The original allegation from the Attorney General was that Intel had been making hardware companies offers that they couldn't refuse. Intel was said to be pressuring companies into signing exclusivity agreements tied to unreasonably large cash incentives. It was also accused of threatening companies with dire consequences if they changed their minds.

This victory for Intel is certainly getting it excited on its corporate website. In a paragraph with the byline "The NYAG's complaint is grounded more in rhetoric and politics than fact and law," an Intel spinster says that New York made the claims for the "political purpose of providing sound bites for media attention".

In the statement, Intel went on to say: "The NYAG's conscious decision to use repeatedly the legal term "bribery," to characterise Intel's discounting, for example, is an outrageous hijacking of the meaning of language. As even the NYAG concedes, Intel provides rebates, or credits, against amounts owed to Intel, to reduce the cost of microprocessors to its customers.

"This is common in business and in every day life. A "bribe," on the other hand, is a well-known legal concept".

The Attorney General's office, meanwhile, said in a statement that it believed the claims "had merit", but "in light of the court's decision believe that no purpose is served by pursuing the matter further".

A $6.5 million dollar settlement will cause sighs of relief from Intel executives, tired from years of slogging it out in the courts. The book can be shut on this particular case.

Intel historians will remember similar charges brought against Intel which were settled. AMD took $1.25 billion from the company's coffers, while the US Federal Trade Commission also successfully brought Intel to book on antitrust allegations. 

Jason Gorss, spokesperson at GlobalFoundries, told TechEye: "It's a pretty unique partnership and the event should exemplify that. The Common Platform alliance has existed for almost a decade now and has enabled several generations of semiconductor technology for mobile, computing and data management applications.

"The alliance is based on a unique shared R&D model, where customers benefit from world-class process development and deployment.

"At the forum, we'll be discussing advanced technology nodes and the innovation pipeline to 14nm and beyond. We'll be hosting technical deep dives and discussions on the increasingly complex manufacturing and design processes for the 20nm and 14nm nodes. We'll also be talking about the challenges of lithography and what we are doing there to address issues such as double patterning and EUV.

"And attendees will get a glimpse into the future through an executive panel on the next key drivers of semiconductor innovation beyond 14nm technology, from FinFETs to nano-wires to 450mm wafers."

ARMadillo: A mobile chip stuffed down the pants of an ageing rock star to impress girls.

ARMaDildo: A mobile chip which needs batteries

PhARMacy: A place to buy chips to rear your ill company back to health

ARMore:  The love that Microsoft has for things not of Intel

ARMature: A developer trying to stick Windows into a mobile environment

HARM:  To injure oneself by the incorrect placement of a mobile chip

pARMesan: Cheesy Intel mobile stuff

CARMel  A place which is made a no smoking zone when under the direct control of a Hollywood A lister

ChARM Offensive: Marketing campaign for mobile chips

DhARMa: It is a Hindu's duty to install mobile chips

ARMhole: Cambridge

KARMa: What will run over Microsoft's Dogma

PtARMigan: A strange Scottish bird who lives in Invernesshire

ARMistice: A peace treaty between Microsoft and ARM

BARMy: The concept of ARM on a server

AlARM: What wakes up Intel with a cold sweat

MARMite: A small British company - you either love or hate it

FARM: A place where ARM chips are grown, TSMC

MARM: What you call the Queen when she is using a tablet

FireARM: Chips used as weapons of mass distraction

GARM: Hindi word for when the chip is too hot

GendARMes: A French police force dedicated to chip intellectual property enforcement

HARMonious: When the chip works as marketing says it does

ARMageddon: ARM's hopes for Intel in 2012

ARMature: ARM grows up

ARMless:  Microsoft

UnARMed: Intel

DisARMed: IBM

UnderARM: Apple

WARMonger: Larry Ellison

WARM: Cold war between Intel and ARM

SwARM: Android applications, or a cluster of ARM chips

BlARMy Stone: A place in Cambridge where sales teams are trained in how wonderful ARM chips are

VARMint: A person who calls for the use of ARM chips when they are not appropriate

TARMac: ARM on a MacBook

ClARM: Clapham

PARM: When Intel throws its toys out of a pram

SmARM: The board

VietnARM: The CES tradeshow

cRAM: Intel throwing toys out of its PRAM and forgetting you need ARM in the word

StARM: Terrible weather in Northern Ireland.

StARMan: David Bowie's smartphone

The method does not involve buckets of liquid nitrogen and waving goodbye to your PC warranty.  Alongside engineers at North Carolina State University, AMD has increased processing speeds without overclocking, instead finding a way to more intelligently assign workloads between the CPU and GPU.

It is not the first example of CPUs and GPUs getting crammed onto a single chip. AMD has already been doing so with its Llano processors, while Intel’s also fitted the graphics processor onto its main chip with Sandy Bridge.

It appears that AMD is looking one step ahead and has produced a system that involves much more closely working processing units. It appears to be linked to the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture plan stretching out to 2014.

Even though the CPU and GPU are already housed on the same chip, Dr. Huiyang Zhou, the author of a NCSU paper on the chip design, reckons that there is still woefully little interaction between the two.  Zhou says it has been the aim of the research to resolve this problem.

With CPUs doing the brain work, and GPUs generally providing the processing muscle, Zhou and AMD have been working on more intelligent workload assigning.  This means allowing GPUs to execute computational functions, with the CPUs pre-fetching the necessary data from off-chip memory.

Both CPUs and GPUs can pick up data from off chip memory just as niftily, but GPUs are much quicker at ploughing through it all. Basically, AMD and Zhou reckon they increase speed and efficiency by letting CPUs and GPUs get stuck into their specialist roles.

In preliminary tests this has worked to an impressive effect.   According to Zhou, the approach allowed processor performance to improve by an average of 21.4 percent.

Intel may have a seemingly unassailable lead over its competitor, but if AMD is about to bring these increases to bear any time soon then it will certainly give Intel more of a run for its money.

TechEye has approached AMD about commercialisation of chips using this technique.  We'll let you know just as soon as we hear back from Intel too.

The design allows for linear scaling across multiple chips.

Syed Ali, President and CEO at Cavium, claims that the family can provide the most compute power of any standards-based communications processor chip, at 120GHz of 64-bit compute processing.

The OCTEON III can manage 4X higher application performance than the earlier OCTEON II with significantly superior performance per watt.

Ali claimed it was the industry's first SoC to integrate search processing using Cavium's NEURON Search processors along with DPI Acceleration.

This all means that next-generation networks can handle the explosive increase in traffic expected from the cloud and mobile broadband, as well as increased exchange of multimedia and video rich content.

Ali said that the higher traffic means that networks need intelligent application-aware and secure processing. This has shifted the bottleneck for L3 - L7 data and security services to CPU processing and means that there is shedloads of 64-bit CPU GHz processing power which needs to be done.

Cavium's third generation custom cnMIPS "Real Cores" have up to 48 superscalar MIPS64 cores, operating at up to 2.5GHz, he added.

The new processor family can handle over 500Gbps of I/O connectivity per chip, over a variety of interfaces including multiple ports of 40G, 20G, 10G, GE, Interlaken, Interlaken/LA, SRIO, PCIe Gen3, SATA 6G and USB 3.0.

The first 28nm OCTEON III silicon is expected to sample in the second half of 2012. 

*EyeSee We like the spec sheet. L2 Cache? "Large".

Despite HP’s $690 million nod at the continued marketing of Intel Itanium-based HP products, ensuring that the upcoming Poulson Itanium will be marketed and further supported until 2017 (when Kittson, the successor to Poulson should arrive), after Poulson, however, all bets are off.

HP is in a position where, in spite of its 140,000-strong client base for Itanium, it can shift hardware to Xeon-based products over the course of the next two years, while it continues to support Poulson. It’s a safe bet that it will be done as Oracle, which stopped developing for Itanium and HP-UX, in favour of its in-house Sun SPARC-based servers, is by and large one of the reasons Itanium is still around.

Oracle and HP are locked in a bitter feud over head-hunting, Itanium, and someone playing the odd round of golf one too many times with the enemy. It isn’t very likely that Oracle will do a 180 on its decision to hang up the Itanium boots, and with that, a huge client portfolio goes away. Of course, it could be argued this is nothing more than Oracle’s attempt to leverage its Sun SPARC server hardware and dropping Itanium support. HP tried fighting this in court, but the fall-back plan can simply be to shuffle clients along to Xeon, where Oracle cannot afford to back out.

HP already has the ability, but maybe not the supply capacity, to let Itanium fall flat on its face. It has ported HP-UX to run on x86, it has started supplementing its Superdome servers with Xeon-powered blades and although it hasn’t been successful in pushing for Xeon-Itanium socket compatibility, many features like I/Os, chipset and integrated memory controllers are already there.

Intel, which recently sank its Itanium Software Alliance and fended off rumours it was reshuffling engineers from Itanium to Xeon, remains adamant Itanium is a goer.

One Intel representative said to TechEye: "Poulson is on track for launch later this year; with performance that’s expected to be more than double that of Tukwila. As we’ve said publicly before—based on customer requests, a new version of Itanium has historically been released every 2 years or more."

Poulson, which will be released later this year, will introduce a new Itanium architecture. It’s an octa-core CPU, optimised for multi-threading (four threads), sporting 768KB of L2 cache per core and 54MB of L3 cache. It promises to deliver two-fold performance over its predecessor, and what will easily be a much better power/performance ratio over Tukwila, which was still built on 65nm.

So, what of Kittson, the successor to Poulson? "We expect Kittson to be consistent with this release schedule based on the information we have today," the rep told us. Basically, Intel will continue to develop Itanium for as long as Intel wills it necessary.

Kittson, provided it launches in 2017, as scheduled, will require that both Intel and HP extend their support - both software and hardware, into 2020. An unlikely scenario, considering the state of affairs.

Still, whatever HP does, it will carry the blessing of Intel.

Margins on Itanium iron are higher than Xeons, we’re sure, but losing highly-profitable hardware and software to Oracle’s Sun Microsystems might smart more than HP is willing to take.

One of the things it did bring was a lot of clarity to where Rory Read, AMD’s CEO, wants to take the company in particular with concerns to the CPU and GPU roadmaps.

Lisa Su, Senior Veep and General Manager for Global Business Units at AMD, presented a piece of slideware that shows what’s in store for discrete graphics in 2013, sort of.

2013 will see the debut of another nautically-themed family of graphics chips. “Sea Islands” is the name, a third generation DX11 part, second-generation Graphics Core Next architecture on 28nm that includes Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features.

As AMD’s ticks and tocks are a bit out of sync – new architectures usually debut on mature processes, not on new ones, like GCN and its 28nm node – we’re inclined to say the soon-to-be 8000-series GPUs are based on a tweaked Graphics Core Next with added HSA features, rather than a revolutionary new architecture.

HSA, as AMD has put it, aims for a tighter integration of CPU and GPU functions within an APU, however Sea Islands is a discrete part, so we are keen on seeing where AMD is taking this. It also shows AMD will only release new parts next year and not late 2012 as some pundits wagered.

The first step will be to, apart from mobilising its software partners, leveraging whatever HSA feature the GPU has to AMD’s benefit, and this will likely be workload distribution between GPU and CPU plus memory management. From what we know of HSA, this is about all you can do right now on a discrete part.

Coming back to the name, “Sea Islands”, we won’t bet you the names of the chips, but you’ll excuse us if we say the Mediterranean is a better candidate than the Wikipedia definition of “a chain of tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the United States”.

AMD will have to fend off Nvidia's Kepler until early 2013, it seems, but so far it seems in a good position to do so.

Reuters is saying that hours after after Appleton's death Micron's board named Durcan, the president and chief operating officer, as temporary CEO.

The word on the street is that Durcan will stay on full- time.

Appleton performed stunts at airshows, and died after the small plane he was piloting crashed at an airport in Boise, Idaho.

He had already decided to retire and announced he was leaving, which might explain why Durcan was able to be placed behind his desk before the chair got cold.

Micron can't really afford much in the way of disruption as it is struggling with sluggish computer sales and declining prices.

Durcan joined Micron in 1984 and served as chief technology officer before becoming chief operating officer in 2007. He has taken on a greater role running the chipmaker while the more flamboyant Appleton focused more on strategy.

Micron's board of directors also named director Robert Switz the new chairman of the board. Switz was formerly CEO of ADC Telecommunications.

But the loss of Appleton could delay the acquisition of troubled Japanese rival Elpida Memory. Elpida is rumoured to have been in talks to be bought by Micron or reach some kind of partnership. 

Speaking at an analyst shindig, new Senior Vice President and GM Lisa Su said that AMD will take advantage of all sorts of ecosystems, from Windows 8 to Android.

According to Tech Report, no longer would AMD be "religious" about architectures and instead would become flexibile as part of its strategic plan.

In terms of Civilization V, AMD has decided to move from winning Piety points to concentrating on the Freedom culture. We expect it to start building the Sydney Opera House any day now.

It is worth pointing out that despite these announcements, AMD has not made any specific commitments to ARM-based products on its roadmap.

ARM was only mentioned once so far, and Su could have just been coughing. Certainly for the next year AMD is still worshipping at the altar of x86 for now.

But it would help push AMD into the mobile market by taking an x86-compatible SoC into the sub-2W ultra-low-lower category.

Of course, being "ambidextrous" does not mean having an extra ARM, it just means you can use whichever ARM you like. 

New price lists released from Intel indicate that Chipzilla is holding prices for now, probably thanks to a lack of serious competition from AMD.

Intel added seven new processors to its Sandy Bridge lineup this month. These are the Core i5 2550K with four cores, 3.4GHz, and 6MB cache which will cost $225, Core i5 2450, which has four cores, 3.2GHz, and 6MB cache) and will set you back $195. The other four core chip is the Core i5 2380P which will clock at 3.1GHz and has a 6MB cache and cost $177.

Of the two core chips, the  Celeron B815 will run at 2.6GHz, have 2MB cache and cost $86, while the Celeron T3500 will run at 2.1GHz and have a MB cache and cost $80. The Celeron M 867 will run at 1.3GHz and have a 2MB cache and cost $134. The only new single core is the Celeron M 797 which will run at 1.4GHz and have a MB cache, and cost $70

The Celerons are mobile chips and the Celeron M 867 and 797 are both Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) which can run at 17W TDP. The two 'P' processors apparently don't have integrated graphics cores.