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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MIT, among several other ‘high end’ universities require all students to pass a swimming test of four laps in their pool in order to graduate. Swimming, a basic survival skill as viewed by the university, may be the first test many freshmen will fail in a long while. I found this amusing since it would be the first test that I would ace at MIT, if I was to attend that college. Someone that I know at Chaska is going to MIT, which he found out only a few weeks ago, and has been trying to sell off his AP test spots since they won’t do him any good for MIT.

Here is the link: The Boston Globe

-John Havlik

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Yesterday, at work one of the tenants was throwing away a ton of dated computer components. Most of the stuff was SCSI Pentium and Pentium 2 servers, some Pentium overdrives, and old apples and one old power mac. Among the mess were two jewels, one was a case with a Biostar motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, which we found later, and another was a Elitegroup motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.0Ghz. Both boards have AGP 4x slots, well the Biostar has a AGP pro 4x slot but AGP cards work in it so it’s all good.

The Elitegroup one wouldn’t POST so it has been robbed of its CPU and heatsink. The Biostar does work. It took a bit of coxing to get it to find the 40GB western digital hard drive to boot Windows XP, but it is working now. The 512Mb DDR ram from my brother’s shot motherboard fits nicely next to the ATi Radeon 9600 that was in my brother’s old box. My Sound Blaster Live! card, Pioneer DVD burner, and my 200GB hard drive will be making their way into the new system by the end of next week. I can finally play Halo at full settings without any lag.

-John Havlik

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