IBM and the U. S Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have signed a new contract to build the next generation of IBM's BlueGene supercomputers at the famed DOE facility. The first IBM BlueGene supercomputer, called “Dawn,” will have a top processing speed of 500 teraflops. The second IBM system, dubbed “Sequoia,” will offer 20 petaflops of performance and surpass the records Big Blue set when it installed the massive Roadrunner system for the DOE in 2008.

Advanced Micro Devices is updating its line of 45-nanometer Opteron processors with five new energy-efficient models that work within 55-watt thermal envelopes. In addition, AMD is rolling out a pair of high-performance, 45-nm Opteron processors that run at 2.8GHz. The new offerings expand AMD's line of 45-nm Opteron processors, formerly, known as “Shanghai,” which first came to the market in November.

Intel will shrink its Atom processor to 32-nanometres in the second half of 2010, and the company is developing this chip and a new netbook platform under the codename “Medfield”, according to a research note that UBS analysts published earlier this month.

Dell confirms that it has developed an ultrathin, luxury laptop code-named Adamo, in an effort to counter what Apple achieved with the MacBook Air.