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Tid-bits
11/4 - What goes around comes around. AMD is being sued by Tessera. The suite charges, among other things, "deliberate and willful conduct by Spansion and AMD".
IBM has developed technology that could remove the bottlenecks in today's computers and other electronic systems. The technology uses "light in place of electricity".
Intel went from memory maker, to processor maker, to a designer and manufacturer of platforms. Per vice president and general manager of Intel Europe, Middle East, and Africa, "Intel evolved from a memory company to a microprocessor company to become a platform company" (Reuters).
Graphics chip maker S3 is using the new mantra of power per watt to market a new family of graphics processors that consumes less power than competitors. The chips may not perform as well as nVidia or ATI's top offerings. "The selling point of the S20 series however is ... performance per watt". The company licenses technology, through a partnership with Fujitsu, from former microprocessor maker Transmeta to reduce power consumption. The chip supports DirectX 9, high definition video of 1080p, but only does Shader Model 2.0 with extensions. Nevertheless the technology is powerful enough to run Aero Glass—the most demanding presentation layer of Microsoft's upcoming operating system Windows Vista. The chip will also be available in a dual-card setup reminiscent of nVidia's SLI and ATI's CrossFire.
IBM will uses its own chipset—the X3—in its new Intel MP (Multi-Processor) servers that have dual cores. The chipset will enable IBM to distinguish its servers from those of rivals that also use the new Intel processors and squeeze out even greater performance. If anyone could do this, it would be Big Blue. Another differentiating factor will be the inclusion of 10 gigabit Ethernet, "making IBM the first major vendor to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology in its Intel processor-based servers". There's no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the server offerings appear to be pricier than at least some of the competition.
The same authors point to an additional reason behind Intel's moving up the release date of its new server chips from 2006 as originally planned to October and November of 2005. The mere act of rushing out the desktop version of the chip earlier in the year helped expedite the development of the server chips: "Intel moved up the launch date partly because the chips were ready earlier than expected after the company rapidly developed the dual-core desktop processor that serves as a blueprint for the Xeon 7000 chips".