Gossip

"This Intel Athlon chip sucks ... power out of the battery"

If you're Dirk Meyer, AMD Executive Vice President, Computation Products Group, you probably should make jokes about Intel chips - especially when your presentation ends because the notebook battery runs down. But remember, it's going to reboot ...

Poor old Dirk. He got a big laugh at the VIA Technology Forum when his PC died half way through his presentation. "This Intel processor chip sucks power out the battery," he quipped. Point scored! and nobody would ever know if it was, or wasn't, an Intel chip. Right?

The problem was simple; the plug fell out. A helpful organiser plugged it back in, and of course, the next thing that happened was that the computer rebooted.

A pity - the screen display showed, quite clearly, that it was a Phoenix bios, and an Athlon processor ... as made by AMD's computational products group.