But Wait, There's More. . .

• AMD Gets Big Endorsement for Opteron from Uncle Sam with Red Storm Super. . . Court Says Intel's Itanium Chips Infringe Intergraph's Patents. . . Microsoft, Siebel Sign.NET Alliance.

• There are not many big surprises in the IT market, but we got one this week when supercomputer maker Cray chose chip and interconnection technology from Advanced Micro Devices to build a 40-teraflops supercomputer called Red Storm rather than use its own processors and technology or Itanium processors supplied by Intel. The Red Storm supercomputer, which will cost $90 million to manufacture and support, will be comprised of thousands of AMD 64-bit "Hammer" Opteron processors; the exact number will depend on the clock speeds that AMD can deliver when the machine is operational at Sandia National Labs, one of the facilities where the U.S. government does simulated nuclear weapons testing on supercomputers, in 2004. Cray already sells its own vector supercomputers as well as vector machines from NEC .
  
  
• The Texas District Federal Court has ruled that Intel's Itanium processors infringe patents help by Intergraph, a one-time chip and workstation maker that now designs software for geographic information systems. Under the terms of a settlement reached in April, Intel and Intergraph agreed to go to court over the patents in question, which relate to the parallelism in the Itanium chips that makes them distinct from Pentium processors. Intel agreed to pay Intergraph $150 million within 30 days of the final judgement of infringement, and another $100 million if Intergraph won an appeal if the Texas court ruled in favor of Intel. Intel is now seeking to get the court to reconsider its ruling--always a dubious tact--and is expected to appeal the case. Intergraph has already won a separate $300 million settlement out of Intel for rough handling during the Pentium generation of processors that Intergraph claimed resulted in its not being able to become a credible supplier of Intel-based workstations because of unfair treatment from Intel compared to other suppliers.
  
  
• Microsoft and CRM software supplier Siebel Systems have signed an alliance that will see Siebel deploy its eponymous CRM applications on Windows platforms using Microsoft's .NET technologies. Siebel started out on Windows servers, and it still ships the vast majority of its software on Windows platforms even though it does support Unix and other environments, so a pact with Microsoft on .NET is not all that surprising, except perhaps that it took this long. Exactly what this means is unclear, since Microsoft is working on its own CRM software and is obviously keen on selling its stuff rather than promoting Siebel's solutions. Then again, Siebel aims mostly at very large enterprises--hence its overlapping and non-exclusive deals with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems--and maybe Microsoft wants a piece of that high-end action with .NET. Siebel says that it will work with Microsoft's engineers to certify its CRM suite on the .NET products, and says further that it will spend $250 million on developing the Siebel CRM suite for .NET and marketing it to prospective customers. Microsoft will also devote company resources, presumably including marketing muscle and software engineers--to the Siebel alliance, but is not saying what resources it plans to commit.
  

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