Scott M. Fulton, III

When the US Dept. of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's office on August 31 issued their joint status report, along with Microsoft, on the progress of its antitrust oversight, they acknowledged that period is due to expire this November. But in a statement, the DOJ said it would petition to extend its oversight period for another two years until late 2009, at least with regard to its protocol licensing operation if not the entire company. Microsoft agreed to that extension, the statement added.

Now, in a petition before US District Judge Kathleen Kollar-Kotelly, the State of California, along with five other states and the District of Columbia, said they would ask US District Judge Kollar-Kotelly to extend all the provisions of government oversight to 2012, in a status meeting scheduled for today.

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The first official benchmark test results for Intel's Tigerton series and AMD's Barcelona series were released by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. From a pure prowess perspective, neither the new quad-core Xeon MPs nor the new quad-core Opterons walk away with an all-around victory, with Intel's X7350 stealing the show in integer throughput, and AMD's 8350 winning the race in floating-point throughput.

Intel tested a Lenovo R630 G7 system with four of each of its new quad-cores dropped in at some point, including its new top-of-the-line 2.93 GHz Xeon MP X7350. Though it has yet to publish results for all Tigertons across the board in the SPECfp_rate 2006 floating-point throughput test, a quartet of X7350s scored about 29% better in base rate and nearly 34% better in peak rate than four of AMD's top-of-the-line Opteron 8350s in the SPECint_rate 2006 integer throughput test.

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News is only now leaking out that the three-layer, single sided format for HD DVD engineered by Toshiba was given the green light by the DVD Forum, official backer of HD DVD, on August 31. Though no statements were released by either party (the DVD Forum rarely makes public pronouncements), journalists including DVDTown's Henning Molbaek - who originally broke the news of 51 GB last January - had at least enough information yesterday to declare the format ready for production.

BetaNews has asked Toshiba for comment and verification on this matter, though we have not yet heard back.

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After a few years of flirting with the idea of developing its own suite of applications, perhaps under the Lotus banner, that support the OASIS OpenDocument format, IBM has decided to join Sun Microsystems in the development of OpenOffice.org, the principal open source ODF applications suite.

In announcing its move today, IBM acknowledged that it had been developing some ODF components for use with Lotus Notes, but will now roll them into its contributions to the open source community. Sun currently produces the commercial ODF-supporting suite StarOffice; and since late 2005, when Sun and IBM openly courted development groups to meet at IBM's Armonk headquarters to plan the future of ODF together, observers speculated IBM could be working on an "Office killer" to go up against Microsoft.

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With today being AMD's turn at the center stage spotlight, Intel is doing its best to keep its brand presence and its recent performance gains - both in terms of hardware and finances - in the public mind. For once, a company that may have spent more of its history restructuring than being well-structured may be finally experiencing some payback time, as Intel announced this morning it is dramatically upgrading its third quarter revenue forecast.

During its last fully completed fiscal quarter, Intel's revenue was already up 8% over the same quarter in the prior year, with $8.7 billion. In late July, it forecast revenue for this quarter (which ends at the close of September) at between $9.0 and $9.6 billion.

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The latest batch of 8300 series and 2300 series Quad-Core Opteron processors, formally announced by AMD today, will feature hardware-based library support for software to be able to run virtualized environments.

The AMD-V virtualization layer, as the company will call it, will provide virtual machine environments from VMware, Microsoft, Xen, and others with direct channels to memory and system resources, enabling them to bypass operating system drivers and go straight to the source. The result is something almost, but not entirely, quite unlike virtualization as we have come to know it before. Typically, a virtual machine establishes an intentional layer of indirection between a guest environment and system hardware. Now, these systems will have the option of addressing memory directly, rather than indirectly.

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Throughout the past five years, AMD has stated Intel has been unfair in the way it measures its CPUs' power consumption, and presents those numbers to the public. But it hasn't come up with an alternative method...until today. Beginning with the Barcelona generation of quad-core CPUs, AMD will utilize what it calls average CPU power (ACP), which unlike Thermal Design Point (TDP) is not based on how much power is required to cool a chip, but rather to run it.

"One of the biggest problems that our customers have come to us with is, 'I want more performance but I'm really tapped out. I'm at the limit for the amount of power I can pull into the data center,"' relates John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide marketing development manager for server and workstation products, in an interview with BetaNews. "They may have empty space left in their racks, but their facilities guys have told them, 'No more. You aren't getting any more power we can't provide any more.' So in order to put in new, more powerful servers, they have to find somewhere else in the data center they can go find something to unplug in order to make room for it. And we don't think you should have to do that."

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It will be the first commercially available x86 processor to provide four cores on a single die - to manage four logic units with a single, internal controller. By all rights, AMD's quad-core Opteron, officially announced today for availability this month, should be a milestone in CPU architecture. But Intel has had plenty of time - in fact, several months more than the market had originally anticipated - to implement performance tweaks and power gains that could perhaps compensate for the significant boosts that customers are expecting from quad-core Opteron.

AMD's gamble is that everything Intel has done to this point to make up ground won't be enough. "To us, it's more important to bring new functionality and new levels of performance in the same platform, than it is to rev the platform every six months," said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide market development manager, in an interview with BetaNews.

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What just last year generated legislative deadlock for a deeply divided Congress, has this year sailed through the House of Representatives after just a few hours of modest debate: H.R. 1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007, has passed the House with at least some measure of bipartisan support.

The Senate will be debating essentially identical language in S. 1145, which was reported favorably to the floor there last July. There, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) will be leading the charge. Republican Orrin Hatch (Utah) has already signed on as a co-sponsor.

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If ever there were a time for either Blu-ray or HD DVD manufacturers to play a trump card, now may be the time, and this could be the one: A consortium of Chinese university engineers and government officials, in cooperation with a Chinese video standards group that includes globally recognized manufacturers, plus the DVD Forum, have come to an agreement on a standard specification for a blue-laser disc mechanism and format specifically for the Chinese market.

The new group will be called the China High Definition DVD Industry Association, or just CHDA, and this is not the last you will hear of it.

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For more: Patent Reform Passes US House 225 - 175, Senate May Follow

As debate on patent reform began this morning on the floor of the US House of Representatives, twelve amendments made their way through the Rules Committee, all of which appear to be designed to tweak the bill's language rather than insert any "poison pills" that would ensure its failure. The only significant opposition appears to have come yesterday from President Bush, whose office came out yesterday condemning H.R. 1908's key provision limiting damage awards in infringement suits.

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We've been using the term "resurgent" in conjunction with Acer so often that you'd begin to think it was a brand name for a new PC model. But in the quarter just ended the surge failed, so to speak, as hardware analysis firm iSuppli reports unit shipments for Acer fell by 10,000 for the first time in several quarters.

For the second quarter of 2007, the "resurgent" tag belongs elsewhere: first to Lenovo, which responded to Acer's first quarter challenge with flying colors. Shipping 22.9% more units in the second quarter than it did in the first, Lenovo pumped out about 4.87 million PCs. In so doing, it bumped Acer in iSuppli's global Top 5 OEM list back down to #4, and took back 1.5% of market share.

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In a filing before the US Federal Communications Commission this morning, the Dept. of Justice's Antitrust Division argued that proponents of "net neutrality" would stifle the natural course of free market innovation in Internet technologies, in the name of leveling the playing field for competitors. Creating different tiers of Internet service, Assistant Attorney General Thomas O. Barnett's team argued, is really no different than the Postal Service charging different rates for shipping varying classes of mail.

"Much of the conduct that some proponents of 'net neutrality' regulation are concerned about can be precompetitive," the ATR team wrote. "Differentiating service levels and pricing, for example, is a common and often efficient way of allocating scarce resources and meeting consumer preferences. The United States Postal Service, for example, allows consumers to send packages with a variety of different delivery guarantees and speeds, from bulk mail to overnight delivery. These differentiated products respond to market demand and expand consumer choice. No one challenges the benefits to society of these differentiated products; nor does anyone seriously propose that the United States Postal Service be banned from charging different fees for next-day delivery than for bulk mailers. Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not regulatory intervention."

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In what could become a precedent setting finding, a three-judge panel of the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned a lower court's dismissal of antitrust complaints raised by Broadcom against Qualcomm. At the heart of the debate is whether the exclusivity rights granted to a patentee corporation should enable it to obtain a legal monopoly over markets the patented technology may create. US District Court in New Jersey said it should, when dismissing Broadcom's claims in August 2006. But the appeals court soundly rejected that basis, and reinstated the case.

"In dismissing Broadcom's claim of monopolization in the WCDMA technology markets," wrote Judge Maryann Trump Barry in her formal opinion Tuesday, "the [N.J. District] Court reasoned that Qualcomm enjoyed a legally-sanctioned monopoly in its patented technology, and that this monopoly conferred the right to exclude competition and set the terms by which that technology was distributed."

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A story run over the UK wires of Reuters this morning quotes a European Commission spokesperson as confirming that everyday customers of Google - presumably typical working-class folks - have been sent EC questionnaires asking their opinion about the forthcoming merger between Google and display advertising provider DoubleClick.

The two companies have stated they intend to make their initial filings of merger information with EU antitrust regulators later this month. While questionnaires from the EC are not uncommon in everyday merger investigations, there are two unusual elements here.

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