AMD has faced some hard tactical decisions since it sold its handheld chip division to Qualcomm in 2008 and effectively stepped out of the smartphone business. Whistling that "No Regrets" tune, it has burrowed ever deeper into ever bigger devices, from laptops to desktops and massively multi-core servers and supercomputers. Today's purchase of Silicon Valley startup SeaMicro is an exponential jump in the same direction, because SeaMicro specializes in edifice low-power server hardware for entire datacenters. One of its key innovations ...

Advanced Micro Devices said this week that it has shipped about 5 million of its power-efficient Fusion processors to date, as it makes inroads thanks to Intel's fading Netbook franchise. Traditional Netbooks are minimalist, typically sub-$350 laptops that average about 3 pounds and feature Intel's power-frugal Atom processors. But the specially designated category of Netbooks is fading as more companies and consumers gravitate to plain old small laptops, minus the Netbook nomenclature and minus Intel's Atom. ...