On October 26 Intel announced that it had begun offering a new firmware for their second-gen X25-M SSDs. The new firmware offered support for the SATA TRIM command, a feature in Windows 7 and Linux which helps SSDs maintain consistent performance over the long haul. Less than 24 hours later, however, and Intel pulled the firmware in response to a flood of reports claiming the upgrade process was responsible for bricked drives. Fast forward to today, and Intel has announced that it has replicated the issue and is working on a fix.

“Intel has replicated the issue on 34nm SSDs – X25-M – and is working on a fix,” said Alan Frost of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group.

“Intel is pursuing the resolution of this as a high priority. Intel is seeking direct feedback on this issue from members of the [Intel Support Community]… asking them to send their drives directly to Intel to expedite the analysis of the issues. This action will enable us to more quickly generate a resolution for this issue.”

Frost went on to imply that the firmware–version 02HA–was not to blame, but rather the v1.3 flashing tool.

It’s a well-known fact that Intel and NVIDIA are not the best of friends. Between icing their chipset biz and going to war in courts, Intel has spent the last two years showing NV the powder. Rather than take it lying down, ol’ green has fired back with a satire blog, of all things.

The blog has actually been up since late September; it claims to be a “a parody of events occurring within the semiconductor sector, with particular focus on its largest, and most-commented-upon competitor.” While most people would immediately think chief rival AMD, NVIDIA’s blind rage puts Intel on that podium instead.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, we couldn’t help but try our hand at it too.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo yesterday filed an antitrust suit (PDF) against Intel in the US District Court for the District of Delaware.

The suit alleges that Intel Corporation willingly compelled or participated in several market actions design to block or impede market actions from rival firm AMD.

“Intel has engaged in a systematic worldwide campaign of illegal, exclusionary conduct to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for x86 microprocessors, the ‘brains’ of Personal Computers (’PCs’),” the filing reads.

“By exacting exclusive or near-exclusive agreements from large computer makers (’Original Equipment Manufacturers’ or ‘OEMs’) in exchange for payments totaling billions of dollars, and threatening retaliation against any company that did not heed its wishes, Intel robbed its competitors of the opportunity to challenge Intel’s dominance in key segments of the market. This illegal behavior was highly detrimental to consumers, competition, and innovation.”

The Delaware filing is very similar to that of the European Commission’s which ruled against Intel in May with a penalty of €1.07 billion.

The ongoing EC case alleges that Intel leveraged its significant financial capabilities to persuade customers into delaying or aborting AMD-powered plans in favor of products with Intel chips. The charges include paying at least one retailer to stock only Intel parts, and offering several secret rebates to make Intel processors the only economical choice.

The New York suit has requested a trial by jury, and asks for compensatory damages on five claims both civil and criminal.

Despite earlier reports that Intel visited board vendors in China to discuss Larrabee, the firm’s PR claims that no such meetings took place.

Heading off inquiries from the press, Intel’s Nick Knupffer said via Twitter that Intel CEO Paul Otellini “did not talk LRB to AIB’s in China.”

Knupffer’s statements come in response to a Digitimes report that Otellini made rounds with Chinese board makers to promote the company’s upcoming Larrabee GPU. Digitimes further alleged that Intel was preparing to offer preferential pricing and bundling to allay fears that the GPU would not effectively compete against incumbent GPU firms AMD and NVIDIA.

Larrabee is Intel’s first foray into discrete, or standalone, GPUs in about ten years. The new design is said to use an array of x86-compatible execution engines which are harnessed to crunch data in parallel. Intel hopes to leverage this architecture to compete directly with AMD and NVIDIA in gaming, and later in other markets.

Intel maintains that Larrabee-based products are scheduled for early 2010, which means the February/March launch window. If that is the case, we find it dubious that Intel isn’t talking with board partners to produce rebranded parts.

PC World is reporting that Intel has expanded its shipment lead over AMD according to recent Q3 sales figures.

Intel improved its share in the third quarter to 81.5%, up from 81.2% at this time last year. AMD also improved its year-over-year share by 0.1% to 17.8%.

On the quarter, however, AMD fell 0.7%, while rival firm Intel picked up an additional 1% share over Q2.

The YOY gains for both AMD and Intel come at the expense of VIA Technologies which dipped from 1.1% to 0.7% over the past year.

Intel and Numonyx are today announcing a key breakthrough in the development of Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology.

The breakthrough has enabled the partnership to develop a 64Mb test chip that demonstrates multiple layers of PCM arrays on a single die. These findings will enable future PCM-based devices to offer lower power consumption, higher capacity and greater storage density.

The company is calling the breakthrough chip a PCMS, or Phase Change Memory and Switch. The PCMS interleaves layers of thin-film PCM arrays with controlling thin-film selectors called Ovonic Transfer Switches (OTS). The sandwiched PCM and OTS layers are arranged in a crosspoint architecture and fitted to a CMOS substrate to create high-density, high-bandwidth PCM cells.
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Engadget is reporting that there have been confirmed cases of Intel’s newest firmware update and toolbox rendering the X25-M SSD inoperable under Windows 7. Intel officially responded, saying

Yes, we have been contacted by users with issues with the firmware upgrade for our 34nm SSDs and we are investigating. We take all sightings and issues seriously and are working toward resolution. We have temporarily taken down the firmware link while we investigate.

No further word is available yet, nor is there any known resolution for consumers whose drives have been damaged by the update.

Following just behind the official launch of Windows 7, Intel has announced the immediate availability of firmware and a utility to give all Windows users access to the ATA TRIM command on the company’s lineup of X25-M G2 SSDs.

What is ATA TRIM?

An SSD’s total size is composed of thousands of smaller units called “blocks,” which average about 512k these days. SSDs deliberately try to spread written data across all of these blocks so as not to prematurely wear out the memory chips, which can only accept a limited number of writes. This technique is called wear leveling. Over time, wear leveling guarantees that every block on the SSD will become filled with a hodgepodge of active and deleted data. Once this happens, new writes force the drive to perform an intensive process called the read/erase/modify/write cycle.

An REMW cycle forces an SSD to scan its blocks for deleted files, copy active data to cache, purge the deleted files, append the new data to the data in cache, and then write the cache back to the new free space. This is called write amplification, and in serious cases, it can force an SSD to shuffle up to 20GB of data just to write 1GB of new information. This causes significant performance issues for SSDs.

The solution to this problem is to let SSDs physically erase files the moment they are deleted in the OS, and that is precisely what the TRIM command does. Windows 7 is the only Microsoft OS that supports it, and it must be used with a TRIM-compatible drive like the OCZ Vertex, G.SKILL Falcon and now the Intel X25-M G2.
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Having just paid a €1.06 billion fine to European regulators, Intel may now be facing action from the United States Federal Trade Commission.

Intel has told Reuters that it believes its business practices in the US to be legal and of benefit to its customers, however three out of four FTC commissioners currently favor pursuing action on a formal inquiry opened in 2008.

“They said it could be a matter of weeks or a matter of months when the vote happens,” one source said.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner Thomas Rosch and Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour currently favor pursuing legal action against Intel, according to sources.

Intel has already had to pay fines to regulators in South Korea, Japan, and Europe. A fine from the FTC would be another black mark on Intel’s anti-trust record.

Intel has quietly made a new addition to their LGA1366 lineup, the Core i7 960.

The new chip clocks in at 3.2GHz (3.33GHz with Turbo Boost), which puts it in the same league as a Turbo Boosted i7 860 (2.93-3.46GHz). The new chip replaces the 950’s position in the Core i7 lineup, and additionally makes way for the new 975 Extreme Edition CPU.

With a higher average frequency and an identical price of $562, the 950 also casts serious doubt on the value of the new Lynnfield-based Core i7 870.

Executives from Intel and IBM were amongst six individuals arrested today amidst allegations that they were involved in a hedge fund’s insider trading scam.

According to the report from the Associated Press, the arrested parties include IBM SVP and GM Bob Moffat, Intel Capital Director of Strategic Investments Rajiv Goel, as well as Raj Rajaratnam, partner in the $7 billion Galleon Investment Group.

The US SEC has alleged that Moffat, Goel, and four additional parties passed insider information on Google, Polycom and Hilton Hotels to Rajaratnam who turned a $20 million profit on the information over a six month period in 2007. Reuters reports that the trades also occurred at Intel Capital, and that the insider information was also used to trade IBM, Sun Micro and AMD stocks.

The SEC has filed civil charges related to the insider trading in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. However, it is not yet clear what criminal charges are being brought against Rajaratnam, as reports conflict on the number of securities fraud and conspiracy charges being leveled.

While the ongoing antitrust battle being waged in Europe between chip giants Intel and AMD is fresh and memorable, few recall that a similar battle has been unfolding in a US District Court in Delaware since 2005. The case has remained quiet for years as the two parties glacially worked their angles, but the action heated up yesterday when both firms filed to sanction the other.

Both motions accuse the other of faulty data retention practices which have lead to a destruction of evidence.

AMD’s position (PDF)

“Intel could have easily avoided this evidence preservation fiasco, had it and its counsel exercised a modicum of diligence in designing and implementing an effective document preservation program,” their filing reads.

The “fiasco” AMD references is later specified as, “Intel’s much-heralded, high-vaunted, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at remediation.”

AMD continues: “At the heart of Intel’s preservation problems was its failure to disarm an aggressive auto-delete system, despite uncontroverted authority required it do so…It’s auto-delete shredder continued to run without any safety net.”

“In sum, Intel’s feckless attempts at preservation have left AMD without the benefit of at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million relevant documents with which to prosecute its case,” they conclude. “How many exactly were permanently lost, AMD will never know.”

AMD has asked the judge to order the jury to assume that the destroyed documents were favorable to AMD. They further request that Intel be on the hook for the fees necessary to confirm and execute their motion.

Intel’s position (PDF)

Intel’s motion alleges that AMD exaggerated its document preservation efforts in bringing a suit against Intel, saying, “AMD misrepresented its efforts and tried to hide its failures from the court and Intel.”

“Ever since Intel disclosed its problems in 2007, AMD claimed to have an ‘exemplary’ scheme to retain documents in this case. It is now clear that AMD did not, and that some AMD executives and employees failed to retain thousands of documents and e-mails,” claims Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

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