So here is where the circus meets the professional. I’m tired of crappy phones with their dinky apps and their cloudy touchy-feely internet-is-all-encompassing malarkey. What I want is real mobile computing. I want to run the same software that I do on my computer at work and at home. I want full-blown Microsoft Office. (Or OpenOffice. Or LibreOffice.) I want full-blown Adobe Photoshop. (Or GIMP.) I want the real internet. I want a real version of Windows. I want real software. I want the real deal.

No more freaking apps!

I’m tired of PDA-like behavior from my smartphone. Seriously people, my Palm Pilot wasn’t good enough then, and cellphones killed off its advancement years ago. Only, they haven’t advanced significantly in its place. Smartphones now still can only just barely do what PDAs did way back when.

Since freaking Y2K we’ve been able to put an x86 PC into a pocket. It’s over a decade later, and we somehow can’t put a full PC into a smartphone?!?!?!

Yes, it’s going to be slower than a good laptop, which is already slower than a desktop PC. I get that. I can be patient. I can wait for my application to load. Especially if it’s a real application and not just an app. Really. It’s okay!

Yes, battery life may be a bit tricky. Though, honestly, I really don’t think it should be as bad as some make it out to be. Put in a slightly larger batter for starters. And continue improving the technology to use less power. There’s nothing new here. But if you don’t start somewhere, you’ll never be sufficiently motivated to iteratively improve the design.

And honestly, with good drivers, even Windows has been stable enough to run 24×7 lately. And that’s without some fancy new not-entirely-asleep sleep mode that updates things periodically while asleep. And there’s always Linux. Heck, my cellphone has needed a reboot more often than my PC has!

So it’s about flirking time that someone brings a full x86-capable (with PCI bus) solution to the smartphone. Really. It was about time half a decade ago! It’s way beyond about time now.

I don’t care if it’s Intel. They’re certainly poised well to do it. They have the technology, just not the cojones, apparently.

I don’t care if it’s AMD. After their acquisition of ATi there’s no reason that they couldn’t do it with their own SoC. And while Intel is fiddle-farting around with x86 smartphones without a PCI bus, there’s a big freaking opportunity here to take the market right out from under them. They’d even deserve it too!

Heck, even nVidia ought to be able to make a chipset for an Intel Atom that includes the PCI bus. nVidia used to make good chipsets. (And, of course, they’re great at other stuff too, like graphics.) And they’ve come to some kind of agreement with Intel again, right?

As much as it pains me to say it, at this point, I’d even consider something from freaking VIA! And I’ve never used a VIA product that I didn’t hate. They bring unstable to a whole new level! But even they are positioned to make an x86 smartphone that can run Windows.

Someone, already, geeze!

It’s bad enough that tablets are barely even getting there, but by now we really should have an x86-based full-Windows-running phone.

I’d say thank goodness that Fujitsu finally gave us one with the F-07C, except that oh, wait, it’s only available in Japan. 

Though it was absolutely no surprise to find out, it was somewhat unexpected to hear all the same.  Intel and nVidia have worked out their differences and will be sharing patents … so long as Intel coughs up $1.5 billion to nVidia’s coffers.

To say that these two companies, Intel and nVidia, have not exactly seen eye-to-eye in the past is nothing short of an understatement.

And yet, ever since AMD bought out ATi, never have Intel and nVidia needed each other more.

So, again, not a surprise, but somewhat unexpected regardless.

The future should become rather interesting.  Intel can no longer afford to keep putting out such lackluster integrated graphics, and they know it.  They’ve announced their “Eye Candy”.  What will their future hold?

And nVidia meanwhile has expressed plans to offer ARM-based CPUs in 2013?  That should be interesting.  I wonder what technology from Intel they’ll be able to incorporate into that.

But I also have to wonder at the subtleties.  nVidia, for example, was particularly good with memory controllers … up until CPUs started impeding that with their own integrated ones.  Will Intel for example be able to tweak their future CPUs with some of nVidia’s wily memory-handling ways?  And what will be see in the future from nVidia chipsets for Intel motherboards?  Will nVidia’s integrated firewalls come back?  Will SLI be better supported on Intel boards?  With integrated graphics as well?

What the future holds exactly will, of course, be up to Intel and nVidia to work out.  Potentially they have the technologies needed to compete quite well with AMD+ATi instead of struggling on their own while bickering.

Ideally, granted, I’m a little concerned that we’re going to really be losing market competition here though.  With these tightly bound CPU and graphics tie-ins, even if theoretically you could pair Intel with ATi or AMD with nVidia there has got to reach a point where the performance for doing so will suffer.  And with all other parties virtually nonentities in the competition these days, it looks to make for an awfully choiceless future, even if that future will be filled with interesting things.

The title pretty much speaks for itself.  Apple’s newest Mac OS X update, 10.5.7, is having issues if you use VMware Fusion and an ATI 3D graphics card.  Problems reportedly include but may not be limited to: system crashes, slow performance, and incorrect rendering.

Macs that use nVidia graphics are unaffected.

And again, it’s only when you combine VMware Fusion with ATI cards.  If you don’t use VMware Fusion, you should be fine.

So who would use VMware Fusion and why?  Well, anyone who wants to run Windows of course.  (Or Linux, or whatever OS you like while also running Mac OS X.)  VMware Fusion is a virtual machine for Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers that allows you to run Windows (or whatever) relatively seamlessly while you use your Mac.  So if this doesn’t sound even remotely familiar to you, then you’re probably safe.

Meanwhile, everyone involved (Apple, VMware, and ATI) are all looking into the issue and hope to have the update problems resolved shortly.

Normally I’d say that any journalist that spreads rumors is not really a journalist. And, actually, I stick to that. This isn’t journalism. This is blogging. I’m not a professional. I don’t have an editor. I’m not even paid. (Heck, my “advertising” isn’t even making any notable quantity of money.) So I feel perfectly free to put this out there:

Long ago, at what seems like the dawn of modern PCs, there was a company who took their processor, bus, and memory knowledge from producing graphics cards and re-tuned their work to also fill in a huge gap created by AMD for quality performing chipsets. That company was nVIDIA. For a long time AMD failed to really press competition with their own chipsets, making lackluster performers, and so it was a huge business for nVIDIA to delve into with lots of dollars to make.

ATi tried to get in on the action, but never really impressed. While VIA took the ultra-cheap low-ground with ho-hum performance and questionable stability. While nVIDIA proved that the same heart that made blazing-fast graphics processors could make equally robust and lightspeed chipsets. They quickly ruled the roost for the top end motherboards in AMD-based systems. nVIDIA and AMD just went hand-in-hand.

Of course nVIDIA also produced Intel chipsets now and again, but rarely so.

That is, until the day that the unthinkable happened: AMD bought out ATi.

Suddenly AMD – with the help of their new acquisition of ATi – was serious about providing their own chipsets. And together they finally had the know-how to take a serious chunk back. And so nVIDIA’s chipset market shrank. Fast.

nVIDIA tried to branch out to Intel then. For the first time in forever they took Intel platforms seriously and seemed to commit to the idea. It made good market sense. But Intel has always been (and probably will always be) good at producing their own high-quality chipsets with excellent performance. So there wasn’t really much of a displeased market for nVIDIA to steal there. The only real gap to firmly steal was the top-end gaming market, which is big dollars, but only a small percentage of the market.

And that brings us to the almost equally unthinkable: the rumor that nVIDIA is thinking of leaving the chipset business all together.

When you look at what has gone on recently in the market, combined with the falling world economy, it makes sense that nVIDIA would be thinking of ways to “cut the fat”. So it’s no surprise to hear if nVIDIA has called a meeting to gauge support for chipset development. You’d be crazy not to re-examine every aspect of your business in today’s market. Almost no one is making money right now, especially on something of a luxury item as a high-performance gaming computer. But everyone knows that the bad economy won’t last forever, so it’s time to look at how to weather out the bad economy, not time to ditch business entirely.

Still, that doesn’t stop the rumor-mongers from saying stupid things like, “OMG! nVIDIA is like totally quitting the chipset industry!”

Is it true? How the heck should I know? I’m just an intelligent observer. I have no connections to the inside of nVIDIA.

But I seriously doubt they’d do something so drastic.

In spite of AMD having bought ATi to make their own graphics and chipsets, the whole thing was done because alone neither AMD nor ATi could compete with nVIDIA’s chipset domination for an AMD platform. And that’s one thing AMD really decided they wanted (finally) was to provide a whole platform. Even together though, they’re still not besting nVIDIA’s quality. And while Intel might make a lot of good chipsets and motherboards, they certainly aren’t top-notch when it comes to gaming platforms. So nVIDIA has been taking and holding a nice chunk of the gaming market.

And, ultimately, that’s what nVIDIA is all about, is gaming. They’re the best. Period. Occasionally ATi comes close, but long-term, nVIDIA definitely holds that crown. So why would nVIDIA ditch their top position in the gaming platform chipset market by dropping their chipset business and just sticking to graphics? It just doesn’t make sense. You don’t exit a high-price market niche that you own. You just don’t. In a high-price market they can virtually make up their own premiums. They don’t have to compete there against low prices. It’s the best part of the market to dominate.

So while I can see where the rumor mill got its crazy ideas from, that’s all they are, are rumors. There might even be one or two grumblers over at nVIDIA that want to quit while they’re ahead. But I just don’t see it happening. They’d have to be fools to ditch what they have and are holding on to.

It’s just a rumor.

Trust me.

I bet you never thought you’d see the day when nVIDIA and ATi actually did anything together, what with them being the two biggest rivals in the 3D graphics card market. They can’t even seem to agree on Direct X standards. How could they ever get over their hatred of each other competitive streak to do anything together?

Well, if the class action lawsuit filed has any merit, apparently they found common ground at least on one thing, that bigger prices are better. The law suit alleges that ATi and nVIDIA knowingly and intentionally worked together to fix their prices. The suit now combines a whopping 51 separate civil antitrust suits against nVIDIA and ATi for price-fixing in the graphics market.

Allegedly the pair have been holding secret meetings to determine and set their prices. And worse, to synchronize their product launches in back-and-forth stages in an effort to camouflage the conspiracy by making it appear that they were remaining competitive. Supposedly this collusion of the top end of the graphics market has been going on for years.

Is it true? Well, that’s for the courts to decide. Not that courts are always 100% accurate in their decisions, but generally I’d like to at least presume innocence until guilt is proven. Still, the pair of GPU gods have not exactly been forthcoming. For example, a not entirely condemning (but neither entirely innocent) email between nVIDIA senior VP of Marketing (Dan Vivoli) and ATi CEO (Dave Orton) that read, “I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect,” was fought tooth and nail to be delivered to the courts. ATi and nVIDIA both fought to keep the email secret under the guise of it being “trade secrets”. A funny defense considering there were no trade secrets in the email.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup failed to find the humor there too, as he charged, “This court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of your companies. I am against you hiding information from the public. If we get to summary judgment in this case, nothing will be under seal.” Which was especially interesting as after having read the fought-over email, he stated, “This is not a bad document for you. It is not a home run but it is a base hit.”

So the courtroom antics flied.

For a more detailed breakdown of the lawsuit, including some pricing and release schedule charts, take a gander over here.

Personally, I’ve been wondering about this one myself for years. It used to be that each new GPU launch would take the top-price tier and push everything down into the affordable range. And sometimes they’d release new products at the same time. Then one magical day suddenly all new GPUs just cost even more than the last. And just as strangely, every release was perfectly staggered. It was like they had suddenly stopped all real competition and just agreed to milk consumers for all that they could. A coincidence? Possible, but unlikely. A direct collusion to squeeze the market? Possible, but also unlikely.

Most likely just a simultaneous independent bright idea from each side that so long as the other side wasn’t undercutting them, they’d run with high prices all they could. That sort of unspoken plotting that two competitors who know each other so well can read into each other’s motives and run with, and continue so long as the other side continues to not screw it up. Which is not exactly illegal, but not precisely nice to consumers.

Still, ultimately, the courts will decide. As of yet there is no official decision. And there may not be one, if Judge Alsup decides the case has no merit. Time will tell. But one thing will probably be for certain, and that is that ATi and nVIDIA are likely to pretend to compete again, at least until the lawsuit goes away. So let’s hope those better and better prices come back to us again, at least for a while.