In the quest to find better ways to both store and power hardware Microsoft looks to the planet's final frontier-- the company has put a container-size prototype datacentre in the seafloor near the Orkney Islands.

The deployment of the Northern Isles datacentre at the European Marine Energy Centre is a milestone in Project Natick, a years-long initiative researching ways of building and operating "environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacentre units" able to live underwater for years. As Microsoft puts it, "more than half" of the world's population lives around 120 miles (or 193km) of the coast. Thus, putting datacentres under the water near coastal cities makes sense, since it means data has a shorter distance to reach such communities via datacentre demanding less power and maintenance.

Intel celebrates the 40th anniversary of the historic 8086 processor at Computex 2018 with a special edition CPU-- the Core i7-8086K, an 8th generation chip able to reach speeds of up to 5Ghz without overclocking.

The anniversary is actually a dual one, since Chipzilla is also celebrating 50 years in the business. However the 8086 is arguably more important, since the processor was the first running on x86 architecture, making it a chief reason as to why Intel is the giant it is today. Of course the Core i7-8086 is a bit more sophisticated than the original 16-chip 8086, being a Coffee Lake-based chip with a 6-core/12-thread part with a 4GHz base clock, 5GHz boost clock, and 12MB of L3 cache.

The saga of the sale of Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC) has finally come to a close-- following a lengthy review by Chinese antitrust authorities the constortium lead by Bain Capital now owns the lucrative chipmaking business.

Confirmation comes via Toshiba, who states the sale is worth three hundred million yen (roughly $18 billion). The deal was set to close on March 2018, but the Chinese authorities took longer than expected to go through the paperwork.

Now TMC belongs to KK Pangea, a purpose-built company making part of Bain Capital. Controlling it is a consortium of buyers consisting Apple, SK Hynix, Dell and Seagate. Interestingly Toshiba owns 40% of the unit, giving it voting rights but not majority rule. That said, Toshiba is "expected" to eventually become a Pangea affiliate.

In January 2018 Fujifilm and Xerox agreed on a $6.1 billion joint venture deal-- a deal that is now no more, following a Xerox settlement with activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason.

The deal was to combine Xerox with the longstanding Fuji Xerox joint venture, creating a combined print technologies and intelligent work solutions company. The new company was to be controlled by Fujifilm, something that left Icahn and Deason (who own 15% of Xerox) unhappy, leading to legal action.

The Xerox announcement of the termination cites other reasons, including “the failure by Fujifilm to deliver the audited financials of Fuji Xerox by April 15, 2018 and the material deviations reflected in the audited financials of Fuji Xerox, when delivered, from the unaudited financial statements of Fuji Xerox and its subsidiaries provided to Xerox prior to the date of the Subscription Agreement and taking into account other circumstances limiting the ability of the Company, Fujifilm and Fuji Xerox to consummate a transaction.