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The online channel is up 78% in 2010 and is recession-proof, concludes ICEcat based on its annual tabulation of the usage of data-sheets of their open catalog project.

During 2010 ICEcat facilitated 874 million data-sheet downloads for products from 5228 different tech brands by more than 12,700 different online channel partners from 87 different countries.

The usage of data-sheets shows HP, Lenovo and Sony are the top three online channels brands of 2010, but Dell has transformed into a fast-growth channel brand. And Samsung is one of the fastest risers.

Suppliers brand Pelikan made an even bigger jump than Dell from rank 131 to 44 and is now the best-performing provider of compatible ink cartridges.

Advanced Cable Technology (ACT, +3797%), Lindy (+1563%) and Vivanco (+1147%) are the top three fast movers in the top 100 of brands measured by ICEcat.

Although notebooks, warranty/support and desktops still dominate, products for security, fun and smaller form factors are changing the game. Among fast-growth categories is also household white goods...

Go Open ICEcat

Professor Uzi Vishkin, from the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, says the industry needs a radical basic computer architecture redesign (an architecture in use for over 50 years).

Current computer architecture comes from mathematician John von Neuman in the 1940's, which Vishkin describes as "serial computing"-- where "any single instruction available for execution in a serial program executes immediately."

However this limited concept is no longer relevant, thanks to the advent of multicore processors and ever-increasing memory sizes. Instead Vishkin proposes massively parallel architectures executing indefinite amounts of instructions at any given time.

Such an approach obviously requires radical hardware design changes involving high bandwidth, low-latency networks between processors and memory--with a single processor core controlling all other cores.

Viskin calls his architecture abstraction approach ICE (Immediate Concurrent Execution) and holds 6 patents on the technology. His research team has prototype hardware running the ICE architecture.

Go Using Simple Abstraction to Reinvent Computing for Parallelism (Communications of the ACM)

Intel suspends shipments of its Core series processors-- Core i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge chips specifically-- due to flawed transistor.

The faulty transistors leak current, causing SATA data transfer performance problems.

Intel says it is already on the case, and should be delivering updated chipsets to its customers by late February. It should also manage to reach full volume recovery by April. The company estimates the costs to repair and replace all faulty materials to reach $700m.

This problem might also cause delays to products in development.

Samsung is offering refunds or exchanges for some PC models carrying the faulty chips, while NEC may delay some models' release, according to a Bloomberg report.

Go Intel Identifies Chipset Design Error, Implementing Solution

Go Samsung Will Offer Some Refunds After Intel Chip Flaw

Jon Peddie Research reports 2010's WW PC graphics devices shipments show only a 4.3% Y-o-Y growth-- a result it describes as disappointing. 2010 started strong start with analysts (including Gartner and IDC) predicting the year ending with 13-15% growth.

As device shipments declined, pc graphics chip shipments fell 7.8% in Q4. To make results worse, market leader Intel shows decline (instead of the traditional seasonal pickup) with 52.5% market share for Q4, a decline of -7.3% (compared to Q3 2010's 55.2%).

In Q4, AMD and Nvidia both gain valuable market share-- AMD is up to 24.2% (from Q3 2010's 23%) and Nvidia has 22.5% (from Q3 2010's 21%).

JPR however predicts 2011 should still be a solid year, if not strong, thanks to recovering WW economies, AMD Fusion and Intel Sandy Bridge launches and mainstream/high-end system DX 11 adoption driving GPU sales.

Go Jon Peddie Research Reports Disappointing Q4 2010