Rumor mills keep spewing out ‘insider’ information that there is a planned ATI-AMD merger. Many have commented that this would hurt Intel and nVidia, as ATI reportedly makes the best chipset for the upcoming Conroe (Core Duo 2). With Intel and AMD as arch enemies, this chipset would likely never see the light of day. nVidia, as we all know, has helped AMD significantly with SLI and their enthusiast chipsets for AMD64 systems.

Reportedly on Monday, AMD and ATI will confront share holders on the possibility of a merger, naturally for their approval. Then the FTC will have their way with AMD and stall the merger for several months, if it even allows it. One speculation that I can offer is that the current lawsuits against Intel by AMD may be used as a cover in order to sneak the ATI merger through the FTC quickly. Other speculations on the net include the fact that AMD doesn’t have enough revenue to completely buy out ATI. Personally, I’d like to see ATI to continue to be a independent company.

-John Havlik

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Traditional IDE/PATA drives have less than a week before they will no longer make their way to high end Intel systems. Beginning with the ICH8 south bridge Intel no longer plans on providing native IDE support on south bridge chips. Just a day ago, a certain fellow at the inquirer ranted over how Plextor is the only manufacturer of SATA optical drives. In the end he said that IDE’s days are numbered as he believe that by next year IDE will be reserved only for low end systems. Mr. Demerjian said that the market really needed a kick start to get more suppliers for SATA optical drives, and it seems Intel is going to be that boot that will be doing the kicking. It’s about time PATA dies, I really want a SATA dual layer BluRay R/RW drive in my next desktop system.

-John Havlik

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