In the future, your Samsung vacuum cleaner, robot or washing machine will run on an OS called Tizen RT, slated to be introduced and detailed on Tuesday.

The OS for smart devices and gadgets -- in other words, internet of things (IoT) devices -- will be introduced by Samsung at its Tizen Developers Conference, which will be held in San Francisco starting Tuesday.

Samsung will share the architecture and future release schedule for Tizen RT at the conference. A number of sessions are being held on how to deploy and update the OS across devices.

The real-time OS is a slimmed-down version of the mainstream Tizen OS, which is being used in Samsung TVs, smartphones, Gear smartwatches and other devices. Though it is an open-source OS, Samsung is its biggest backer.

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In the next year or two, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will add support for Intel Optane memory and storage to its latest Unix servers.

Optane is a new form of storage and memory that could replace today's SSDs and DRAM. It is significantly faster and denser than both.

One new system that can be configured with Optane is HPE's new Integrity i6 server, which was released this week. Integrity i6 is based on Intel's Itanium 9700 processors, code-named Kittson, and runs the HP-UX OS. The server can also be linked to HP's all-flash 3Par storage arrays, which are due to get Optane support later.

Optane has stringent hardware and OS requirements. The first Optane products were low-capacity storage drives for PC caching and worked only with Intel's Kaby Lake chips and Windows 10.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprises' HP-UX OS has been around for more than 30 years, and users may be looking to move on from the Unix-based OS.

Now HPE is offering a way out of the ancient OS using containers, which are small buckets running instances of applications. The containers will be offered with the Linux OS.

HPE will provide containers to transition from conventional mainframe-style OSes to new hardware like x86-based Xeon servers. In this case, HPE is trying to get users to transition from Itanium chips.

Intel started shipping its last Itanium 9700 chips -- codenamed Kittson -- on Thursday. Correspondingly, HPE announced new Integrity i6 servers with the new chips. But the future of HP-UX servers is uncertain because Intel has no new Itanium chips beyond Kittson.

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It's the end of the line for Intel's Itanium chip, a troubled processor family that spawned many product delays and bad blood between HP and Oracle.

Intel on Thursday started shipping its latest Itanium 9700 chip, code-named Kittson, in volume. It's the last of the Itanium chips, which first appeared in early 2001.

Beyond Kittson, there will be no more chips coming from the Itanium family, an Intel spokesman said in an email. That ends a tumultuous, 16-year journey for Itanium, which Intel once envisioned as a replacement for x86 chips in 64-bit PCs and servers.

Support for Itanium has dwindled over the past decade, which has led to its gradual death. Server makers stopped offering hardware, software development stalled, and Intel has been openly asking customers to switch to x86-based Xeon chips.

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You won't need to buy a rack of 400 servers if you have one high-powered Nvidia DGX-1 supercomputer with a Volta GPU sitting on your desktop.

The DGX-1 supercomputer -- which looks like a regular rack server -- gets most of its computing power from eight Tesla V100 GPUs.

The GPU, the first one based on the brand-new Volta architecture, was introduced at the company's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on Wednesday.

"It comes out of the box, plug it in and go to work," said Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during a keynote speech.

But the DGX-1 with Tesla V100 computer is expensive. At US$149,000, it's worth some people's life savings. But Huang encouraged people to order it, saying the box will ship in the third quarter.

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IBM is trying to remove some of the complications related to image recognition with new tools to automate critical machine learning tasks.

A major update of the company's PowerAI tools has a feature called AI Vision, an auto tuner that makes it easy to identify and classify pictures. It will also speed up image recognition by breaking down tasks over multiple clusters.

AI Vision plays a big role in automating machine learning by creating a tuned model, said Sumit Gupta, vice president of machine learning.

The software abstracts machine learning, and developers don't need knowledge of low-level access to frameworks to tune, train, and deploy image recognition models. It's much like programming a game to take advantage of GPUs without deep knowledge of low-level APIs.

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Low-cost smartphones like the Moto G5 introduced a few months ago are shipping with soon-to-be-outdated chips from Qualcomm, which has announced successor chips.

Qualcomm on Monday introduced the Snapdragon 630 and 660, which are massive upgrades to chips used in low-cost smartphones introduced over the last six months or so.

And in a few months, you'll be able to buy low-cost smartphones with these new chips, with prices starting at US$200. The handsets will feature LTE download speeds equivalent to that in the iPhone 7 and have graphics processors capable of capturing 4K video.

Additionally, the low-cost smartphones will charge up faster than ever. The chips support Qualcomm's Quick Charge 4, and smartphones can charge up to 50 percent in just 15 minutes.

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Just a few years back, Dell said it didn't want to mimic sloppy behemoths like IBM or HP and, instead, wanted to be lean and focus on the mid-market.

But after a US$67 billion merger with EMC in 2016, the new company called Dell Technologies is a full-bodied systems integrator, offering hardware, networking, storage, and services.

In the meanwhile, the company's rivals slimmed down. The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise focuses on data-center hardware, while IBM focuses on software.

Dell Technologies is taking a page from Alphabet, a bunch of autonomous companies like Google working together. Dell Technologies includes hardware company Dell and storage provider EMC, with many independent operational units that have combined to strengthen the company's infrastructure stack.

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If you hate waiting for your smartphone to charge, relief is coming soon.

After some hiccups, Qualcomm's superfast charging technology, called Quick Charge 4, will be in smartphones around the middle of this year.

Qualcomm says Quick Charge 4 is one of the fastest smartphone battery technologies. It can charge a smartphone up to 50 percent in less than 15 minutes, or give enough juice for five hours of talk time in five minutes, the chip maker claims.

The new charging technology is about 20 percent faster than its predecessor, Quick Charge 3, which is in many smartphones from Sony, LG, HTC and Motorola.

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In a slowing PC market, Chromebooks siphoned market share away from Windows PCs in 2016 as their popularity grew outside the education market.

Chromebook shipments grew by a stunning 38 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Gartner estimated 9.4 million Chromebooks shipped, compared to 6.8 million units in 2015.

The number is just a fraction of overall PC shipments, but growth came in an otherwise down PC market. Overall PC shipments in 2016 were about 270 million units, a decline of about 6.2 percent, according to Gartner.

Looking forward, 2016 may go down as the best year ever for Chromebook shipment growth. Gartner is estimating shipments to continue growing in the coming years but at a slower pace.

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Microsoft's hardware partners will flood the market with Windows Mixed Reality headsets by the holiday season this year, offering up a new way to enjoy Windows 10.

A Windows Mixed Reality headset from Acer is already being seeded to select developers by Microsoft, but isn't available to consumers yet.

So far three PC makers -- Lenovo and HP as well as Acer -- said they would ship headsets later this year. Dell is still mulling a release date. The headsets will start at $299, the rough minimum price suggested by Microsoft.

The headsets need to be wired to Windows 10 PCs. Once on, they will transport you to a virtual world where you can, for example, roam, Skype-chat and play Xbox games. It's like computing in a 3D world, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.

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After about half a decade, Intel is wiping the confusing E5 and E7 monikers off its Xeon chips and rebranding them to bring more clarity about the performance and features that come with the processors.

Xeon chips are used in servers and workstations like Mac Pro. Xeon chips being released mid-year will be broken down into Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze processors.

The naming scheme -- derived from metals -- is a mix of Olympic medals and branding of credit cards from companies like Delta. A person familiar with Intel's plans earlier said the chips will likely be widely referred to as Xeon-P, Xeon-G, Xeon-S, and Xeon-B, with the P for Platinum, G for Gold, etc.

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