News summary

Texas MP3 Technologies bought a patent and the next day (2/15/07) filed a lawsuit against the major MP3 manufacturers - Apple, Samsung and SanDisk . The Register reports:

Chief executive Ron Edgerton explained the company's rationale last July. "We made this decision because this patent may require millions of dollars of legal fees to optimize its value, and otherwise would have required a significant amount of SigmaTel's management attention," he said. "SigmaTel's customers, however, will not have to worry about this patent being enforced against them, as SigmaTel has retained the necessary rights to protect its customers."

Not so new news department, IBM plans on having Roadrunner up and running for the US Department of Energy early 2008. Roadrunner will bounce along at 1 petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. DailyTech reports:

Roadrunner will use a conventional cluster of 16,000 AMD Opteron processor cores alongside 16,000 Cell B.E. chips, with both chips working together to handle a share of the calculating work.

The chip world is changing, so says Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, speaking at the Globalpress Summit (2/26/07). From EDN:

With process differentiation rules out of the equation, companies will have to rely on design differentiation, according to Rhines. This means expertise at four levels: system architecture innovation; proprietary IP blocks; implementation efficiencies and higher yields.

More:

On the intellectual property (IP) side, the independent IP industry is now growing at 20 percent a year. Rhines said it was worth about $2 billion this year and he expects it to double by 2010.

HT Pinehurt Joe.