According to EE Times, AMD, Micron, and Lexmark are all considering to go private. The rumors surface after a horrible thrid quarter performance from AMD and analyst reports that the company will run out of cash within two quarters.

Last quarter, AMD lost $883 million in free clash flow. The figure turned out to be much worse than originally expected and took the company by surprise.

In addition to severe financial troubles, Intel has been relentlessly pursuing AMD. Intel gained back 4.5 percent marketshare in the microprocessor market last quarter, and now controls 80.2% of the total processor market.

Intel announced today that it is working with ASUS to develop low-cost portable PCs. This project is not to be confused with Intel's Classmate PC, which as far as we know is a completely separate venture. There is no specific target price for these notebooks, however, Intel said that some might be available for less than $200.

The first Intel-ASUS laptop was announced at the end of a keynote address at Computex. Jonney Shih, CEO and chairman of ASUS, walked onto the stage with a prototype of the low-cost notebook PC. The PC itself is very small, and measures in at only 225 x 165 x 35mm. It weighs only 890 grams.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what market segment this PC is targeted at. Intel and ASUS both claim that it is designed for developing countries, but where that would leave Intel's Classmate PC is beyond our knowledge. There have been some discussion that ASUS will be offering the PC through traditional retail channely, meaning a government contract wouldn't be the only way to get this PC.he laptop series has been dubbed the Eee, which according to ASUS stands for, "easy to learn, easy to play, easy to work." Although we might not like the name very much, the price point should make u for it.

As can be expected, the laptop is based on an Intel chipset and CPU. The notebook is more flexible in terms of operating systems compared to Intel's Classmate PC, and similar to the XO, is based on a distribution of Linux. Intel and ASUS, however, opted against making a specialized Linux distribution and instead chose to base the laptop on the well-known Linux distribution Ubuntu. In addition to compatiblity with Linux, we are being told the laptops will also be compatible with Microsoft's operating systems.

The notebook's monitor has a 7-inch diagonal length. Unfortunately, ASUS didn't go as far as to reveal the resolution of the display. In terms of storage, the notebook can be equipped with NAND memory modules ranging from 2 GB all the way to 16 GB. As of right now, the price point of the laptop is expected to be around $199. Naturally, the price will go up depending on the laptop's hardware configuration. T

A working model of Intel's classmate PC is on display at Sandisk's stand in Comutex. Intel's Classmate PC holds a stark similarity to MIT's One Laptop For Child XO laptop. The Intel Classmate and XO are fundamentally different from one another despite targeting the same market. While the Intel Classmate attempts to stay true to traditional notebook PCs, the XO takes a rather unconventional approach.

The OLPC organization is headed by Nicholas Negroponte, who has been quite critical of Intel's Classmate PC on a number of occasions. He feels that Intel's low-cost laptop is much more "teacher-centric", while the XO is much more "child-centric." In addition, he feels that XO has an inherent advantage because it was not created for pure profit. Despite this, the OLPC organization has still faced criticism in the past.

Returning to the Intel Classmate PC, the laptop comes pre-installed with Windows XP Professional. Given that Intel has so much involvement in the design of the PC, it is no surprise that it comes equipped with an Intel Celeron M processor. Special attention has been given to the storage of the notebook, and it features 2 GB of NAND flash memory. The memory can be expanded through USB ports.

The memory modules are obviously supplied by Sandisk, given that the Classmate PC is on display at its booth. The Classmate PC seems much more similar to traditional notebooks than its competitor, XO. Screen brightness is also quite similar to traditional notebook PCs.

AMD recently unveiled its 65nm AMD Turion 64 X2 processors at an event alongside NVIDIA and Broadcom. Up until now, AMD's mobile processors have been able to resist the change to a smaller manufacturing process. As AMD continues to rapidly refresh and convert its Fab 36 manufacturing facility, more manufacturing capabilities are being opened up to the company.

Intel has held an advantage in process technology over AMD for quite some time now, and originally moved its mobile processors to 65nm in 2006. Reducing the manufacturing process usually results in lower power consumption and lower operating voltages, which also means lesser cooling requirements. All of these characteristics are key to the success of a mobile platform, which explains why Intel and AMD are both aggressively refining their manufacturing process.

The performance changes, however, aren't always immediately drastic. It is common practice for companies to shrink a familiar CPU with a finer manufacturing process before creating a completely new chip on an unknown process. This allows the semiconductor to mature the manufacturing process with a familiar design, clearing out process design related issues, before moving on to producing new chips on the smaller design process. This means that although the performance changes of the current 65nm Turions might not be groundbreaking, the new chips will certainly allow AMD to refine its 65nm process technology and work out design issues before they launch their next-generation processors.

In an attempt to further extend battery life, the new AMD-based platforms, which were the main focus of the event, will use the recently launched AMD M690 chipset which has a new memory technology called Display Cache. The technology allows the CPU to operate in low-power mode without accessing system memory. Combined with the new 65nm design process, AMD hopes to extend mobile battery life to 5 hours.

HP Lab Researchers have created a new “field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)” architecture, a variation on the FPGA technology, that could beat Moore’s law and allow chip makers to place 8 times the number of transistors currently possible on standard 45nm field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips.

Stan Williams, an HP Senior Fellow and director, said in a press statement “As conventional chip electronics continue to shrink, Moore’s Law is on a collision course with the laws of physics. Excessive heating and defective device operation arise at the nanoscale. What we’ve been able to do is combine conventional CMOS technology with nanoscale switching devices in a hybrid circuit to increase effective transistor density, reduce power dissipation, and dramatically improve tolerance to defective devices.”

Current conventional FPGA chips use 80 to 90 percent of their CMOS for signal routing, leaving a relatively small portion for logic processing transistors. With the new FPNI approach, all logic operations will be performed in the CMOS (complementary metal oxide silicon) while most of the signal routing will take place in a nanoscale crossbar switch structure which will be placed on top of the CMOS.

The crossbar is connected to the CMOS using technology developed by Dmitri Strukov and Konstantin Likharev of Stony Brook University in New York. The new FPNI approach is said to have numerous benefits including the possibility of a much higher transistor count along with lower power consumption.

The first implementation of the new method, which uses 15-nanometer-wide crossbar wires combined with 45-nm half-pitch CMOS on a conservative chip model, is said to be the equivalent of a three generation leap on the International Technology Roadmap for Silicon without having to shrink the transistors. Restating it, this means that applying the FPNI architecture using a 15nm crossbar on a current 45nm chip will allow 8 times as many transistors compared to using no crossbar. Researchers believe this model will be technologically possible by 2010.

A model based on 4.5-nm-wide crossbar architecture combined with 45-nm CMOS was also presented. The 4.5-nm-wide crossbar would allow the same amount of transistors to be placed in a hybrid chip only 4 percent the size of a current 45-nm chip.” Snider and Williams believe it will be ready by 2020.

Three months ago Transmeta launched its first ever high-profile lawsuit against Intel Corporation. At that time, Transmeta had recently made the transition from a company that offers low-power chips to one that that licenses patents and performs R&D. With licensing as its primary source of income, it was only natural for Transmeta to file a lawsuit sooner or later.

Transmeta filed its lawsuit against Intel alleging that Intel’s entire x86 microprocessor line, all the way back to the Pentium Pro to its present day offerings, infringed on one or more of eleven total patents held by Transmeta. Transmeta went on to say that Intel had made over $100 billion on the processors pertaining to its patents and requested the court for treble damages (meaning that if they win they will be awarded triple the cost of the actual damages), attorney's fees, and a licensing deal.

Intel finally responded to the lawsuit earlier this week by countersuing Transmeta. The countersuit alleges that Transmeta has breached seven patents held by Intel, most of which deal with methods to control and reduce power consumption. Intel accuses Transmeta of breaching its following patents: 5,745,375; 5,617,554; 5,802,605; 5,819,101; 5,881,275; 6,385,634; 6,418,529. The countersuit centers on Transmeta’s Crusoe, Efficeon and Efficeon 2 brands.

In addition to the the lawsuit, Intel found a total of eleven defenses against Transmeta’s lawsuit:

1. Non infringement
2. Invalidity
3. Obviousness type double patenting
4. Prosecution history estoppel
5. The doctrine of laches
6. License (sic)
7. Equitable estoppel
8. Ownership
9. Marking
10. Inequitable conduct and infectious unenforceability
11. The doctrine of unclean hands

As of yet, Transmeta has not commented on Intel’s countersuit, which was jointly filed with its response to Transmeta’s opening lawsuit.

Looks like HD DVD just got a lot more attractive for consumers. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2007 in Las Vegas, the HD Promotion Group had plenty of announcements regarding their new optical disc format.

The conference began by poking fun at Blu-ray. A short street video asked a man what Blu-ray was. His answer was a simple: "Is that a porn star?" After a few laughs from the crowd, everything got down to business again.

The most notable announcement came from Fujii, who confirmed that HD DVD discs will be getting upgraded to 51 GB. The capacity increase is made possible because of the adoption of three layers, instead of two. Each layer will support 17 GB, adding up to a total of 51 GB. Currently, HD DVD supports a maximum of 15 GB per layer, however, with the adoption of the new structure this figure will increase to 17 GB.

HD DVD is one of the two major formats vying for dominance in the emerging high definition living room. The successor to DVD, the format has been facing tough competition from Blu-ray. Its major drawback has primarily been smaller storage capacity compared to Blu-ray, however, with today’s announcements the format has been made a lot more attractive.

Many believe that the race for GHz ended with the Pentium 4 architecture, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at the speed of these two upcoming IBM processors. According to the agenda of the International Solid State Circuits conference, IBM’s Power6 Processor will operate at speeds of over 5GHz in high-performance applications. The second-generation of the Cell Broadband Engine processor, which was co-developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, will run at 6GHz. More details of Intel's "teraflop-on-a-chip" network processor will also be revealed.

The ISSCC2007 advanced program (PDF) claims IBM Power6 server processors are expected to begin shipping in 2007. Although it has been widely believed that the processors will run at a clock frequency between 4GHz and 5GHz, information provided by IBM for the ISSCC agenda states otherwise. The processor will run at over 5GHz in “high-performance applications” while also running at under 100 watts in “power sensitive applications.”’

IBM states that the Power6 offers “ultra-high frequency operation, aggressive power reduction, a highly scalable memory subsystem, and mainframe-like reliability, availability, and serviceability.” The dual-core 341 square millimeter processor features 700 million transistors. It is constructed using a 65-nanometer manufacturing process.

The ISSCC program also revealed technical details of the second generation IBM, Sony and Toshiba Cell Broadband Engine. The first generation of the chip, which is currently used in the Sony PlayStation 3, runs at frequencies up to 3.2GHz. The second generation chip, on the other hand, will receive a frequency boost of nearly 3GHz and have an operating frequency of 6GHz at 1.3V. In addition, it will be constructed using 65nm CMOS SOI technology and will feature a dual power supply helping increase memory performance.

Despite IBM’s evident advancements in clock speed, Intel will still be holding firm to its multi-core approach to performance. According to the program schedule for ISSCC, Intel will reveal more details regarding its 80-core Tera-scale processor which can run 1.28 trillion floating-point operations per second.

Described as a “network-on-chip architecture”, the 225 square millimeter chip has 80 cores, each operating at 4GHz. The die is built using a 65nm process and is able to “achieve a peak performance of 1.0TFLOPS at 1V while dissipating 98W.” Currently, the processor is not able to run conventional applications for Intel chips.

Even though the chip is currently little more than a prototype, Intel CEO Paul Otellini claims it will be available within five years. The processor was first announced last September at the Intel Developer Forum.

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference will be taking place February 11-15 at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. Other notable appearances will be given by Sun Microsystems, who will be discussing its Niagara2 processors, and AMD, who will be talking about its quad-core Barcelona processors expected to ship mid-2007.

A virtually unheard-of Israeli startup, Lucid Information Technology Ltd., has received financial backing in their second round of funding from Intel Capital, Giza Venture Capital and Genesis Partners. The company raised a total of $12 million, $7.5 million more compared to the $4.5 million of their first round which was held in 2005.

Lucid Information Technology Ltd. was launched in 2003 with $500,000 in funding provided by Israeli business incubator Mayaan Technology Ventures. The company currently employs 27 workers and is located in Kfar Netter, Israel. Their initial product will be a high-performance System on a Chip (SoC) and parallel architecture that will be able to support four graphics processing units (GPUs) simultaneously. Lucid believes that their product will transform “traditional off-the-shelve graphic cards, graphic processor units (GPU) and graphic cores into powerful and scalable visualization solution, transparently to the applications, enabling price-performance ratios never considered possible before.”

Lucid’s parallel-processing chip will allow several graphics processors to work in parallel and is highly targeted at computer gaming. Lucid hardware and software will be both required in order to make the complete system work.

Lucid expects for their first complete samples to be ready by the end of 2007. The company hopes to gain the support of board manufacturers such as Asus or Gigabyte and system integrators such as Dell, HP, and Alienware.

It hasn’t been completely verified yet, but a user named "muslix64" has posted an exploit in a thread on the Doom9 forum claiming that he has been able to circumvent AACS, the encoding format used to protect HD DVD content.

"Muslix64" claims to have completely backed up an HD DVD movie and provides a Rapidshare link to downloading BackupHDDVD, a small Java-based utility that aids users to backup their HD DVDs. A YouTube link to see the program in action has also been posted.

"Muslix64" describes the utility as "This is a java based command line utility that decrypt vide files (.evo) from a HD DVD disk that you own, to your hard drive and you can play them back with a HD DVD player software."

Although much of the dirty work in backing up a HD DVD movie is done by the tool, users are still required to find their own cryptographic keys for the disc being copied. No guidance is provided to help users find the keys, but the author suggests the process is trivial.

Although the exploit hasn’t been completely confirmed yet, if it turns out to be true it could mean a number of things. For one, it is possible that we might start seeing pirated HD DVD content. In addition, since Blu-ray also uses AACS, we might see a similar crack be released for Blu-ray movies in the next couple of weeks.

"Muslix64" claims the tool works on his XBOX 360 external HD DVD player, but that the software should not be limited to just one specific player.

A new zero day vulnerability has been discovered that can potentially affect computers running four versions of Microsoft Windows. The proof of concept code targets an issue with the Client Server Run-Time Subsystem and could allow hackers to elevate privileges in Windows 2000 SP4, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows XP SP1, Windows XP SP2. The exploit also affects Windows Vista, which is what Microsoft believes to be their most secure operating system to date.

The code, which was first publicly released on this forum by a user named "NULL", affects the Client-Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS). The primary function of the CRSS is to launch and close applications.

Using the vulnerability, hackers can potentially raise their privileges on a Windows based PC, allowing them, for example, to go from guest to administrator.

Security vendors, however, are not viewing the exploit as critical because preliminary findings have shown that attackers would have to first gain access to the target PC in order to raise their privilege.

Although Microsoft has so far not heard of any public exploitation regarding the issue, they will still be treating it seriously. On the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog, Mike Reavy, program manager with the MSRC, stated, “MSRC will be monitoring overall threat conditions for this and any other issue reported to us. If we do see anything that we believe puts Microsoft customers at risk, or significant new developments, we will update everyone through our standard mechanisms including this blog and if need be, an Advisory with additional details.”

Even though the exploit affects Microsoft’s newest Operating System, Windows Vista, Microsoft’s faith in the new operating system, which will be launched January 30, 2007, has not wavered. Reavy went on to say in his post, “While I know this is a vulnerability that impacts Windows Vista I still have every confidence that Windows Vista is our most secure platform to date. As always, we here at the MSRC encourage everyone to enable a firewall, apply all security updates and install anti-virus and anti-spyware software.”