No matter what happens, Intel won't acquire AMD, I can bet on that. Anyway, I don't like bets and gambling, so I will move on and tell you about Intel's plans for future acquisitions. Since they have a strong position in the computer industry, Intel is now aiming at the consumer electronics market, instead of expanding its domination in the hardware field.


In an interview with the Financial Times, Intel's Digital Enterprise group senior vice president and general manager, Patrick P. Gelsinger, said "I think you will see Intel being more acquisitive," while admitting that some of the purchases made so far by the chip maker weren't that great.

After talking about the lessons learned in the past, Gelsinger identified five areas where Intel could get better with new acquisitions - consumer electronics, embedded devices, visualisation technologies and the market for low-cost computers, where its Classmate PC Netbook model is already fighting the tough competition, especially the Asus Eee PC.

Now, I hardly wait to see who's going to be Intel's next "victim," but I am also glad that, considering the lessons of the past, the companies they purchase are probably going to be allowed to keep their identity and operate as subsidiaries, as it happened with Havok, purchased by Intel in September.

Intel wants to prove that it’s not only good at making CPU-related stuff, but also knows a thing or two about networking and high-speed Internet connections. A few days ago, Intel demoed 10 Gigabit per second speeds over copper wires, something that previously seemed quite impossible for some networking engineers. 10Gbit/s network speeds aren’t exactly out of the ordinary these days, but these were only achieved by using fiber optic wires, which are certainly more expensive than copper ones.

The 10GbE over copper is currently destined to be implemented only in Server NICs which will support both 1GbE and 10GbE speeds, so that companies that are already using 1GbE switches can install these NICs and be prepared for the transition to 10GbE in the future.

The most efficient transfer speed for the 10GbE technology is reached over up to 328 feet using CAT 6a cabling or up to 180 feet when using CAT 6 cabling. The new NICs feature a technology called VMDq that will be able to handle the sorting of data from servers running virtual server operating systems and will be able to offload much of the process to the special processor integrated in the NIC card.

Intel’s 10 Gbit Server Adaptor is supposed to be priced at $999 and should be available towards the end of May. With prices like these, consumer-grade motherboards won’t be incorporating 10GbE NICs any time soon.

As time passes, flash drives get cheaper and cheaper, and even as we speak, prices are ridiculous, but they keep going down. When I say "ridiculous," I think about those days, not so long ago, when a 128Mb USB drive was worth a little fortune. Now, for that price, you can get a 8GB drive, and also get drunk. Anyway, instead of getting drunk, maybe you could also consider buying a...32GB drive?


A few days ago, A-DATA Technology, a worldwide leader in high performance DRAM modules and flash memory products(thumbs up for their awesome DDR2 kit I have inside my computer!), announced its largest USB flash drives, the 32GB PD2 and PD9!

The 32GB PD2 and PD9 have the same size, exactly 69.6mm x 17mm x 10mm (L x W x H ), so you can carry them anywhere without breaking a sweat (well, I guess you don't want to SWIM with one in your pocket!).

I know you must be asking yourselves about the pricing, so I Googled a while for you, and here's what I found: $123.99 at Newegg, after mail-in rebate. Obviously, there are also other merchants having them in stock, so if you still have an old 128Mb flash drive, or your brand new 2GB one is not enough... you know what to do!

Until now, the world of electronics had only three passive circuit elements - the capacitor, resistor, and the inductor. While the fourth one, the memristor, was predicted and described way back, in 1971, by UC Berkeley's Leon Chua, this never went beyond the theoretical status. This week, researchers at HP Labs reported a major breakthrough, being the first ones to turn the memristor from theory to practice!


The team of researchers at HP Labs' Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams, published a paper in Nature magazine, in which they mentioned that, apart from coming up with a physics-based model of the memristor, the team managed to build nanoscale devices that prove to have all the required characteristics of the theoretical concept."To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science. By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers," said Stanley Williams.

In the future, this breakthrough may lead to completely different computers, with incredibly low power requirements and better performance, even paving the path for future computers able to "think." Anyway, I am sure we won't get to see these things happening in the next 4-5 years but, by the end of the decade, the landscape of the industry may be completely different to what we see today, and all thanks to the breakthrough made by a small team in the spring of 2008...

Blu-ray might have won the format war, but it looks like this technology still struggles to get massively adopted by the HD-hungry fans. Prices for BD-players are still high, blank discs are too pricey, the content is not yet varied enough and Blu-ray PC drives don’t seem to be needed as of yet. You could get a PS3 or a laptop that has a BD drive for a more effective way of spending your money. Wait, if you have a PS3 and a PC BD drive, would it be possible to use PS3 discs with your PC rig? They say it won’t, but Lite-ON has a different opinion.

The Lite-ON DH-401S PC drive wasn’t advertised as being so smart, but some people actually reported that it has the ability to read PS3 Blu-ray discs. Now, all you have to do is buy one of these drives and figure out how to make PS3 games work on your PC with some kind of wonder emulator.

You’ve probably heard of some cool PS2 emulators that are supposed to let you play PS2 games on your PC, but the sad fact is these emulators are far from offering a pleasant experience. You could play some games that aren’t graphics intensive, but most games will fail to run smoothly o your PC, although the actual PCs should be faster than the PS2.

So it’s more likely you won’t be playing PS3 games on your PC anytime soon because emulators need to be specifically optimized for PC components, and this thing could take several years. However, I reckon that hackers everywhere are thrilled at this prospect. At least they can easily find a way to extract useful data, or make copies using this drive. Heh, I don’t really mean to give them nasty ideas now, I’m just talking about the possibilities. They’ll do what they know best anyhow.

The drive is sort of cheap, it only costs around $150. If you somehow feel the urge of hacking something, go with this drive and experiment a bit.