February
While there were signs of activity this month, it was generally of the litigious variety as Intel especially came out fighting on several fronts.
Intel's busy legal team first called into question the legality of AMD's plan to spin-off its manufacturing arm and sell it to Middle Eastern investors. The issue concerned the cross-licence agreement between Intel and AMD, allowing AMD to make x86 chips, and whether it was transferrable to the new company.
While it was looking at its cross-license agreements, Intel came to the conclusion that it wasn't happy with the NVIDIA one either and got the lawyers involved there too.
AMD decided to shrug-off Intel's unwelcome attention and proceed with the spin-off anyway. It was eventually completed, but not before AMD had to delay the shareholder vote because it couldn't get enough of them to turn up first time.
February was also a busy month for another trend that was to define the year - the convergence of the PC and telecommunications sectors. From the PC side, Intel announced a collaboration with LG to make a next generation mobile internet device and Acer revealed its plans for a major move into smartphones.
From the telco side we had Vodafone launching its first smartphone based on Google's phone OS Android. We also saw the company that designs the vast majority of the processors you find in mobile phones - ARM - announce its plans to challenge Intel in mini-PC market.
