The past week has been a holiday season in North America, which means we haven't seen that many major announcements. There were, however, a few notable events, including Cisco's plans to take at least a baby step into the consumer electronics market, AMD's writedown of ATI goodwill, China's plans for 3G, and NVIDIA's new Ion platform.
Here are the week's top stories in hardware:
AMD writes down ATI's value...again: The only consolation that comes as a result of this further devaluation of AMD's ATI purchase is that it's less a shot at ATI's competitive position and more the result of market behavior over the past 3-6 months.
Cisco to bring "human network" to your stereo: Cisco, long a brand leader in corporate network hardware, is taking steps to enter the consumer market. The company's prowess in its chosen field is unquestioned, but will that translate into sales at the likes of Best Buy?
China licenses (non-Chinese) 3G wireless standards: Once upon a time, China's avowed goal was to go with a unilateral TD-SCMA deployment, but issues with its own homegrown standard have forced the nation to turn to CDMA 2000 and WCDMA to feed its citizens' desire for 3G connectivity.
AMD, Intel, and the cases in between: A walkthrough of the current cases between Intel and AMD, where the various investigations are currently, and how things proceed from here. If you want to know how all of these bits tie together, here's your chance.
NVIDIA unveils ION platform: It's tiny, it's NVIDIA-powered, and it's built on Atom. NVIDIA is making big claims about this little box; hopefully we'll find out more at CES.
Details on HP's Firebird PC: HP's got a plan for a smaller, lighter, Blackbird built on the same single-foot style of case (but a good bit smaller). I spent some time with a Blackbird 002 once upon a time, and I have to say I generally liked the case styling—if HP properly balances performance and size, the Firebird could be a hit.
Source : http://arstechnica.com/
