With only one day to spare before the start of the infamous Intel Developer Forum, AMD announced plans for another processor design. With this latest chip, AMD is hoping to make up for its recent loss of market share to its arch rival, Intel. What makes this new chip proposal interesting is the fact that these new chips will only have three processing cores. That’s right: tri-core CPU’s. Intended to be part of the upcoming Phenom lineup, AMD says that it hopes to market its newest creation towards budget minded multi-taskers, and that it will be available in the first quarter of 2008.

Making processors is a tricky business. When you’re building chips where certain parts are on the order of only a 100 atoms across, you’re bound to have failures. Usually when things go haywire in the manufacturing process, the manufacturer is forced to discard the product and start over. Unfortunately, each time you’re forced into this position, you’re wasting time, energy, and, most importantly, money. Especially for a company that’s in such dire straits as AMD, any loss of money in the manufacturing process is unacceptable.

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If you’re keen on tracking all activity on your site and you’d like to have access to those statistics locally, then FireStats might be just what you’ve been looking for. I’ve used the tool for a little over a year now, and I’ve been impressed with it right from the beginning when it was still in beta.

Most of the credit for this awesome little tool goes to Omry Yadan, who has done an outstanding job of maintaining the project. Omry pushes out regular updates, and also does an excellent job of documenting all changes and fixes. The latest stable version of FireStats is 1.3.6, and development is still going strong.More…

Written entirely in PHP, and with plenty of Ajax support wherever possible, FireStats provides all the essentials and a bit more. There are plenty of tracking tools on the Net, but many, like Google Analytics (which I also use) don’t afford the user any privacy protection. Since FireStats resides locally on a users server, you can be assured that no unwanted information will be send to any third party – not that I don’t trust Google, but it’s nice to have complete control over all of your data.

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Just the other day, I reported that HD VMD was looking good to be the third candidate in the race for supreme leader in the HD format wars.Apparently three wasn’t enough, and so now there’s a fourth contender: the Chinese-made CH-DVD. Slated for an unspecified release in 2008, the new format isn’t looking all that impressive. It’s pretty much what’d you’d expect to see from China, an HD DVD knock-off.

According to Ars Technica, this isn’t the first time that China has tried to steal – uhm, I mean “create” – a standard for technology that’s already in wide use around the world. Back in late 2003, China tried to introduce the Enhanced Versatile Disc (or simply EVD) with the intention of stealing some of the DVD’s popularity. China’s efforts to “innovate” have also extended into the world of 802.11 Wi-Fi encryption; in late 2003, the Chinese tried to impose their WAPI standard on the international community by forcing companies who wanted access to the Chinese market to partner with one of eleven Chinese firms that licensed the standard. Needless to say, this effort, along with countless others, like an XML alternative, failed as well.

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While the two heavy weights slug it out in a high-priced battle of consumer favoritism, why not just have the little guy sneak up from behind and deliver the necessary coup de grace? While your competitors are slowly but surely lowering their prices to the magic number, why not just come in and start there directly?

That’s exactly what London based New Medium Enterprises was thinking when they announced plans to use traditional red-laser optics technology to deliver high definition content to consumers. The new format, dubbed HD VMD (which stands for “High Definition Versatile Media Disc”), was first demoed early last year, but only managed to generate a little hype. Even though the concept was played down by the bigger names and their high-profile, over-priced formats, New Medium Enterprises stuck with its guns and continued development.

The technology behind HD VMD is ingeniously simple. Instead of trying to impress the industry with fancy new names and brand new laser technologies which require the complete retooling of entire production lines, New Medium Enterprises decided to take existing DVD technology, beef it up a little, and combine it with the leading edge in compression technology.

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Ever since Intel introduced their Core 2 Duo processors last year, it’s been nothing but hell for AMD. In order to stay competitive with their rapidly aging architecture, AMD was forced to drastically cut prices in order to present the customer with a better value than Intel. Knowing that they’d forced AMD into a corner, Intel made them sweat even more by cutting their own prices. Consumers couldn’t have been happier; the two market leaders were waging an all out price war, and they were reaping all the benefits. The situation was looking quite bleak for AMD, who still didn’t have a 65nm chip out while Intel was already announcing possible release dates for its new 45nm lineup.

After numerous complications and delays, AMD has finally shipped the industry’s “first native X86 quad-core mircoprocessor” lineup. As is traditionally the case, this first lineup of quad-core chips has been designed for server applications; expect to see the desktop oriented lineup, codenamed “Phenom,” as early as December, 2007.

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