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Microsoft revealed at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, that it has signed additional hardware partners for Mira the company's platform for next-generation portable touch-screen monitors.

Using Windows CE .NET and the Remote Desktop Protocol in Windows XP, Mira devices enable a user to work on a PC from up to 150 feet away. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will announce tomorrow that Redmond has tapped Philips and LG Electronics to build Mira-enabled devices, expected to debut later this year

News source: Beta News
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Chip Wars Accelerate

This vendor support, while not unusual for AMD, shows some early acceptance for the new processors.

"It's showing that they continue to come out with new products and are doing announcements with [vendors] that are using the chip as well; they're not just throwing the part out there," said Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research.

AMD's new chips will complete with rival Intel's Pentium 4 desktop processor and Pentium III-M and Celeron processors. On Tuesday, Intel announced a new version of its multiprocessor Xeon chip for workstations and servers that reaches speeds of 1.6 GHz.

The nomenclature that AMD now uses for its chips, an initiative it began last fall , is designed to give customers a more accurate sense of performance than simply stating the megahertz, said John Rowe, product marketing engineer with AMD's mobile group. The numbers, such as 2100, represent relative performance, instead of the internal clock speed of the chip.

"It's a good way to communicate to the customer what performance they can expect out of the processor they're buying," Rowe said, adding that after a little skepticism in the beginning, the branding seems to be catching on with vendors and customers.