I've known this was coming for a while, but didn't want to mention it until it was official.

SEMI, the global industry association serving the micro- and nano-electronics supply chain, and Reed Business Information (RBI), a leading business-to-business publisher and information provider, have announced a broad-ranging media partnership that includes the merger of Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine with Semiconductor International.

As part of the deal, the English edition of Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine has discontinued publication. I expect you'll be seeing my byline in a variety of other venues shortly. Watch this space for details.

Just when Hewlett-Packard was starting to right the ship... Board member Thomas Perkins has resigned over tactics used in the investigation of a boardroom leak.

“Once a board has gotten to the point when people are hiring private investigators to snoop on other directors, you have a big problem,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in San Francisco.

Sure looks that way to me...

For a long time, microprocessor manufacturers encouraged customers to believe that processor clock speed was the best measure of performance. Never mind the abundant evidence showing that more efficient architectures could do more work in the same number of clock cycles.

Then the drive for clock speed at all costs ran aground on the basic laws of physics. Faster chips consumed too much power, got too hot, and didn't actually do much for application performance.

Now, multicore is the new gigahertz. If two cores are good, four must be better, or eight, or... Never mind that much of the advantage of multiple cores depends on the software's ability to partition operations among them. Oh well...