Silicon Origin

Sony Corporation has reported its biggest loss in the last four years. The net loss of Sony totaled 67.6 billion yen ($562 million) in the three months ended March 31st.
The cause: Sony PlayStation 3.

Rumours say that Sony is selling its new generation gaming console at a price much under the costs of production. This, and the recall of over 9 million notebook batteries, has cost Sony more than its yearly profit.

But hope is not lost for the Japanese giant: Sony expects sales growth of 5.8% and a profit of $3.7 billion by the end of March 2008.

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AMD’s new “Stars” processor family will be branded Phenom™, because, as AMD’s press release sais:

Industry’s only true x86 quad-core architecture paired with the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series to offer a phenomenal computing experience

AMD sais that the new AMD Phenom™ will be the industry’s first true, native quad-core processor. Anyway, Intel’s Core 2 Quad is not: it has two Core 2 Duo processors on the same PCB.
AMD sais:

With the true quad-core design offered by the upcoming AMD Phenom processors, cores communicate on the die rather than through a front side bus external to the processor – a bottleneck inherent in other products that are packaging two dual-core chips to form quad-core processors. AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture on-chip ensures that all four cores have optimum access to the integrated memory controller and integrated HyperTransport links, so that performance scales well with the number of cores. This design is also highlighted by a unique shared L3 cache for quicker data access and Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ infrastructure compatibility to enable a seamless upgrade path.

AMD officials say that Phenom™ Quad-core will be available in the 2007 Christmas season.

Only 224 days till X-mas! Let’s wait and see!

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Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. Jay Leno

So, this is what marketing is about: creating a need and fulfilling it. You can see it everywhere: TV Shop, Internet, shops, TV ads, and so on, and so forth…

In the IT industry I seem to observ this principle being used by Intel: Bearlake chipsets are all new, improved, fast, glittering and super… but if you want a Bearlake-based configuration, you will have to use DDR3.

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Apple seems to be a really important player on the cell phone market, although they have only one phone model: iPhone. But iPhone has so many innovations and so many discussions around it that there is probably no one that hasn’t heard of it. A survey realised by ChangeWave Alliance has revealed that there is a certain amount of excitement around the revolutionary cell phone Apple is going to release in June.
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Intel will launch, on the 9th of May, the Bearlake chipset, with support for the “new and improved” DDR3 memory. AMD does not take the same path, instead, in the new AMD K10 core they will include support for DDR2 at 1066 MHz.
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Athlon has always been “The Pentium of AMD”. But this situation is about to change: it seems Advanced Micro Devices has decided to retire the old and well-known Athlon brand in favor of a new and improved one: Phenom.
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