Cody Taylor

arcticstoat writes “Intel has surprised the industry by announcing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Taiwanese silicon chip maker TSMC to manufacture Atom CPUs. Although TSMC is already employed by AMD, Nvidia and VIA to make chips, it’s not often you see Intel requiring the services of a third fabrication party. Under the MOU, Intel agrees to port its Atom CPU technology to TSMC, which includes Intel’s processes, intellectual properties, libraries and design flows relating to the processor. This will effectively allow other customers of TSMC to easily build Atom-based products similarly to how they might use an ARM processor in their own designs. However, Intel says that it will still pick the specific market segments and products that TSMC will go after, which will include system-on-chip products, as well as netbooks, nettops and embedded platforms.”

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Save the Netbooks writes “We discussed Psion sending C&Ds late last year over international trademarks held on the term ‘netbook’ and Dell accusing Psion of fraud last week. Since then Intel has joined in by suing Psion in federal court. On Friday Psion counter-sued Intel (court filing, PDF). SaveTheNetbooks.com has an analysis here. Psion has demanded a jury trial, profits, treble damages, destruction of material bearing the mark ‘netbook’ and the netbook.com domain (among other things), claiming that they are still actively selling netbooks despite also revealing sales figures showing a minuscule market share. It seems that declaring victory may have been a little premature as it will be months before the dispute plays out in court.”

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With news that users are hacking Windows and Linux Netbooks to run OS X–and run it pretty well–Apple needs to release a Netbook of its own before it loses ground in the highest-growth laptop category.

nerdyH sends us to LinuxDevices for a description of a tiny Linux device called the Marvell SheevaPlug. “A 0 Linux wall wart could do to servers what netbooks did to notebooks. With the Marvell SheevaPlug, you get a completely open (hardware and software) Linux server resembling a typical wall-wart power adapter, but running Linux on a 1.2GHz CPU, with 512MB of RAM, and 512MB of Flash. I/O includes USB 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, while expansion is provided via an SDIO slot. The power draw is a nightlight-like 5 Watts. Marvell says it plans to give Linux developers everything they need to deliver ‘disruptive’ services on the device.” The article links four products built on the SheevaPlug, none of them shipping quite yet. The development kit is available from Marvell.

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christian.einfeldt writes “According to an article in Laptop Magazine on-line, one-third of Dell Inspiron Mini 9s netbooks are sold with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Dell senior product manager John New attributed the sales volume to the lower price point of the Ubuntu Linux machines. And the return rate of the Ubuntu Linux machines is approximately equal to that of comparable netbooks sold with Microsoft Windows XP. Dell spokesperson Jay Pinkert attriutes the low return rate to Dell’s good communications with its customers, saying ‘We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is.'”

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Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.

We’re at the native Linux desktop, moving towards the Android desktop (netbooks coming soon). What would bridge those two environments, is to offer a second Linux sandbox which runs along with Android.

ASUS on Friday said it has been developing a netbook based on Google’s Android platform that would ship by the end of 2009 — and would make Linux on netbooks a real alternative to more expensive (not to mention closed) Windows PCs.