As we’ve seen, the launch of the Radeon HD 7000 series is rather successful so far, but 2012 isn’t starting well for AMD as it seems, or more specifically, for their laptops.

Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company manufacturing laptops for big companies such as HP and Dell, is now suing AMD for an alleged breach of contract.

The claim from Quanta states that laptops made for NEC equipped with AMD chips were defective. Although there was no mention of any models, the report did make mention of both AMD and ATI, thus possibly implying both CPUs and GPUs. The problem encountered by Quanta is a heat tolerance issues in a particular laptop line with a particular chip (once again, no mention).

Quanta claims that it “has suffered significant injury to prospective revenue and profits” and are suing AMD for breach of warranty, negligent misrepresentation, civil fraud, and interference with a contract.

AMD replied saying that the claims are false, adding that Quanta used the same chips in a different computer for NEC without experiencing the same problem. This derives the blame from AMD to Quanta itself, suggesting the problem could be caused by the design of the laptop.

Additionally, AMD also responded that the chip in question is no longer being sold.

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The Semiconductor Industry Association’s (SIA) latest report shows a reduction in chips sales worldwide.

The report presents the sales for the month of November 2011 which, even though showing a total of $25.1 billion chips sold worldwide, still presents a 2.4% reduction from the sales of October 2011.

“Supply chain disruptions resulting from the floods in Thailand have impacted semiconductor sales in the near term, however OEM’s are expected to recover production losses over the course of the next few months,” said Brian Toohey, president, Semiconductor Industry Association. “November sales were additionally affected by the continuing European financial crisis which is having a broad impact on other economies and global demand.”

This comes partially from two factors that were encountered, one being the floods in Thailand, the other being the European financial crisis.

However, it is good to state that the semiconductors sales around the world did increase by 0.8% compared to the same period one year prior. Furthermore, the SIA predicts the closure of the year to bring more growth and further improve 2012.

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You may remember that back in October, we took a look at the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD, which simply blew us away in terms of the performance that was on offer with lightning fast speeds and a decent set of internals featuring a SandForce controller.

Working on the success of that drive, OCZ have developed the Max IOPS version with a few minor touches from themselves. The development on the Max IOPS has had a bit of a revamp in terms of the PCB, the NAND used with Toshiba Toggle Flash being used opposed to IMFT flash as seen on the original Vertex 3. These little touches allow the Vertex 3 Max IOPS to deliver more when it comes to the overall I/O operations per second, which is the whole purpose of this drive.

OCZ always quote their 4KB Random Write Aligned IOPS through use of IOMeter 2008 and with the standard Vertex 3 coming in at 60,000 write, we find the Max IOPS boasting a massive 75,000 IOPs. An impressive figure to say the least, but we all know that sales hype can sometimes be exactly that.

It’s drives like this that we’re really keen to look at as they offer something different to the norm and get our enthusiast blood pumping again, so let’s get straight into it by starting off with what comes included, as we all know OCZ always like to bundle a nice package together.

No matter who you are, you should be more than aware of SanDisk, whether you have a camera or a mobile phone that takes a memory card, you would have most likely used a SanDisk memory card at some point. What you may not know is that SanDisk were one of the first to release an SSD to the general market with the U5000 32GB SSD back in 2007.

Since this time, SanDisk went a bit quiet on the SSD front and have had their focus on other areas of the market, mainly with mass producing memory cards and similar based products. 2011 however, we see them returning to the SSD market with the SanDisk Ultra SATA II Solid State Drive.

The Ultra may not jump out at you when you hear that it utilises a SATA II interface, but it’s worth noting that the average user out there doesn’t even know what SATA III is, let alone having it on their system. The cold hard truth is that the majority of computers in the mass market only have SATA II capabilities, so why flood the market?

With that out the way, it’s worth looking at the main area of this drive, which is all about the internals as you’d expect. Not only does this drive feature the famous Sandforce controller, but also includes SanDisks very own asynchronous NAND flash memory, which is quite a big acomplishment in its own right.

An exciting time is upon us when we see a new set of memory chips come on the market, and we’re interested to see how they perform when we get down to it, but first we should have a look at what you get included when you buy this brand new product from SanDisk.

I doubt we will be seeing some Terminators anytime soon, although IBM’s “cognitive computing” could well one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize, which is basically what humans can do better than machine.

We know that computers are better than human when it comes to playing Jeopardy, but as far as human qualities go, Watson isn’t the best.

“This is the seed for a new generation of computers, using a combination of supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology,” Dharmendra Modha, the principal investigator of the project, said in an interview with VentureBeat. ”The computers we have today are more like calculators. We want to make something like the brain. It is a sharp departure from the past.”

Indeed, such a creation could have so much use, although even if Hollywood usually makes better movies than documentaries, we’ve all seen at least once what a thinking computer can do, so I hope they have a fail safe if they plan on making a Skynet…

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This comes as a surprise to many as most market analysts had expected the company TSMC to produce the 28nm chips for AMD but now it seems that both companies (TSMC and Global Foundries) will be producing the chips which seems like an expensive option. So far we know that there will be three AMD 28nm cores codenamed: “Thames”, “Lombok” and “Tahiti”. It is believed the first GPUs to hit the market will be entry and mid range cards as AMD is reportedly taking its time to perfect the high end and dual GPU cards to make sure it can compete with the 28nm Nvidia equivalents.

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