Earlier this year, Intel was forced to pay a $1.45 billion fine by the EU, and last month they had to pay AMD a $1.25 billion settlement for anti-competitive practices. This new suit is for basically the same things.

The E.U.'s charges included paying computer makers to use Intel chips instead of AMD ones, and even threatening some companies if they went ahead and used AMD CPUs. The FTC notes that the public has been denied access to "potentially superior" chips as a result of the same bad practices. And it highlights what seems to be a particularly nasty one: Intel apparently designed compiler code so that it "deliberately stunted" the performance of the code when run on non-Intel CPUs, and then told the public the code simply worked better on Intel-made chips.

Ugly stuff. The first hearing is scheduled for September 8, 2010, so this is going to be a long and drawn out process. [FTC via FastCompany]

And you have to figure that's pretty far behind, since the Larrabee launch timeframe was 2009/2010. The only way you'll be able to touch Larrabee now is as a development platform for graphics engines or high-performance computing, in order to develop for future Intel products.

Intel says they're going to announce new plans for discrete cards some time in 2010—mayyybe CES, where we talked to former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett about Larrabee last year? But, more likely at the Intel Developer Forum later in the year. [Intel]

MaximumPC put the 5970 to the test (check out their review here), and found that it lives up to its promise. The 2GB dual-GPU card is the first to support DirectX 11, and basically doubles its wholly respectable predecessor (the 5870) in specs, capable of delivering nearly 5 teraflops of raw processing power. It's a massive card, about a foot long, designed mostly for heat dissipation, at which aim it apparently succeeds. It's also got easy access to overclocking via AMD's OverDrive, and can drive up to three displays simultaneously with a maximum resolution of 7680x1600. So it's pretty much the greatest thing ever, and it's got a pricetag to match: $600 upon its undisclosed release. Yow. [MaximumPC]

Bobcat's a low power chip at Atom, like for netbooks, that can run using less than 1W of power. It'll be manufactured using a 32nm process. It's not hitting until 2011 though, and as Ars' Jon Stokes points out, by then Intel will have been at 32nm with Atom for a while, and already close to going to 22nm.

Bulldozer is AMD's new server architecture, also, slated for 2011 which uses a new design with two "tightly linked cores" as the heart. You can read about it in way more detail over at Ars, though for now, Stokes says it's still hard to tell how competitive they're going to be with Intel's 2011 lineup. Guess we'll see. [Ars, Image via Michele Eve/Flickr]

Here's how Intel describes the settlement:

Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices today announced a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes.

So, they're not fighting directly anymore, and the mountains of patent and antitrust disputes are resolved: Intel will pay this ridiculously large sum of money to AMD, and agree to not engage in anything even resembling monopolistic behavior, and both companies will live in harmony, cross-licensing technologies and competing, but softly! Great. Well, sort of: Intel's biggest problems right now don't come from other companies, but from governments: complaints from AMD no doubt helped spur investigations by the European Commission and New York Attorney General into Intel's business practices, and as part of the agreement AMD is withdrawing their complaints with both agencies, but the EC issued their $1bn+ fine quite a while ago, and from the looks of it, the AG's office is eager to move forward with their investigation too. In other words, this probably isn't the end of the pain for Intel.

That, kids, is why you don't engage in anticompetetive practices in a two-company industry. [WSJ Law Blog]

Insane Graphics Card Packs 2GB Memory and Six (Yes, Six) DisplayPort Ports

Rumor has it that AMD is set to announce a new, and 100% ridiculous, flagship card: The Radeon HD 5870. The 5870, if the rumors are correct, will have 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a whopping six DisplayPort ports, not to mention dual DVI ports and an HDMI. Clock speed and GPU speed are relatively normal at 4800MHz and 850MHz, respectively. It'll require two PCI-E slots, which is reasonable considering the spec excess. It ends up here in Remainders because the only source we've seen is a post on Softpedia, and while it's certainly crazy, we're not sure how big the market is for a six-port graphics card. [Softpedia via Tom's Hardware via Crunchgear]

Volcano Prevention Efforts May Result in Volcano Eruption

Geologists working in Campi Flegrei, a caldera in Naples, Italy, are concerned about the volcano's possibility of eruption, so understandably they're doing a little drilling to figure out exactly what the risk is. Unfortunately, the seven 4-km holes they have to drill could have exactly the opposite effect from preventing an eruption—there's a distinct risk that the drilling itself could trigger an eruption, which could well wipe out the entirety of urban Naples. If they hit magma, the sudden rise in temperature would vaporize their drilling liquid, causing an explosion which could in turn trigger an eruption. It's a sexy and dangerous headline, but it winds up in Remainders because, well, the risk doesn't seem all that great: 4km wouldn't even be halfway deep enough to reach any known reservoirs of magma, so it's probably a moot point. [New Scientist via Pop Sci]

Makeshift Bike Rack Attaches to Street Signs

The CycleHook is a dual-looped piece of metal that locks securely onto pretty much any signpost, creating two sweet parking spots for bicyclists. It's a pretty good idea—I'm a cyclist, and I can confirm that most cities don't provide enough spots to lock up a bike, and sometimes traffic cops get snippy when you chain up to a signpost on the sidewalk. The problem with the CycleHook is that it's not new. Montreal, for one, has had this exact design attached to parking meters for years, and I'm sure it's not the only city to have the same thought. On the other hand, Montreal's parking spots aren't pretty pink. [Wired]

PC Built Inside a Classy-as-Hell Leather and Wood Chest

We love PC case hacks. Anything you can shove a PC into, please do it, and send us pictures. There are several inviting spaces that haven't yet been used—and this here is one of them. Rob Higardea crammed a PC into this beautiful, vintage wood and leather chest. Yeah, it's got wires hanging out the back, but from the front? Pure class. I'd love one of my own, except that much class would probably stick out in my apartment more than a slab of anonymous grey plastic. [UnPluggd]

From the looks of it, this case will mirror the European Commission's case almost exactly:

"Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market," Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. "Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices."

The AG even echoes some of the same cases used in the EC's investigation, like the time Intel allegedly paid $130 million to keep IBM from selling AMD-based servers, which IBM execs considered as much a business deal as a way to avoid incurring the "wrath of Intel." I too avoid the wrath of Intel, by using AMD chips. Bam! Also: no. But still, dick move!

Cuomo is working with the same body of evidence that the European Commission was, and probably quite a bit more—the FTC's been breathing down their necks for over a year now—so I'd expect this to get pretty uncomfortable for Intel. And by uncomfortable, of course, I mean very, very expensive. [NYT]

AMD said they expect less of an increase in Q4 revenues due to "the big build we've seen of PCs in anticipation of the Win 7 launch." Read: most PC makers aren't going to be ordering too many components from AMD for a little while. Apparently that comment has led investors to think this is an industry-wide phenomenon, that PC makers have all the inventory they need and more.

Without knowing how widespread the effect is, let's assume there are a ton of PCs out there. In that case, what will likely happen is the manufacturers will just sit on their inventory longer, and component suppliers will receive fewer orders. Hopefully, though, they'll feel the need to turn around that inventory quickly, which would mean some awesome deals could be on the horizon. [All Things Digital]

Image via Jfaneves

The two new cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, are the first video cards in the industry to fully support DirectX 11. Beyond that tidbit, they're capable of producing 2.72 TeraFLOPS of computing power and are equipped with 1GB GDDR5 memory.

And yes, each is capable of driving six 30-inch monitors at once—what AMD refers to as "Eyefinity" technology.

Sadly, there's still no word specific on pricing or availability, but these obviously aren't bargain basement cards. [BusinessWire]

The processor will be a version of AMD's six-core server processors, and will place all six cores on one 45nm die. AMD warned that clock speeds will probably not be quite as high as current quad-core processors (MaximumPC suggests this may be due to "added thermal output from the two additional cores"), and will have 3MB of L2 and 6MB of L3 cache. It'll be competing with Intel's "Gulftown" (probably Core i9)when it debuts next year. But the best news here is the backward-compatibility—unlike Intel, you won't have to replace your motherboard if you want to upgrade to the "Thuban" procs. We hope Intel follows suit, and we'll let you know how they respond later this week from IDF. [MaximumPC via Engadget]

Specifics on the technology are being kept close to the vest, but a recent demonstration revealed, amazingly, that it runs on only one GPU. it also features several DisplayPort connectors—In this case, six 30-inch Dell displays were configured to run as a single 7680x4800 monitor.

Eyefinity is enabled through a combination of hardware and software being developed by AMD. On the hardware front, AMD's upcoming Radeons will sport between 3 and 6 display outputs of various types, DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, etc. And those outputs will be managed by software currently dubbed SLS, or Single Large Surface. Using the SLS tool, users are able to configure a group of monitors to work with Eyefinity and essentially act as a single, large display.

Maximum PC witnessed XPlane 9 and Far Cry 2 running at full resolution on Eyefinity at 12-20 frames per second. HotHardware notes that an upcoming DX11 racing game, Dirt 2, was played at 7680 x 3200 with "perfectly acceptable frame rates" (although 12 fps is not what many would consider "acceptable"). They also claim that there are plans to integrate CrossFire support down the line and that AMD has partnered with manufacturers to create ultra-thin bezel displays specifically designed for use with Eyefinity. How long we will have to wait and how insanely expensive all this will be has yet to be determined. [Hot Hardware and Maximum PC]

AMD decided about a year ago it wasn't doing netbooks (since it already lost) and was going to focus on cheap-and-light notebooks with 12 to 13 inch displays (the HP Pavillion dv2 was one example). Sound familiar? It's just what Intel is doing now with its ULV (ultra low-voltage) chips.

The next generation of these chips (called Congo and which includes the 1.6GHz Turion X2 Neo processor, even though AMD doesn't want us to say processor names anymore) supposedly boosts graphics (1080p video!) and battery life—an extra hour over AMD's last-gen Ultrathin Notebook chips. (Which we'll be believe when we see, since this is really where Intel's Atom and ULV chips have spanked AMD's. Not to mention, Intel's new ULV chips promise almost 6 hours without bulky extended batteries.)

Not surprisingly, AMD's boasting on performance, with up to 77 percent better gaming performance than Intel's set. They even have a nice chart on how confident they are that they can wreck Intel ULV:

I won't be surprised to see key notebook manufacturers using both Intel and AMD platforms in the same product lines, but for now, AMD says both Acer and ASUS will start shipping notebooks with the new chips and 20 more models will have them come Windows 7 timeframe—so like, October. [AMD]

No more shiny AMD Turion or Athlon stickers. The company is done telling consumers what exact processor is inside the computer and instead it will use its new Vision platform to explain what you can do with the computer.

Vision breaks systems into three tiers—Vision, Vision Premium and Vision Ultimate. The basic Vision is for simple tasks (that of your netbook, ultrathin notebook or basic mainstream system). The Premium is one step up the computing ladder and has Direct X 10.1 and HD support amongst other things. On the top is Ultimate which can work video encoding and HD video editing. Now my first question was how the hell is Joe Schmo supposed to know the difference between these levels on a system any better than they know a processor name?

AMD's answer is to couple these Vision levels with other explainers or icons that tell you what the system can actually do with digital content — see, share, create. Seems simple enough—which means more stickers on the palmrest.

You tell me, are you happy to wave goodbye to the processor stickers or do you think this AMD's Vision will just complicate things even more? [AMD]

AMD, as part of a some kind of PR campaign, is saying the culprit is a battery testing suite called MobileMark 2007:

the parameters for this test include having the screen at just 20 percent brightness, Wi-Fi turned off and no music, video, games or Web pages running. More or less, the test turns a computer into a dimly lit clock, then sees how long it can run.

That is exactly the kind of test you'd have to run to hit manufacturers' 50-100%-inflated figures, and the perceived ubiquity of the test gives it an air of authority—or at least respectability—within the industry. Using anything more honest would put a manufacturer at a competitive disadvantage.

This is where the story lapses into accusations of subterfuge: AMD says these tests don't just benefit laptop manufacturers in general—they're unfairly biased towards Intel, whose chips are optimized for these less-than-realistic scenarios. It's easy to see how this would be upsetting, but it's not clear what AMD can really do. They're proposing a system by which manufacturers show two battery ratings—one the shows a theoretical, low-use maximum, and one that reflects heavy use. (To their credit, Sony already does something like that). Intel tacitly admits the practice, but is predictably standoffish about it, while AMD doesn't inspire much confidence:

By 2010 or 2011, something might show up from a consortium that could be used. It takes two to three years."

Well, thanks for trying, I guess! [NYT]

Engadget says details are scant, but mention that AMD says that new DX11 features, such as the Compute Shader, will help improve Windows 7 performance, among other things. They expect their DirectX 11 products to be available in late 2009. [AMD via Engadget]