...I've got some cash stacked up waiting for the right moment to unload. Lot's of companys have been crushing their 52-week lows and are ripe for the picking. GE, ERIC, AMD, NVDA, AAPL, IBM... Hell, I don't even need to make a list... they're all there.

Some advice for those who have a little extra cash on hand. Get a brokerage account (example - Scottrade). Set up a margin account (they will match a certain amount that you put in). Wait until the gettin' is good... then buy up all these severely undervalued stocks.

Then again... don't... I'd rather make the money you don't want. :)

"Wait until the gettin' is good..."

Now that is a very nice advice. I can add my own: buy when stocks will be at the bottom, and you will make mucho money

IBM buys out nVidia & AMD. Merges them into a sub company of IBM. The graphics technologies of nVidia and AMD(ATI) are picked apart, and best best of breed pieces are combined into the next generation Cell B.E. . IBM directs a new Cell architecture with GPU's added on as extra SPE's.

Even tho the Cell is already designed for massively interconnecting more units, special attention is put into the future design so that enthusiasts can add as many Cell processors to a computer as they want. In other words, something like a PCIe 16x card with a 10GbE or infiniband (eww) bridge that allows the user to add more and more cards. I know nVidia is already doing this with Tesla, but they have much to learn.

The future Cell would focus on raytraced rendering performance, but would obviously serve current rendering methods.

AMD's processor line gets the benefit of IBM's expertise.

All chips get the benefit of being first in line on the 32nm and 22nm lines.

Intel gets some serious competition in the rendering and super computing market.

I believe the fight between CUDA, AMD Fusion, and IBM Cell will only end up enabling Intel to take over the market in the GPU (raytraced future esp) field. I say, merge the best of these 3 technologies giving us massively scalable Cell systems that the entire industry (-Intel)can embrace. AMD is going to need more than being in the 32nm super friends club with IBM, and all 3 are going to need help to fight Intel.

nVidia isn't going to do so well in the chipset market, IBM has the best chipset technology in the world. AMD could use a boost in their chipset tech as well.

I also believe IBM will lead the way in optically interconnecting not only CPU/GPU/Cell, but all the related subsystems. Imagine if this new super company brought us a motherboard that was a big 100gbit/s (per port) optical backplane that you just dropped Cell/CPU/GPU modules on to expand your system. Take two of these motherboards, link them together, and they act like one big VM controlled resource pool. Intel/MS don't want people having scalable clusterable hardware. It means less sales for them. I hope for a future where I have one cluster of resources that I can add anything I want to, and share resources amoung lots of VMs. No more HDMI/USB/etc running around, the pool of GPUs/Cells just output their data to Teradici "PC over IP" chips and all my computing sessions are available on any HDTV/monitor via ethernet/IP.

My dream of a scalable home server architecture just won't happen unless some of the big wigs get together and plan for such a unified approach.

AMD fell asleep at the wheel, I don't think they can catch back up to Intel without something drastic happening. Cell processors seem great, IBM could probably benefit from taking in a company that knows P.C. processors, and GPU's to boot! I don't think IBM would ever go for both inVidia and AMD, that would sure piss off intel tho'. Let apple snag up inVidia, see what they can do with it.

IBM has has a bad history with alliances. Remember AIM, that was a hot thing that did not bolter IBM into the consumer market as it was envisioned. I don't think IBM should look at AMD or nVidia, they aren't as much of a great deal as they might seem on the surface. IBM and Intel work together in relative peace right now.

What IBM is doing these days is bolstering their cloud ans SaaS offerings. They should buy Sun, and gain the rights to Java, MySQL, JCaps/OpenESB and all of the SOA tech that comes along with that. The next big wave of technology is going to be Electronic Healthcare, and all of those technologies are key to making that a reality. Sun could be purchased for ~5bn (Oct 10, 2008), which is a drop in the bucket. Also, Sun's business model is aligned with that of IBM.

3/7

I understand the point your trying to make about the AIM (Apple IBM Motorola) alliance, but it wouldn't really apply to this situation. IBM would run the merged companies and direct a new unified tech path for extremely scalable Cell based GPGPU/CPU architecture. The future of rendering is Raytracing, and IBM is the only company with the expertise to really create an architecture that could rival Intel.

Another point that kind of defeats your statement about AIM, IBM has already formed a sucessful club with their fabrication partners. This would be the icing on the cake. IBM grabs the failing nVidia and AMD and turns them into a power house pushing all their great technologies.

Regarding your comment about Sun, I agree. If Sun could be had for pocket change, then it would be great for them to gobble up what limited technology Sun now has. They could migrate Sun software to their hardware, dump their processor line which can't even keep up with Intel's offerings, and hopefully converge a large piece of the business market to a unified IBM architecture. With IBM dropping the Cell B.E. (PowerXCell 8i Variant) into their mainframe and unix boxes (and thus taking the top spots on the Top500.org list), we could see old Sun software running very quickly on IBM hardware.

I believe we will see an optical surprise from IBM and Sony with the 32nm or 22nm Cell. Maybe something as cool as a chip module with a power plug and an optical interface to interconnect with other modules. Imagine playing raytraced games and having no practical limit to the number of Cell's you can add on to your machine. - hey I guy can dream can't he.