So my christmas got a little interrupted by a bad case of breaking my leg, living in Norway there will always be that risk, especially if you're in a hurry and too cheap to buy decent winter shoes.
So I want to start with a news roundup of some of the very relevant things that has happened since I've been away.
The biggest event was probably the nVidia and Intel settlement, but another big event was the fact that AMD fired Dirk Meyer, and later had two high ranking board members leave, the fact that Dirk Meyers got fired seems to be because he wasn't visionary enough to get on the Tablet wave, which is an explenation that doesn't entirely make sense to me, there's no real Windows Tablet out there, they are coming for sure, but we've yet to see them in sale, Acer probably has the most interesting one, namely the one using the revised C-50 CPU from AMD that has a TDP of only 5W while still being able to handle HD and operate at 1GHz, but again they've shown it at conferences, it doesn't seem to be out yet, so I don't know how he missed it since it has barely started and the Ontario with a few tweaks seems to be the "guy" for the job.
The fact that Intel and nVidia settles is interesting. Does this mean nVidia and Intel will play nice? Maybe, but my guess is only for a limited time, nVidia wants in on the Personal Computer market, which is why they are agressively developing ARM soc's and nVidia won't think twice before challenging Intel if they think they have the advantage, and seeing how aggressive nVidia has been with Tegra, and the fact that they compared it to a Core 2 Duo is a clear shot at X86.
The third huge development was of course the release of Sandy Bridge and the Cougar Point Chipset fail.
Sandy Bridge came out, offering impressive numbers, and currently all eyes are on AMD's upcoming bulldozer, in fact certain forums are full of speculation threads about Bulldozer, Anyway Intel continued their tradition of changing the socket and chipset you need to use it, ok in Sandy Bridge's example it makes sense because of the built in GPU and you would probably need to change the overall design a bit to accomedate that, the frustrating point is though how often Intel does this when it seems unnecessary(LGA 775 may have been used for a long time but you needed to chance chipset constantly if you wanted the next big thing.) the problem was however shortly after the release and people had started to recieve their SB motherboards and CPU's Intel started a recall, this was due to a problem in the South Bridge in the new Sata controller, the details of the issue is somewhat irrelevant, the interesting part is why it wasn't discovered earlier, clearly Intel is supposed to have experience with building this technology, and as some blogs and articles has pointed out, Intel usually finds these issues through their extensive testing, it has been speculated that Intel did this to save money, that may sound wierd considering Intel expects to pay about $1bn when this is all over, but the fact is their stocks barely moved, and just 1% down would mean Intel loses over a billion dollars of their value, as Intel is currently worth $117bn.
But I don't know to be honest, Intel might have the facilities to test extensively, but thinking back it's definitely not beyond Intel to find out they screwed up after they released the product. I think this is fairly common with a company over 15times the size of it's closest competitor, we see it very often that companies like Microsoft and so on neglect quality control, simply because of the lack of competition.
I hope to get to update this blog and finally get my page up and running as soon as possible.
