One of the unexpected benefits of the AMD/ATI announcement is that it has opened up some reasonably well-informed discussions about the overall direction that the industry is headed in. This can be summed up in one single (and perhaps not so simple) word: integration.

As has been pointed out in a number of articles about the acquisition, integration is hardly a new industry trend; it’s just that reaching the “Holy Grail” of combining a CPU with a GPU in a single chip is – for the first time – becoming both technically and economically feasible.

Question: What do Mark Twain, O Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, and Arthur Miller have in common?

Answer: They’ve all stayed at the Hotel Chelsea in New York, where they wrote books, plays, and stories, and in the case of Dylan Thomas “sailed out to die” from here. Another famous guest was Sid Vicious, who woke up in room 100 on the morning of 12 October 1978 to find his girlfriend Nancy Spungen lying dead on the floor of the bathroom.

There’s not much I can add to the seas of ink that have already been devoted to the acquisition of ATI by AMD, except to say that I have to admire its audacity. We have interesting times ahead of us in the industry!

I’ve completed my tour of the Emperor Tu Duc’s Tomb here. In fact, the word “tomb” is a misnomer because his corpse wasn’t actually interred in the sepulcher out of fears that it would be stolen and is hidden away somewhere else on the site.

Just to make sure that nobody knew its location, everyone who was involved in its construction was executed after the Emperor’s burial. Now there’s gratitude for you.  

It’s been interesting to see all the comment about the growing popularity of flash memory this week, fueled in large part by In-Stat’s prediction that the market share for flash in mobile computers could reach 50% by 2013.

2013 is a long (and for an analyst a safe) distance away, but In-Stat’s forecast seems to be feasible given the undoubted benefits of flash over hard disk drives, including faster data access and boot-up times, better reliability, and its ability to be squeezed into smaller form factors. These are particularly important in mobile computing scenarios, where having to wait ages for your notebook to power up can be really irritating and inconvenient and where weight and space are at a premium.

Just like their Qing Dynasty counterparts in China, the emperors of Vietnam’s Nguyen Dynasty spared not a single cent of their subjects’ money on maintaining their lavish (and in many cases lascivious) lifestyles.

The emperor Tu Duc was a particularly notorious offender, spending so much money on the construction of his palace and tomb near the city of Hue that that there was an unsuccessful coup in 1866 aimed at unseating him.

I’m still suffering from a serious case of sensory overload after my trip to Vietnam last week.

From a tourist perspective, this country is a great place to visit and offers just about anything you could wish for, whether it be glorious natural scenery and great beaches or rich historical sites and vibrant city life.

Idyllic. That’s the only word I can think of to describe the view of the Perfume River from my hotel room in the historic city of Hue in Central Vietnam.

The ideal place for some truly creative thinking. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Well, here’s a first, at least for me: an “IT Hospital” complete with technicians dressed in doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms that I visited here in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday. The photo above is the first floor “emergency room”, while the one below is of one of the desktop PC “recovery wards” upstairs.

Quite an interesting marketing concept, and apparently quite a popular one judging by the number of “patients” and their anxious “relatives” at the facility.