Lately, most trials in the IT world I heard about were related to patents and their use, sometimes to names that were too close to notorious ones, but this time, things look different. Samsung hasn/t been sued for using someone else's technology or name, but for selling a product that won't be able to play some movies, despite any possible software update Samsung may release for it. Pretty nasty, don't you think?


This time, we're not talking about a company that filed the suit, because it's a buyer of Samsung's BD-01200 player, Bob MacGovern, and its reason is the fact that some Blu-ray titles simply won't work on his player, because of a "defective design and/or manufacture".

Launched back in June 2006, the BD-01200 is a Blu-ray player whose hardware is simply incapable of running various titles appeared since then, including "The Day After Tomorrow". To make things worse for Samsung, it seems the 01200 is the only model that faces this problem, and they refused to offer a firmware upgrade to solve this problem (or maybe this firmware upgrade is impossible to have, given the hardware setup?).

Samsung didn't comment on the lawsuit yet, but if you have this defective model, you should know the lawsuit is open to any consumer which purchased the BD-01200 player...

Did anyone say AMD is going down? Well, a lot of voices have been saying it lately, but they may not be right. The low-price market has a huge potential, especially if we think about emerging countries like China or India, where AMD's market share is higher than in the rest of the world. In some cases, we're talking about a pretty high distance between the market share AMD has in some Western countries, and their position on Eastern markets. Last move made by world's (still) second largest semiconductor manufacturer was to open a new R&D center...


In my opinion, this is a good move, but there's a question - do they have the resources to push forward and accelerate the research & development process to catch Intel? Well, that's what remains to be seen, but for now, it's enough to say that AMD's new research, development, and marketing facility will be located in Chengdu, China.

Do I have to say more? As I was talking earlier, China is a very good market, with a huge low-budget market, and the new AMD Chengdu Branch is there to do more than simply research and development work.

According to AMD representatives, the center in Chengdu will be AMD's second largest one they have in China. Their position on the local market is excellent, with over 55 percent of the net cafes and do-it-yourself computer installation centers using AMD processors. For now, sounds fine, but we'll see the results in at least one or two years, so... remember - patience is a virtue! ;)

For AMD, last months have been filled with delays, just as if Intel's supremacy on the CPU market and their ever-increasing lead were not enough, but now, the sun seems to shine, just a bit, for AMD. After announcing a delayed driver to support Quad-GPU Crossfire X, or a new delay to the quad-core Phenoms, it was my pleasure to find out that the mid-range Phenoms should arrive a bit earlier than expected...


According to undisclosed inside sources, the 9550, 9650 and 9750 processors from the Phenom series should be sent to the market about two months from now, in early to mid April. These chips will be free from the TLB bug that caused delays over and over again until now, since they seem to belong to the B3 revision.

Unfortunately, not even unofficial information about the high-end Phenom 9950 is available, and I really don't want to think about for how long are they going to delay it again. In my opinion, AMD should concentrate on taking back the market share lost in favor of Intel's entry-level and mid-range processors, and leave the high-end market battle for a bit later.

As expected, there is no official position from AMD regarding this matter, so I guess we should consider the April releases only rumors for now, and keep our eyes on the news channels for official information regarding this matter...

Designed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, an alliance known as "STI", the Cell is a CPU architecture used in more devices, with the most notorious of them being, probably, Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, IBM announced some interesting changes regarding the Cell...


Currently, this processor is produced using the 65nm technology, but since Intel already has 45nm CPUs on the market, and AMD announced them for a later time, it's no surprise that STI decided to start using the 45nm fabrication technology for the Cell. Obviously, this move is going to bring some changes, all of them leading to better performance and lower power consumption, as it follows...

According to IBM's presentation at ISSCC, the Cell built using 45nm fabrication technology and running at 4GHz has a power consumption with 42 percent lower than the 65nm model, and about 66 percent less than the older 90nm one. Apart from these, the best part is that the new technology allows higher clock frequencies, expectations for the 45nm Cell being of 6GHz, maybe even 7GHz.

Unfortunately, no information about the time when these new processors will arrive on the market has been disclosed, so I guess there's a pretty long wait ahead...

One of the hot topics in 2007 was the war between HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, each format with its supporters, from media companies to hardware producers. I don't know if it was really about technology, or simply about "mine is better", but Plextor just released something that should have been around already - the first hybrid optical drives!

The new drives are the PX-B300SA combo, and the PX-B920SA burner. The first one has BD and HD DVD support, and the Blu-ray writer is also capable of handling HD DVD discs, but only has read support for this type of media. Obviously, both drives come with full CD and DVD support, and they are expected to replace the PX-B900A, Plextor's Blu-ray burner announced earlier this year.

Read and write speeds are nothing out of ordinary, and both drives also come with full LightScribe capabilities. The new hybrid drives use the SATA interface, and pricing wasn't revealed yet.

I don't know about others, but for me, this is the future. After all, nobody has to actually win the "formats war" because, for end-users, drives capable of reading and burning all formats available(or at least CD/DVD read/write, and Blu-ray & HD DVD read, like the PX-B300SA combo above), especially if they are wisely priced, are the best choice.