It's no surprise to see big hardware and software companies fighting each other, because that's life - today you work together on a product, tomorrow you end up in court with some patent infringement issues, the day after tomorrow, you're best friends once again... and today, the time has come to find out that ASUS and IBM want to settle some things in a US court...


According to an official statement from ASUS, they filed a patent infringement suit against IBM earlier this month, but they didn't say anything specific about the technologies involved. "We sued IBM for its infringing two of our patents related to storage on the Internet and server technology," that's what Asustek's spokesman said, declining any request for more details.

Anyway, it seems it all started back in December, when IBM filed a complaint against Asustek and its North American subsidiary ASUS Computer International with the US International Trade Commission, claiming that some Asustek products and components infringed its patents.

Oh, well, long story, no predictable end yet, but I am sure they will settle these problems somehow, like the big boys they are.

To make a longer story short, here's what we have in store today, regarding Intel - Atom's pricing and manufacturing costs, their answer to AMD's tri-core processors, as well as their upcoming instruction set extensions, Intel AVX. Are you ready for the ride? Let's go!


First of all, Intel Atom - as you probably remember, we talked about it on the 3rd of March, when it was announced by Intel, but back then, I had no idea what gold mine managed to create Intel with this processor...

The current line-up of Atom processor is the following:
- Atom Z500, 800 MHz clock speed, 512 KB L2 cache, FSB400, 0.65 watt TDP, $45 (including chipset)
- Atom Z510, 1.1 GHz, 512 KB, FSB400, 2 watt, $45 (including chipset)
- Atom Z520, 1.33 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyperthreading, 2 watt, $65 (including chipset)
- Atom Z530, 1.60 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyperthreading, 2 watt, $95 (including chipset)
- Atom Z540, 1.86 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyperthreading, 2.4 watt, $160 (including chipset)

The most interesting part about it is that, according to various industry sources, the price of a single Atom processor is somewhere between $6 and $8, so the profit margin is simply incredible, if this proves to be true!

Next, it's the tri-core business - according to Intel, the Pentium E series performs better, and they even claim the tri-core processors are quad-cores with one defective or disabled core. Yeah, righ, and I saw Elvis at the store today, too!

At last, Intel made public the details about their Intel AVX general purpose architecture, expected to enrich the existing instructions set, further extending the available raw power in desktop, mobile and server processors. The interesting part is that the instruction format leaves room for future improvements, because the Advanced Vector Instructions compresses prefix and escape, with parts of the format defined now, and others, left free for future use. Anyway, this seems to be only theory now, but who knows what's going to be the effect in a year or two, after this instruction set will be introduced?

AMD/ATI can’t get enough of what they’ve accomplished so far with their 3870X2 cards. They think the mid-high range is doing great against NVIDIA’s products, but they also want to reinforce their mid range, which is somewhat threatened by NVIDIA’s 9600 GT cards. The HD 3850 cards are decent enough, though a 3850X2 combination could bring more money.

No doubt about that and Asus sensed this potential. That’s why Asus wanted to be the first to officially announce their HD 3850 X2 card with 1GB of memory that will come in the form of model EAH3850X2/G/3DHTI/1G. The new dual-GPU solution comes standard with the same dual fan cooling design previously used with Asus HD 3870 X2 cards.

Apart from being the first to officially announce this new product, Asus seems to be one of the few partners that will launch it, since rumor goes that the card could end up costing too much for a mid-range card. Whatever the situation, the new card from Asus will feature 668MHz for the GPU clock, while the supplied memory of 1GB GDDR3 will work at 829MHz (1,658MHz effective). Asus also cared to mention that this card scores 13250 in 3DMark06, which is 34 percent higher than 9884 when compared to a single GPU solution.

Availability date and price are still shrouded in speculations, but according to some other rumors this card should cost around $300. I’m sure the prices will drop pretty quick, judging from what we’ve seen in the case of 3870X2 cards.

Things have changed with the current quad-core CPUs. I mean, Intel’s and AMD’s CPUs have interesting overclocking potentials and you have to buy a good air cooler or even make the leap for water-cooled blocks. Well, not necessarily. The Fudzilla have proven that the latest PehnomX4’s can go without special cooling even when they are overclocked to the maximum.

For their experiment, the guys over at Fudzilla played with a PhenomX4 9850 and turned on the improved Cool ’n Quiet feature. In this situation, the air-cooled Phenom 9850 reach 60+ Celsius but once the number-crunching applications are turned off, it idles all the way to 28 – 35 Celsius. So keep in mind that in order to achieve these temperatures you need to activate the Cool and Quiet option on your motherboard and set the energy settings in Windows to energy efficient.

The Fudzilla experimenting team also informs that in Idle mode, Cool’n Quiet downlocks the CPU to 1250MHz with 6.25 multiplier times 200 MHz buss speed. Practically, when you surf the net, read your word documents, write something or listen to some music, the Phenom 9850 will go down to below 40 Celsius while in games it can easily get back to the lower sixties. All this just with a standard cooler. I wonder what water-cooling could do to this CPU.

Ever had your laptop stolen? I hope not, but such things happen pretty often, and the outcome can be pretty worse, since this is not like having your watch stolen. Your computer usually contains confidential data, including credit card information or dirty emails, so if it gets stolen, it wouldn't be nice at all... but the good news is that Intel's Anti-Theft Technology (ATT) will take care of your laptop's dark secrets, if it gets stolen(or even when your wife tries to stick her nose in, why not?)!


Intel's ATT technology will be introduced later this year, and it involves placing a chip in the laptop, which will prevent the machine from booting without the owner's permission. Unfortunately, Intel didn't tell anything else about how is this going to work, so we'll have to wait and see...

The good part is that Intel is not alone in this quest, being supported by Absolute Software Corporation (creators of firmware-based data protection/tracking solutions), BIOS maker Phoenix, and Utimaco (a data security company), as well as McAfee and various manufacturers, including Lenovo and Fujitsu.

Although it won't probably fully protect you by itself, ATT will surely give you a bit of extra peace, and combined with a hard drive encryption technology, may finally put an end to identity theft that occurs often when a laptop is stolen. If you didn't have the change to subscribe to our news by email yet, now it's the right time to do it, because we'll keep an eye on Intel's ATT, and we'll surely get back with new information, as soon as it becomes available!