Rambus lawyers bored… decide to sue the world

Vein in JHH’s head sets new protrusion record

In the spirit of the season, Rambus Inc. is giving out another round of subpoenas to all of its friends in the tech industry.  Most interesting among the defendants perhaps is nVidia, who only months ago signed a licensing agreement with Rambus to end an ITC blockade of its products, (virtually their whole portfolio), which infringed on Rambus’s patents.  Round 2, or 3, or 400ish… Ding!
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IBM says “FU” to electrons, “Shalom!” to photons in chip design

Multi-core chips to see the light

If IBM has its way, QPI and HyperTransport are about to look about as fast as your mom’s 56K modem.  It seems that copper interconnects are simply not good enough anymore, and IBM researchers have developed a way to incorporate nano-scale CMOS optical devices onto the same slab of silicon your old-and-busted electron based transistors are fabbed on.  This allows chips to use pulses of light to communicate with each other rather than electrical signals to achieve some mind boggling bandwidth numbers.
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Fresco Logic launches the FL1009 USB 3.0 host controller

We sit down for a chat with the CTO

ALTHOUGH FRESCO LOGIC is still a USB-IF certification short of a sellable product, the company has finally launched its two port xHCI 1.0 FL1009 USB 3.0 host controller. Earlier today we had a chance to sit down for a chat with Bob McVay, the CTO of Fresco Logic and he gave us an insight into Fresco Logic and why it has taken so long time to bring this product to market, among many things.
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Acer announces three new tablets

One powered by AMD, two by ARM

AMD DID MENTION that it wanted a slice of the tablet market and it seems like this is happening sooner rather than later, as Acer has announced that it will be launching an AMD powered tablet sometime in February next year. At the same time the company announced that it’s readying two Android tablets, both powered by ARM and all three tablets are said to have dual core processors.
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Sandy Bridge pricing leaks in Sweden

All standard quad cores get priced

CONSIDERING WE’RE STILL about a month and a half from Intel’s Sandy Bridge launch, we’re surprised to see that the pricing has already leaked, courtesy of a Swedish online retailer. The best part of the new is that the overclockable K models are only slightly more expensive than the non K models, something which should be good news for those wanting to try their luck at overclocking their new Sandy Bridge setup.
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Asus adds tactical vest to its TUF motherboards

And a thermal radar

THE TUF SERIES of motherboards from Asus has always been a product range that we haven’t quite understood, as it makes bold claims about MIL-SPEC tested components and has never struck us as a must have type of motherboard. The latest addition to the TUF series is the Sabtertooth P67 and it adds even more head scratching features, although it’s very possible that we’re not the target market and that’s why we don’t understand Asus’ reasoning.
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Brazos performance numbers arrive

Good enough graphics, not quite as good CPU

AMD HAS FINALLY allowed the first benchmarks of its Brazos platform to be published and it’s without a doubt an Atom beater, well, at least the Zacate based E-350 is. As expected the graphics performance is quite good, albeit quite some ways away from AMD’s discrete offerings, however it seems like on the CPU side of things, VIA of all companies have managed to one-up AMD in terms of entry level processor performance.
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