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• The Toshiba buyout announcement arrived in February, and the acquisition became effective just recently. Fujitsu still holds 19.9% of the former hard drive business throughout the transitional period, but Toshiba now controls the hard drive design, manufacturing, and sales divisions formerly operated by Fujitsu. The goal was to obtain Fujitsu’s large business clientele, whose importance is growing given the transition from 3.5” to 2.5” formats. Toshiba did not have enterprise-class drives in its portfolio, but the company is strong in NAND flash, making it obvious that it needs a door opener for the enterprise market. Additionally, the 38.6 million 2.5” drives shipped by Fujitsu in 2008, combined with Toshiba’s 34.5 million shipped drives, makes Toshiba the #1 global supplier for 2.5” drives. The Toshiba 2.5” hard drive index page lists all hard drives from Fujitsu and Toshiba. We found the MJA2500CH, which is no longer available through fujitsu.com. This drive is available at 80GB, 250GB, and 500GB capacities, and they all share the same basic specifications: 5,400 RPM, 8MB buffer, SATA/300, and 9.5 mm standard Z-height. The 500GB model is based on two platters and weighs in at 101g while the two other versions are based on a single platter and weigh 96g. The Fujitsu drive’s 89 MB/s maximum throughput is best of class; the second-fastest is WD’s new 640GB Scorpio Blue. Unfortunately, access time isn’t really quick at 20 ms. Other 500GB notebook drives range around 16 to 19 ms. I/O results are similar, with the Fujitsu drive providing great throughput, but only average I/O and PCMark Vantage performance. But the MJA2500CH has other good qualities. Its 0.7W idle power is as low as you can get today, and it never consumed more than 2.5W. The 0.9W required for HD video playback is excellent—right down there with Hitachi’s Travelstar 5K500.B and, ironically, the in-house competition from Toshiba.

• IBM is a logical choice to buy AMD. For starters, AMD cannot be bought by just anybody, since there are limiting factors with the license for the x86 architecture. If AMD would be acquired by a foreign company (such as Samsung), that license would be lost, and that would diminish the value of AMD as a company. Thus, Nvidia and IBM, are the only two real players are in the game. When it comes to IBM, the matter of market cap is very simple - AMD is currently valued at $3.88 billion and Nvidia goes for $13.44 billion. IBM is valued just below the $150 billion mark. Thus, AMD is pocket money for IBM, and the potential gains with AMD under IBM's wings are numerous. For starters, IBM has a ton of manufacturing partnerships and is a member of a manufacturing alliance that involves AMD, IBM and Chartered from one side, and Toshiba and Sony from other. Let's not forget the fact that with AMD/ATI (or just Daamit) on-board, IBM would rule the world of video game consoles - all three consoles feature IBM processors, and the two leading consoles have ATI GPUs inside. The next generation of consoles could look much different, if IBM would have such design teams to develop complete solutions for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. And the market of 200-300 million consoles is very attractive. There is also a small fact that AMD relocated one engineering team from Austin, TX to East Fishkill, NY - to work on a new manufacturing processes on the spot. With a lot of AMD engineers working closely side-by-side with IBM on next-gen designs, opening all secrets would create an incredibly flexible semiconductor giant that would be able to seriously cut down Intel's market share. This would also propel IBM into worlds that are currently closed for the company, such as the consumer electronics segment, where ATI Imageon chips go head-to-head against STMicro, Thomson, Philips, Silicon Optix and others. The handheld market is also an interesting segment where ATI and Nvidia ship hundreds of millions of chips per annum, and we won't go into lucrative HPC deals where IBM usually competes either with its Power, Cell or Intel chips. Going all-IBM in the x86 arena would also open a new world for IBM's services, and this is what the company wants to influence. With ATI on board, IBM would enter the world of visual computing, which is set to dominate the world in decades to come (holographs, HUDs, monitors everywhere we go). GPGPU also comes to mind, and this is the reason why both IBM and Nvidia would want AMD very, very badly. AMD has been quite vocal about integrating GPGPU-friendly improvements, and GPUs would gain CPU-friendly features.What speaks against an acquisition of AMD by IBM is IBM's current direction into services. Conclusion With Nvidia not having any support from partners to buy AMD, and the fact that the debt-to-equity ratio could prove deadly, Nvidia is effectively out of the running for the company. A deal could still happen, but if AMD is for sale, IBM is the logical choice. As some Intel insiders have told us, this would be the move that scares Intel's leadership beyond belief. There is a saying inside Intel: "IBM is a vampire that never dies". You can give it Tom Cruise's face, but the fact of the matter is that IBM has been around the block before the block even existed. A combination of IBM and AMD would leave x86 licenses safe and intact, and that is a matter of utmost importance. From another side, the manufacturing alliance should not be overlooked. A third option for AMD is to weather the storm and stay on course alone, surrounded by a ton of partners, and faith that K10.5 and K11 will bring out competitive CPU parts, to complement graphics and chipsets. Only time will tell how this story ultimately unfolds.

• Asus, DFI, MSI Give Mobos The Crossfire Treatment

  Although NVIDIA has a nine-month head start over ATI in the dual graphics chipset space and has the lead in both graphics performance and platform technology, the firm still continues to aggressively secure its place in the market. One good example is NVIDIA's acquisition of Taiwanese chipset maker ULi in December, which has added years to the company's already rich chipset-IP war chest. Moreover, NVIDIA can probably launch a two-card SLI system with four GPUs at any time the market warrants it. NVIDIA's recently launched nForce4 SLI X16 chipsets for both AMD and Intel sockets offer two, full-featured x16 PCI Express ports. However, the PCI Express lanes are split between the Northbridge and Southbridge sections of the chipset, as opposed to allocating 32 lanes locally, which could potentially pose a performance penalty in the future. But, for today's applications, this design disadvantage will not be noticeable. So where does that leave ATI? We thought a good place to start would involve an in-depth analysis and look at some of the first motherboards that are based on ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition chipset. What we can say from the outset is that if a good gaming experience is what you are after, the ATI Crossfire solution largely runs head to head with NVIDIA's SLI systems. ATI's chipsets, however, do pose some interesting design challenges for motherboard makers, since ATI currently is unable to deliver a state-of-the-art Southbridge that can offer Serial ATA II and Gigabit Ethernet. As a result, motherboard makers look for third party Southbridge alternatives in order to offer better overall value (e.g. Asus' A8R-MVP). This is particularly interesting because alternative Southbridges so far have only been used to reduce costs. How Dual Graphics Works Both ATI and NVIDIA deliver dual graphics solutions that effectively use two graphics chips in order to accelerate 3D processing. Future technology generations may easily use four or even more graphics chips to further increase performance. Just plug two suitable graphics cards (read on for details) into the x16 PCI Express graphics slots on your ATI Crossfire or NVIDIA SLI motherboard and connect them using the corresponding solutions. You then only have to enable dual graphics mode with the graphics driver control panel. You may wonder why this is something people would want to have, given that many games already exceed performance figures of 100 frames per seconds (FPS). There are, however, many options that can be enabled in order to increase the visual experience. Antialiasing helps to smooth edges, for example, or anisotropic filtering can reduce aliasing effects while producing less blur. Finally, some visual effects require each and every image to be run through the pixel shaders multiple times, which can have quite an impact on performance. Future 3D models (e.g. DirectX 10) will allow for fully programmable shaders, which will enable a graphics subsystem (single-, dual- or multi-GPU graphics) to do more calculations than ever before. ATI ideally requires one so-called Crossfire master graphics card (these have not yet been available for the X1000 series) that is paired with any X1000 series model that at least matches the chip model number (e.g. Radeon X1800XT Master plus a regular Radeon X1800XT). The Crossfire Master card features an additional piece of silicon that takes care of the final image composition, while the workload is shared between two (or more) graphics processing units.