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Lawrence Person writes: "Acoording to this story on Semiconductor Business News, International Trade Comission Judge Administrative Law Judge Sidney Harris reprimanded Rambus for "blatant judge shopping" in response to Rambus withdrawing its suit against Hyundai after Harris, known as a tough judge, was assigned to the case. Harris also ruled "that if Rambus in the future ever filed a new synchronous patent infringement case against Hyundai, or even any other firm, such a petition must be assigned to his court if he is able to hear it.""

SteveM wrote citing an Semiconductor Business News article which begins: "SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Here's a surprise. Benchmark test results from Intel Corp. show its new 815E chip set with PC133 SDRAMs beating the performance of its 820 chip set with Direct Rambus memories. Moreover, Intel has posted those unexpected test results on its Web site, not intending to show PC133 SDRAMs beating the Direct Rambus memory format, which is favored by the Santa Clara chip giant." The results actually show some fairly unspectacular differences, but those differences lean overwhelmingly in favor of the SDRAM. Surely someone will come up with a benchmark that always makes RDRAM look better.

SteveM wrote citing an Semiconductor Business News article which begins: "SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Here's a surprise. Benchmark test results from Intel Corp. show its new 815E chip set with PC133 SDRAMs beating the performance of its 820 chip set with Direct Rambus memories. Moreover, Intel has posted those unexpected test results on its Web site, not intending to show PC133 SDRAMs beating the Direct Rambus memory format, which is favored by the Santa Clara chip giant." The results actually show some fairly unspectacular differences, but those differences lean overwhelmingly in favor of the SDRAM. Surely someone will come up with a benchmark that always makes RDRAM look better.

macsen writes " Yet another company gives into Chipzilla's memory mongers, and it doesn't bode well. Hitachi appears to be going for an upfront settlement, and an agreement to drop litigation between the company and Rambus. Two companies in less than a week, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics begins to take hold. See what Tom's Hardware has to say." Check out a more informational original link. This is most ungood - see the first folding, as done by Toshiba last week.

Tekmage writes "How long until someone equips Sony's Aibo to sniff out contamination at the old chemical plant? Cyrano Sciences describes a little of the technology behind their 'Nose Chip' here, and includes some neat examples."

Tekmage writes "HP has announced the release of it's HP2100 bioanalyzer. It makes use of a little chip by Caliper Technologies. Yet another tool for the genetic engineers among us; Caliper describe various aspects of the tech here. "

ST Microelectronics released the first x86 system-on-a-chip today. It's an enhanced 486 integrated with the equivalent of 5 other chips, allowing manufacturers to build complete systems for less that $100, and a 486 is probably sufficient for the types of IA applications ( XC's) Acer's chaiman was talking about.

5 hours ago, Rise revealed details of its new mP6 x86 core: it is 3 way superscalar, is pipelined and has a 3 way superscalar MMX unit. According to this EETimes article sent to us byChris Howard the processor is specifically targeted at multimedia applications, while boasting low power consumption Ed: It would be interesting to know how much of a performance boost the 3rd way gives them: for normal C code the V pipe of the pentium is used around 30% of the time. A third pipe would be used even less. 3-way superscalar MMX makes more sense however as only a few critical routines need to be changed. If a large OEM like Compaq were to ship a DVD-player on each of its boxes, it could expect the DVD software to be tailored for the chips it uses. update: The mP6's measured speed is around 1.15 times the speed of a Pentium II on Windows Apps. However their use of a 6-stage pipeline may reduce their ability to reach high MHz.