As the saying goes, 'If at first you don't succeed, get your stuff together and roll out another hotfix already, it's 2012!' Maybe the saying doesn't go exactly like that, but it should if you're talking about the combination of Microsoft Windows and AMD's Bulldozer line. After 
They say the grass is always greener on the other side, and a pair of announcements from CES seem to give that old cliché some credence. Qualcomm, a major player in the mobile chip market, wants to break into PCs by stocking thin-and-light Ultrabook-style notebooks with its Snapdragon processor, while Intel’s CEO spent part of his keynote address boasting than the company has inked deals with Lenovo and Motorola to power future generations of smartphones with Atom chips.
Forget about diamonds and chocolate, if you're dating a geek, your lady friend will be thrilled to receive an Intel Core i7 3820 processor for Valentine's Day. And make no mistake ladies, us guys would love to get our hands on this chip too. Why? Only because it will be the first quad-core Sandy Bridge E processor, which means it's built on top of a solid architecture and won't bust our bank accounts.
Time to clear the road(map)! It looks like Intel’s doing its spring cleaning a bit early this year in anticipation of Ivy Bridge’s launch. Reports say the company’s winding down production of 27 different CPUs from several product lines and sockets over the first two quarters of 2012 in order to make room for their fancy new chips. 
Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) arrested four engineers for allegedly selling Intel processors designated as Engineer Samples (ES) on eBay for personal profit. Intel ES chips are the property of Intel and are often sent off to reviewers and OEM manufacturers prior to commercial release in order to test for compatibility. In theory, they're supposed to be returned to Intel.
AMD fans were rooting for the Santa Clara chip maker to yank the performance crown from Intel with team green's desktop Bulldozer-based FX series processors. That didn't happen, and it looks like the next batch of Bulldozer processors will skip the high-end hype and attack the mid-range and entry-level markets where AMD has enjoyed quite a bit of success.
How do you chip away at a giant who keeps getting bigger no matter what the circumstances? AMD would pay good money for an answer, as chip giant Intel yet again increased its share of the microprocessor market, and did so even as the demand for netbooks fell significantly. Netbooks, as you know, are almost entirely powered by Intel's Atom processors, and that served Intel well from 2008 to 2010 when the netbook market enjoyed double-digit growth.
They may not manifest in time for Christmas, but price drops for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors are reportedly on the horizon. Word on the Web is that Intel has already given its hardware partners a heads up on plans to reduce Sandy Bridge CPU prices, and that some Core i3 and i5 processor price cuts will run as deep as 10-15 percent.
AMD didn't want to let the year slip by without making one final hardware announcement, and so the chip designer today announced the addition of new A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) based on Llano. There are more than a dozen new chips in all, split between the desktop and notebook, and all of them sporting mostly minor updates, but updates nonetheless.
At the moment, leaks seem to be our primary source of information regarding Intel’s Ivy Bridge platform, with basic specs and release schedule of the upcoming chips becoming known to us in this fashion recently. The latest in this steady stream of leaks pertains to something that is central to any purchase decision — the price.
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