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Adobe Systems, taking the same course with its forthcoming Creative Suite applications, will offer the next Mac OS X version of Photoshop Lightroom only on Intel-based machines.

Apple has chosen to discontinue support for Macs using PowerPC processors beginning with its next operating system, version 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is due to arrive in coming weeks. Adobe said last week that its next Creative Suite will follow suit. The CS family includes programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DreamWeaver, and Flash Professional.

Lightroom, which is for editing and cataloging photos, isn't part of the suite, but it's headed the same route.

"The next full version update of Lightroom will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers," Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post last week. "Lightroom 2 updates will continue to support PowerPC."

Meanwhile, Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack, while fond of PowerPC, took a pragmatic tone on his blog: "By the time the next version of the (Creative) Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either."

Updated at 11:10 a.m. PDT: adding Walmart dv2 laptop information.

Concerns about Advanced Micro Devices' future are being aired as the company celebrates a chip milestone.

HP Pavilion dv2 packs a low-power AMD chip. Can AMD compete effectively with Intel-based ultra-thins?

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The chipmaker said Wednesday that it has shipped 500 million x86 (Intel-compatible) processors since the company's founding in 1969. And to celebrate, AMD is giving away four Hewlett-Packard dv2 ultra-thin notebooks based on its low-power Athlon Neo X2 chip. But the laptop giveaway, ironically, underscores one of AMD's challenges.

Doug Freedman, analyst at Broadpoint AmTech, said in a research note earlier this week that the dv2 laptop has "failed to ramp," meaning it has not gained much traction in the market. Best Buy, for example, though offering a range of other HP dv series laptop models, has not offered the dv2 to date. (Update: However, Walmart offers the dv2 laptop.)

But Freedman's comments are mild compared to what some other analysts are saying after AMD posted disappointing financial results Tuesday.

A blog on ZDNet Wednesday cited a few of the most negative comments. "AMD's tepid top-line results/guidance and weak margins suggest continued execution issues and potential share loss," said Goldman Sachs analyst James Covello.

And J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Danely said: "We believe AMD is losing share to Intel due to inferior products and is being hurt by lack of a Netbook processor...We would note Intel processor sales outgrew AMD by 13 percent during 2Q09 and are expected to outgrow AMD by another 3 percent during 3Q09."

And, as the ZDNet blog points out, maybe the most damning comments come from JMP Securities Alex Gauna: "Another disappointing quarter from the perennial CPU also-ran," he said, referring to AMD's business of making central processing units (CPUs).

Gauna added that ARM chip technology may make AMD even less competitive down the road as future devices adopt these chips. ARM is a low-power chip design used by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Apple, Samsung, and others.

Of course AMD doesn't see it this way. Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and CEO, said in a statement Tuesday that "new platform, microprocessor, and graphics introductions planned for the second half of 2009 position us well to improve (profit) margins and meet our financial goals for the year."

AMD also said Tuesday that during the second quarter Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems announced new servers based on the six-core AMD Opteron processor and that the ATI graphics unit introduced the first 40-nanometer desktop graphics processor, the first 1GHz graphics chip during the quarter, and held the first public preview of working silicon and drivers supporting Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 11 technology featured in Windows 7.

In a recent and so-far relatively obscure video, VMware CEO Paul Maritz offers, at times, a sharp critique of the Intel chip architecture and the challenges of getting it into cell phones.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz

(Credit: EMC)

At the TiEcon 2009 conference in mid-May, Maritz gave a brief oral history of the Intel x86 chip architecture. He noted its shortcomings and the challenges presented by ARM, the chip design that powers most of the world's cell phones and will power Netbooks running on Google's just-announced Chrome operating system.

The video has been made available by TechPulse360.

"Consumer devices came along and there was one problem with the x86 instruction set. All of that complexity in there, accumulated over the years, meant it's a power hog. It loves electricity," he said in the video, referring to Intel's x86 architecture, which virtually all PCs use today.

Maritz--who worked for five years as a software and tools developer at Intel before spending 14 years as a top-level executive at Microsoft and then joining VMWare a year ago--continued: "In consumer devices like phones you can't have that. Battery life becomes paramount," he said.

Maritz described how Intel experimented with the ARM processor architecture and bought a license "for a much simpler microprocessor," referring to Intel's development of the StrongARM architecture, which eventually became a designed called XScale.

Subsequently, Intel decided to get out of the business, according to Maritz's depiction, because the devices were "low-end, low-power, low-profit." Here Maritz is referring to Intel's XScale business, which was sold to Marvell Technology in 2006.

Maritz continued, describing how Intel wanted to get back to its roots: "high performance, complex microprocessors." Then, Intel realized, according to Maritz, that it had to get back into that market: "This ARM thing is a real problem, we're going to have to go back into that space."

In response to the video, an Intel representative said: "Paul Maritz is not privy to all of Intel's future product plans."

Note: Though the video is from May, it did not come to my attention until very recently. I think the topic is important enough to bring up now because Maritz is a high-profile CEO at a large company that builds software that runs on Intel processors and because he's speaking about one of Intel's greatest challenges.

An Advanced Micro Devices executive claims that Intel and Apple cut a deal in 2005 that made Intel an exclusive supplier of processors to Apple, preventing AMD from gaining Apple business.

No AMD CPUs are currently used in Apple computers.

(Credit: Apple)

The claim, made in a phone interview with Tom McCoy, AMD's senior vice president of legal affairs, earlier this week, holds that Intel has had a longstanding deal to be Apple's sole supplier of microprocessors. To date, Apple has not used an AMD central processing unit (CPU) in any of its products. Currently, only Intel CPUs populate Apple's laptop, desktop, and server lineups.

This assertion by AMD comes in the wake of the EU decision last week to fine Intel $1.45 billion for violating antitrust legislation. Last week's EU decision centered on whether Intel used illegal tactics to deny processor business to AMD at PC makers.

McCoy said that a deal was struck when Apple moved from the PowerPC (IBM-Motorola) chip architecture to the x86 (Intel-AMD) architecture. The transition was announced by Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005.

"They made a deal when they were porting over from PowerPC to x86 as to how much Intel was willing to pay for that port. My guess is that Intel asked for and won exclusivity in return for the help that they gave Apple to port," McCoy said.

McCoy continued: "That deal will not be exclusive forever and when that exclusivity is over, I'm sure they (Apple) will choose on the merits. We'll have a chance to compete for Apple's business when Apple is ready," he said. Intel denies this allegation.

Though McCoy did not make any direct charge of illegal activity regarding such a deal, the assertion is not that far removed from charges made in the July 2005 AMD complaint against Intel. AMD, in that filing, cited Dell, among other examples of exclusive Intel deals with PC makers. "In its history, Dell has not purchased a single AMD x86 microprocessor despite acknowledging Intel shortcomings and customer clamor for AMD solutions, principally in the server sector...Dell has been and remains Intel-exclusive. According to industry reports, Intel has bought Dell's exclusivity with outright payments and favorable discriminatory pricing and service." (Note: Dell, in 2005, offered no AMD-based products, though it does today.)

Whether the deal is exclusive doesn't in itself constitute a legal argument, according to Joshua D. Wright of the George Mason University School of Law, who has written about the EU decision in a blog, "Truth on the Market." "Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a plaintiff must show that the exclusive dealing arrangement harmed competition in the form of higher prices, lower output, or reduced innovation," Wright said, responding to an e-mail query.

Update at 7:25 a.m. PDT: Updated stock information added and headline updated.

Sun Microsystems shares soared more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday, following a Bloomberg report that the struggling hardware maker was interested in resuming merger talks with IBM.

Sun climbed nearly 10.8 percent to $6.79 a share in premarket trading. But as the markets opened for regular trading, Sun's shares settled back to a more modest uptick of 2.77 percent to $6.30 a share. The broader markets were mixed.

Either way, its stock remains a ways off from the $9.27 it reached when reports first surfaced it was in buyout talks with IBM.

Sun is reportedly expressing interest in resuming talks with IBM, if Big Blue will raise assurances that it can and will close the deal, according to Bloomberg.

Antitrust experts have previously noted that a Sun and IBM merger would likely face intense scrutiny by U.S. and European regulators.

IBM holds nearly 32 percent of the worldwide server market, based on 2008 factory revenue, and Sun has a 10.1 percent share, according to IDC. Combined, the two companies would account for nearly 42.1 percent of the overall $53.3 billion server market.

And if U.S. antitrust regulators, for example, express concerns over a deal, it could take six months to a year before they issue a final decision on whether to block a merger or let it go through, noted one antitrust attorney.

When companies are concerned their merger may ultimately face a tough time reaching closure, it's often reflected in a higher break-fee, noted the antitrust attorney.

"The price that a party demands for a break-up fee is known to kill deals," the attorney said.

That's because break-up fees can reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

Such was the case for prospective buyer EchoStar Communications back in 2002. The satellite TV company , to Hughes Electronics, after federal antitrust regulators said they would block the $25.6 billion merger.

Sun Microsystems shares fell as low as about 13 percent Monday afternoon, steeper than the declines experienced by the broader markets. Investors, who are awaiting word on whether speculation of an IBM merger will become a reality, apparently were spooked, sending shares as low as $6.82 a share in afternoon trading.

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

Shares of Sun lost 59 cents to close at $7.24, down about 7.5 percent, Monday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, fell as low as about 4 percent to 7,437.59 during intra-day trading and the Nasdaq dipped about 4 percent to 1,484.98. The Dow and Nasdaq were each down about 3 percent at the close.

While it's not immediately clear what may have spooked Sun investors, it is clear that IBM has an interest in migrating Sun's customers from Sun's SPARC architecture to IBM servers based on an x86 chip architecture, according to IBM BladeCenter Vice President Alex Yost, in a recent interview with Brooke Crothers, who writes CNET's Nanotech: The Circuits Blog.

Yost noted in that interview that a number of IBM customers are seeking to use Sun's Solaris operating system on x86-based servers or Linux on x86 servers.

In a more limited fashion, some of Big Blue's customers have a special requirement to use Solaris on Sun's SPARC architecture, Yost noted in that report.

Updated at 10:45 p.m. PST with additional information about Intellectual Ventures

Intellectual Ventures has acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta, an erstwhile supplier of low-power Intel-compatible x86 processors.

Intellectual Venture Funding, an affiliate of Intellectual Ventures, has picked up 140 U.S. patents and additional pending patent applications owned by Transmeta, which was acquired by privately held Novafora in November of last year.

The Transmeta technology will be used "through two distinct routes," according to an Intellectual Ventures' statement. Novafora will improve its own proprietary designs by using some of the technologies invented by Transmeta. And Intellectual Ventures will provide other companies with access to Transmeta's former patent rights under non-exclusive licensing terms.

The portfolio contains many patents issued in the last few years and has generated, in total, approximately $300 million in revenue, the firm said.

Transmeta's claim to fame as a low-power x86-compatible chip supplier was transitory, and in 2007, about seven years after the company formed, it restructured and ceased being a chipmaker. It reorganized as a Rambus-like IP (intellectual property) company that sues other companies for patent infringement. Transmeta's technology is centered on "code morphing" techniques and very long instruction word (VLIW) design architecture.

"These (patent) additions cover inventions in high-performance, low-power, and embedded processors," Paul Reidy, vice president of semiconductor licensing at Intellectual Ventures, said in a statement.

Intellectual Ventures was founded by Nathan Myhrvold after he retired from his position as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft.

Updated on January 6 at 11:20 a.m. PST with correction about Nano 3000.

Dual-core Intel Atom rivals are in the works.

Via Nano procesor

(Credit: Via Technologies)

Via Technologies is planning a very low-power, dual-core Nano 3000 processor, according to Chinese-language Web site HKEPC.

Via's C7-M processor is used in Hewlett-Packard's 2133 Mini-Note, which preceded the crop of Netbooks based on the Atom CPU. Via processors, however, were subsequently eclipsed by Intel's Atom.

Advanced Micro Devices will target its low-power dual-core "Conesus" at the laptop market segment above Atom's Netbook-centric space.

Meanwhile, Freescale Semiconductor has indicated that it will bring out a very-low-power ARM chip that features a dual-core graphics engine targeted at Netbook-like laptops.

All of these developments indicate that the market for ultra-small devices and laptops should heat up in 2009.

Intel currently offers the dual-core Atom 330 that is targeted at Nettops--small desktop computers.

The dual-core version of the Via Nano--due in late 2009 or 2010--may use a Fujitsu 45-nanometer or TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 40-nanometer manufacturing process, according to HKEPC. The Intel Atom is based on 45-nanometer process technology.

(Correction: the Via Nano 3000 will not be dual-core. The dual-core version of Nano will ship in the second half of 2009.)

The Via chip may also include SSE4 instruction support, HKEPC said. Generally, SSE4 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 4) instructions speed up multimedia applications.

Via is also slated to bring out other improved Nano processors in 2009, according to the report.