap until the 10nm Cannonlake CPUs finally hit the market.

As Chipzilla tends to, Kaby Lake will arrive in waves, the first being a selection of six Y- and U-series chips designed for laptops and other compact form factor machines. As such, the draw of such CPUs is less raw power (in that respect little has changed since Skylake) and more the addition of new capabilities to laptops.

Videos is of particular interest, since all Kaby Lake integrated GPUs support hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of 10-bit HEVC/H.265 video streams and the decoding of 8-bit VP9 streams  complete with Dolby Vision and HDR10 HDR standard support. HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 support are also included, enabling the output of 4K video at 60Hz over an HDMI cable.

Cisco confirms reports it is slashing its workforce by some 5500 staff (or around 7% of its global employees), part of a restructuring effort the company says will cost around $700 million in redundancy payments.

The layoffs should hit smaller and more mature Cisco businesses described as lacking in long-term growth prospects.

"We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth," a Cisco statement reads.

As a result, the company plans to invest further in the industry's current hotness, namely the Internet of Things, sceurity, collaboration, next-generation datacentres and the cloud. The announcement came with the Cisco fiscal Q4 earnings report, one showing revenues falling by -2% Y-o-Y to $12.6 billion, even as income is up by 21% Y-o-Y to $2.8bn.

AMD hosts a special "Path to Zen" event in San Francisco to provide further details on the upcoming Zen processor lineup-- one the company says should launch in desktop form early next year.

The result of 4 years of work, Zen processors are designed to provide high performance in systems as varied as fanless 2-in-1s, embedded systems, high-performance computing and datacentres. CEO Dr. Lisa Su says "the performance and efficiency of our Zen core showcases AMD at its best," and the CPUs are able to deliver "a 40% generational improvement in instructions per clock."

The chips are built using a 14nm FinFET process and feature Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), the AMD take on Intel's HyperThreading allowing Zen cores to run multiple threads simultaneously. Further improvements come in an instruction scheduler featuring an 8MB L3 cache together with a larger L2 cache to push 5x the bandwidth to the core than the previous Excavator design.