Last week there was an announcement by Global Foundries that they were licensing Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process for their own use. This immediately started the internet going with talk about how AMD would be using this new process despite there not being any indication that AMD was ready for 14nm for APUs, CPUs, or GPUs for that matter. Now, in true internet fashion the rumor mill has shifted from AMD to NVIDIA. The claim is that NVIDIA will soon utilize Samsung’s 14nm FinFET tech too.

There is an old saying in business that you have to spend money to make money. The meaning is sort of plain, but we will give you a clear example of what it means. In the tech world, if you are not spending money to improve your products or to build the next generation then you are pretty much going to have a very short life. This is not to say you have to dump huge mounds of cash into research and development, but you do have to spend some on the right things. This means that you can tell a lot about a company’s focus and future outlook by simply looking at their R&D spending.

XFX's debut case comes under a name XFX Type 1 Bravo, has dimensions of 518x232x562 mm and a weight of 10.4 kg. The casing is made in modern minimalist design, and materials like steel, aluminum and ABS plastic are used in its creation. It supports mounting of the motherboard in the full ATX format and XFX marked it as Water Cool Ready.

Former CEO of Motorola Mobility, Sanjay Jha, under whose leadership the company was sold to Google, will assume leadership of GlobalFoundries. Sanjay Jha was the chief executive officer of Qualcomm, and from the chief position at Motorola Mobility stepped won in 2012.

As more and more quarterly reports pour in, AMD decided to join with their own, which is not as fantastic as some other have, but it's better than what we have expected from AMD, the eternal loser. Thus, the total loss of the first quarter of this year is $143 million, which is better than the loss in the final quarter of last year ($473 million) and in the same quarter last year, when they amounted to even $590 million.

Manufacturers of hardware components are not expecting a significant recovery of the PC market over the next year. Asus and Gigabyte, both leading manufacturer of motherboards, have said that in 2013 they expect an equal or slightly lower number of deliveries of motherboards than was the case this year.

After the success of their consumer level APUs it looks like AMD wants to try and bring some of that to the professional world. Yes, they are going to be making something like Trinity for the workstation market. AMD is going to attempt to drop a CPU (or four) inside their FirePro GPUs to see if it sticks.  The move is almost the opposite of what you see with the APUs. In the Llano and Trinity you have a small number of GPU cores that are added into the CPU die in order to provide graphical output. These cores are very efficient and were pulled from AMD’s successful Radeon line of GPUs. In the new FirePro Processors they will maintain the full GPU (just like in a discrete card), but add in CPU cores to create a more functional whole.

When Lynnfield launched with its built in PCIe controller the motherboard makers of the world collectively groaned. They began to wonder how in the world they were going to run everything they want to put onto their motherboards with the limited number of PCIe lanes that were provided. The answer to this solution was simple, use a bridge chip… the problem was that there were not many that were up to the job. One of these companies that quickly became synonymous with high-performance motherboards was PLX. We first saw these on Asus motherboards (the P55 motherboards) and the system simply worked. Since then many more motherboard makers have adopted them and come to reply on PLX to keep things moving.

In a surprising move XFX is now stating that they do not provide ANY direct warranty to the consumer. According to their warranty information page  they state “XFX does not sell its Product directly to the consumer therefore the warranty for XFX Products remains the responsibility of your reseller where you purchased the Product”. I am not sure about you, but this sounds like they are dodging responsibility…

CES 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada – One of our late night CES appointments was to the MSI suite. Although we have worked with MSI a lot in the past in the last few months they have undergone some internal restructuring. This has been kept off of the net for the most part, but in the end will be a very good thing for MSI. We expect to hear a lot more from them in the coming months.