Confession: Back when AMD was pitching its Opteron chipset, I convinced my husband to buy shares in the company on the belief that its plans to build a backwards compatible 64-bit processor was so obviously better than Intel’s efforts with Itanium that the market would eventually see it. The market did, and AMD shares went up a bit, but we soon sold them after my company changed its policy regarding stock ownership.

I say this so you guys know that I once believed in AMD. I live in Austin, where the company at one time employed more workers than in its Sunnyvale headquarters. Where Hector Ruiz, who stepped down today from the president and CEO position, lives. But I look at the sad wreck that was once a scrappy upstart irritating Intel and I don’t know what to say. I can start with the facts.

Ruiz will remain as executive chairman of the company and Dirk Meyer, the former COO and president, will become the CEO and president. Ruiz had already named Meyer as his successor, but Ruiz had also said he would stay through 2008. But AMD had seven quarters of losses and wrote down $878 million last week (for a total loss this quarter of $1.2 billion).

Meanwhile, Meyer will preside over the sale of some of AMD’s consumer assets, as announced in the company’s fourth-quarter conference call on Thursday. These assets should include some of the non-core assets related to mobile and digital television AMD purchased as part of its ATI acquisition in 2006. Those are the facts.

Looking at those facts, and the string of things that have gone wrong, from delays with its Barcelona chip to the loss of its CTO earlier this year, and you have to wonder if Meyer, or anyone inside the company should really be the one to take over. Ruiz and Meyer are both known more for their engineering talents than their business ones, which may be one of the reasons AMD held onto non-core divisions for so long. I suppose I should stop caring. After all, it’s been years since I held stock in AMD, and it gets old rooting for the underdog.

Elemental Technologies, a startup focused on faster transcoding, has raised $7.1 million from General Catalyst Partners and Voyager Capital. The company’s software uses the graphics processor rather than the CPU inside a computer to handle the work of ripping a DVD or video file to another format. It’s one of several startups using Nvidia’s GPUs for tasks once allocated to the CPU, and bolstering the idea that GPUs might be better suited than the CPU to some tasks, such as scientific computing or video transcoding. To read more check out our coverage on NewTeeVee.

Summer is generally a slower time for news and this summer is no exception. But the kind folks at Microsoft, Yahoo and Carl Icahn’s investment firm are charitably offering up a form of entertainment with their ongoing Let’s Make a Deal saga.

The latest installment is a letter to shareholders from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang that accuses Microsoft of flip-flopping, creating confusion and generally not wanting to make a deal. The letter also also reiterates Yahoo’s desire to sell the entire company at $33 per share — or if that’s not interesting, just the search assets.

Let me tell you, Yahoo, playing hard to get is smart, but this letter is no way to get the guy of your dreams. In fact, rumor has it Microsoft is seeing AOL now, and everyone knows AOL hasn’t always made the best choice in relationships.

This stuff may play well in Silicon Valley, but outside of it the world is not watching. While Kara Swisher dutifully calls her sources and provides us with the ins and outs of the wheeling and dealing, the audience outside the tech world is yawning. This started back in February (2007 if you believe the original offer from Microsoft). Let’s finish this, so the world can really focus on the banking crisis or high gas prices.

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Here’s a horror scenario for everyone on the content side of the Internet: A consumer comes to a web site to download a movie, work presentation, software update or photos, and just before they commit to the download they pause and wonder: Am I over my usage quota this month? How much will downloading this new HD movie from Netflix on my Xbox cost me?

We’ve all been there before — with cell phones, about a decade ago. Usage-based pricing tiers started out with very limited minutes and lots of overage charges. Competition in the market by innovative operators drove plans fairly quickly to a point where only exorbitant usage resulted in overage charges (and now there are flat-rate plans for those consumers, too).

Unfortunately, the usage-based pricing plans (starting at 5 gigabytes) being considered by AT&T, Time Warner and others will force us all to wonder about the size of our connectivity bill on a monthly basis. Further, the lack of last-mile (the infrastructure that connects the consumer to their Internet service provider) competition will not result in these plans changing in the near future. Today, true competition on the Internet last mile requires new copper or fiber to each consumer — a very costly proposition. Cellular competition, on the other hand, required a less costly (on a relative scale) deployment of cellular towers.

While it is true that the consumer can elect who provides services over their last mile, most of us have very limited choices. As an example, a friend of mine recently moved into a building in downtown San Francisco that had exactly one last-mile provider: AT&T. The 700Mhz wireless spectrum provided a hope for an alternative consumer last-mile option, but that dream quickly faded.

Competition and an aggressive last-mile build have resulted in reasonable usage-based pricing models in Japan. OCN, the carrier operated by NTT Communications, is planning for unlimited download bandwidth usage and a 30-gigabyte limit on daily upload usage capacity. By my estimates, that will be more than adequate for all but the largest consumers of Internet bandwidth and does not invoke any horror scenarios for the large content owners.

In fact, large content owners may help us all avoid usage-based pricing horror scenarios. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month (assume $10/month/Mbps using 95th percentile on 10Gbps of traffic) with the same Internet service providers buying connectivity to their networks because they want to be connected directly to the consumers via the last mile.

If the Internet service providers start billing on usage-based pricing, it’s inevitable that large content owners will look for new ways to reach the consumer. It seems unlikely that they’ll be willing to pay the service provider for access to their last mile if at the same time the consumer is being motivated not to access their content. Why would Microsoft and Netflix pay Time Warner for connectivity to their cable Internet infrastructure consumers if those same consumers are being billed on usage and worry about their usage quotas before downloading HD movies onto their Xbox?

Like other large businesses, Internet service providers are looking for ways to extract more value from their customers. As a venture capitalist, I understand and appreciate that perspective. Usage-based pricing, however, at least as currently envisioned by the service providers, will not only change consumer behavior but will work against some of their larger customers.

As semiconductor firms get around the limitations of making individual processors faster by putting more cores onto a single chip, the mindset of today’s software developers and engineers mindset needs to adapt. For to really take advantage of multiple cores, a programmer needs to look at ways to make her code parallel, splitting jobs into different parts rather than the step-by step instructions delivered to single-core machines. There are also energy and communications issues that can constrain how far multicore can grow. Below are a list of startups that have the potential to stretch multicore processors to their very limit.

Tilera: Tilera, based in San Jose Calif., doesn’t make a software compiler, but rather a 64-core chip that can scale to thousands. It all comes down to the way the chip is designed, according to founder and CTO Anant Agarwal. Instead of the cores “talking” to one another through an on-chip bus interconnect, they’re in a mesh network where information travels faster. Agarwal has said he thinks there will be a Moore’s Law for cores that will lead to the number of cores on a chip doubling every 18 months and a data center in a desktop — a bold, energy-intensive prediction.

Interactive Supercomputing: Like Agarwal, Interactive Supercomputing of Waltham, Mass., is betting on multicore swimming into the mainstream fairly soon. The company’s development platform allows programmers to write in Python or Matlab and then paralellizes the code for them. Its vision is of 40-core or 60-core machines sitting on people’s desktops for intensive computing. If you had 60 cores and the right software on your home machine, your home videos would be much, much cooler.

Replay Solutions: This Redwood City, Calif.-based startup makes debugging software that, while not specific to a multicore environment, allows a programmer to replay exactly what happened the moment before a software crash so he can see what the problem is and fix it. The company calls it “TiVo for Software.” It’s useful because, let’s face it, it’s hard enough to follow and debug a single thread of instructions to a chip. Imagine splitting that code and following it across multiple cores. Or if the cores were in a cloud environment where the location of the software running on virtualized hardware varied. This is really just a neat startup all around.

Cilk Arts: Cilk Arts is essentially focused on extending one programming language into the multicore environment. In this case it’s C++. IBM, Intel, Nvidia and even Apple are all focused on varying ways to easily develop for multicore chips, but there is plenty of room for a small company with good tools to excel. Cilk, which is based in Burlington, Mass., uses a compiler to parallelize the code in a short amount of time without restructuring it. The first release, for x86 cores, is due out later this year.

RapidMind: This startup is also creating a platform to allow C++ programmers to make their code parallel but focuses on taking task-oriented code such as Monte Carlo stimulations and graphics rendering and parallelizes it. Waterloo, Ontario-based RapidMind works on x86 chips as well as graphics processors and IBM’s Cell processor.

image of the Cell Broadband Engine courtesy of IBM

Earlier this week, Delta Airlines announced plans that will turn its boarding passes into advertising opportunities, or billboards, hawking destination-specific businesses and products. An Omaha-based startup, Sojern, is behind this advertising offer, which is going to be adopted by four airlines in addition to Delta: American, Continental, United and US Airways. Given that airlines are in such a desperate position, mostly because of their incompetency, they are ready to try anything, however strange it might seem.

Now there is word that IDT Corp., a calling-card company, is going to start using advertising messages on its pre-paid calling cards. Using technology from in-call advertising startup VoodooVox, IDT will hawk marketing and advertising messages that are matched to a caller’s demographic profile. For instance, if someone was calling the Dominican Republic, an ad for an airline would be piped in while the caller is waiting for his call to connect. IDT sells about 17.5 million pre-paid calling cards every month.

Given the razor-thin margins in the long-distance business, I am not surprised IDT is going down this path, but I wonder if they will use some of the fat CPMs from advertising to offer cheaper or near-free long-distance calls. Now that would be cool, and perhaps something to which an audience — who might get annoyed by ads intruding their calls — would be somewhat receptive.

These two examples make me ask the question: Are we getting so saturated with ads that they will just become meaningless and lose their entire effectiveness?

Baseball’s All-Star Break this week proved to be quite special - not because this was the last All-Star game at The Yankee Stadium, the cathedral of baseball and a place where I fell in love with this distant cousin of cricket. No, it was not special because the All-Star game went into the wee-hours of the night and took 15 long innings before the American League took their rightful place in the winners’ circle. No, it was not special because Josh Hamilton put on an awesome display of power and sprayed home-runs during the HR derby.

To me it was special because it was all about young talent, many making their first (and not their last) trip to the All-Star Game. The HR Derby had none of the established hitters vying for the prize - instead it was all young turks. The All Star game was no different - packed with youth, energy and enthusiasm of talents like Justin Morneau, Scott Kazmir, Grady Sizemore and Evan Longoria. David Wright, Dan Haren, Dustin Pedroia, and Joe Mauer. This was a year where the guard changed.

The game is still the same, except there were new heroes and new starts. That is the beauty of the game I have come to love more dearly than life itself. I think that is the case with my other passion - blogging. Like baseball, the art of blogging remains the same, we just get new players. You see the changes on the Techmeme leaderboard, as new voices emerge, and take their rightful place center stage. We see an emergence of new class of bloggers who are on their way to getting our full attention, playing with some of us old timers (by blogging metrics at least.)

Some (not all) of them (in no particular order) are Eric Eldon at VentureBeat, Allen Stern, MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Caroline McCarthy at The Social, and Andrew Chen. Like Josh Hamilton, blogging also has have a reclamation project in Henry Blodget, leaving his past behind, and playing a new game.

They are among many others who I read daily, just like I read the folks on our team. The rise of 1990s Yankees dynasty came when they took home grown talent of youngsters like Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera and teamed them up veterans like Paul O’Neill. I feel the same way about our little team - I feel especially fortunate that the future of blogging is working alongside me in our little company - Katie Fehrenbacher, Craig Rubens, Chris Albrecht, Liz Gannes, Stacey Higginbotham, Judi Sohn and Mike Gunderloy.

The point I am trying to make is that blogging, like baseball, is a continuum of talent. Instead of hitting and pitching, blogging is about having something meaningful to say, informing, entertaining and educating your community. But most importantly it is about ability to converse, connect and prod your readers into thinking differently. I learnt that from Dave Winer & Doc Searls. I don’t see why those truisms should change - just like the sinker, the long ball and the stolen base.

With that said, like some of my favorite veterans on the All Star Steam, I am not ready to hang up my blogging cleats. Not anytime soon! Now back to regular baseball and of course, blogging.

PS: does anyone have a photo of the All_Star game they want to share with my readers? Email me the link or leave it in comments.

The battle over Yahoo’s search business as witnessed over the last few days seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people — some 400 million — visit to get their news, sports scores and email. I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo.

A story by Judi Sohn, who edits WebWorkerDaily, one of our growing portfolio of blogs, was featured on the home page of Yahoo last night. The story got voted up via Yahoo’s Buzz, a service akin to Digg, except much more powerful.

In a few hours, the story about what to expect when switching from a BlackBerry to an iPhone was viewed over 200,000 times and attracted over 350 comments. Now that’s a lot of traffic — but more importantly, a gigantic amount of engagement displayed by Yahoo visitors. The traffic sent our way by Yahoo was many times the traffic we get from, say, Digg or StumbleUpon.

At the risk of repeating myself, Yahoo’s core business now is “audience.” The company, instead of trying to out-Google Google, needs to beat itself by figuring out new ways to keep the audience growing. The first step is, of course, acknowledging that it is a content company. The next one: figuring out new engagement and audience-grabbing ways.