AMD has been losing talent left and right over the past year. December saw the loss of VP of strategy Patrick Moorhead and Product Director Carrell Killebrew, among others. Just last week week, AMD lost the person responsible for getting AMD GPUs into every single one of the current consoles to NVIDIA.

AMD hasn't been very competitive on the CPU front, and the GPU front seems to be falling behind NVIDIA. Bulldozer had lackluster performance and Piledriver improvements don't seem to be enough to put AMD back into direct competition with Intel. Enter Jim Keller.

Jim Keller worked at AMD between 1998 and 1999 where he led development of the K8 architecture, arguably AMD's biggest lead over Intel, and co-authored the x86-64 specification. Even though he was only there for a short time, he certainly left his mark on the company. His resume is even more impressive with the work he has been doing lately.

Windows 8 is getting closer and closer to be released and today sees another major milestone for the latest operating system. Today, Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 testing and production has been completed and that the new operating system has been released to manufacturing. This means that OEMs now have access to the OS and can start building PCs with it.

Of course those PCs built won't go on sale quite yet. They will hit the market with the general release of Windows 8, which comes on October 26. Upgrades will be offered for $39.99, or if you have recently purchased a Windows 7 PC, the upgrade will only cost you $14.99. Various audiences will get access to Windows 8 RTM before the rest of us:

The Windows 8 release preview is still available for users to check out and can be downloaded from Microsoft. As of August 15, developers will have access to the final build of Visual Studio 2012, which will include resources they need to design, build, and sell apps in the Windows Store. We're just under 3 months away from seeing the final version of Microsoft's latest OS.

A few weeks ago, there were reports of Dropbox users started to receive spam on the e-mails tied to Dropbox. The major problem with this was that some of these user's e-mails were only tied to their Dropbox account which meant that the spam or address leak was coming from Dropbox itself as there would be no other way for the e-mail to be released.

Dropbox enlisted the help of "an outside team of experts" to aid their own security team and law enforcement. Dropbox's VP of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, said in a blog post that a number of usernames and passwords were stolen from third party websites. These combos were then used to sign into "a small number of Dropbox accounts."

One of those stolen password combos belonged to an employee. The employee's Dropbox contained a project file which had a list of e-mails. The company believes "this improper access is what led to the spam." Dropbox is taking several steps to prevent something like this from happening in the future. These are laid out below:

Facebook have not had a good time since their IPO launch, where they began trading at $38 per share. But at the close of Tuesday this week, shares were down another 6-percent, reaching just $21.71 per share. This represents a drop of 43-percent since the social networking site went public.

Even after Facebook's first ever earnings report as a public company was released, there are still concerns over the social networking sites growth, which just don't seem to be going away. Investors had hoped to have seen more progress in terms of the user growth, and how the company is capitalizing on the rapid increase of mobile usage. Investors wanted Facebook to "show confidence they could grow the company, and they didn't", said Francis Gaskins of IPODesktop.com.

But, are we at the bottom of the barrel yet? It appears not. Come August 16, just a mere 91 days after the IPO, insiders such as company officers, directors and employees, can sell a whopping 268 million shares of stock. Between 91 and 181 days after the IPO, insiders can sell an additional 137 million shares. If these shares are to see any move, it could spell quite the disaster for Facebook, and drive their share price much, much lower.

Intel's plans for their solid-state drives (SSD) for 2013 are beginning to form, where we should see the release of the mainstream SSD 335 series, and the performance SSD 525 series getting released. Intel could also unleash their latest 20nm NAND flash memory technology onto some of these bad boys.

Intel's 335 series will replace the 330 series in most aspects, and could sport a new NAND flash memory type, as mentioned above. Intel could tweak the performance of the drive, making it faster than the LSI-SandForce SF-2881-powered 330 series drive, if it had the right firmware and NAND flash combination. The 335 series looks to be receiving, at first, 80GB and 180GB sizes in Q1 2013. 2013 could mark the time when we see 180GB drives become "the new" 120GB size.

Intel's performance-minded SSD 525 series looks to arrive in 25nm NAND flash, why 25nm and not 20nm? We don't know. Intel most likely won't change from the SF-2281 controller that powers the current SSD 520 series, either. But, the herbs and spices that Intel could build into their firmware could change things up a bit. Intel's SSD 525 series will arrive in mSATA, as well as 2.5-inch form-factors, and will arrive in 30, 120, 180, and 240GB capacities.

Intel's Ultrabook Symposium starts tomorrow in Taipei, but Netbook News have sat down with Navin Shenoy, Vice President of Intel Architecture Group and General Manager of Mobile Client Platform before the event starts, to talk about various topics before the event itself.

Shenoy has confirmed that there are 140 Ultrabook designs, with only 35 of these being seen by the public. As of next month, we should expect sub-$700 Ultrabooks, across the Ultrabook board, with more than one model. One of the biggest nuggets of information here is that there are set to be 40 Windows 8-based Ultrabooks with Touch launching in Q4 of this year.

This means before the end of this year, and the end of Mayan long-count calender (and all the doom associated with it), Intel are Microsoft (and various partners) are set to unleash 40 Ultrabooks with touch screens, which is exciting news. Intel's fourth-generation Core processor, Haswell, is destined for the 22nm process, and will be the first System-on-Chip (SoC) for PC. Shenoy pointed out that the idle power consumption of Haswell will be 20 times less than Ivy Bridge, this in itself is an amazing achievement. Haswell is also said to not just be an incremental step forward, but a giant leap in performance.

Ah, Digg. The memories I have of spending countless hours searching for stories, or just having a read out of sheer boredom. Reddit has now replaced it, and its like going from a cheap scotch to something that is ten times smoother, as well as attracts the ladies.

Digg has just made their "Rethought" redesign live, all after their acquisition by Betaworks, and just 24 hours after the company showed off its v1 preview, which was part of a very, very quick 6-week redesign process. Old features from Digg like the Newsbar and Newsroom have been thrown away in favor of a simpler site that emphasizes top stories, popular stories, and "upcoming" stories.

One major change is that the main page of Digg will now be editorially driven, versus being based on a Digg score algorithm. Because it was an uber quick 6-week redesign, some of the main features have been left out for now, such as commenting. This means that, for now, Digg is more of a news portal, than a community. How would a commenting system work on the new redesigned Digg is another question in itself. Betaworks have said that it plans on conducting "a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features".

Over the weekend, Broadcom unveiled its latest and greatest consolidated multi-wireless chips, which use a combination of Bluetooth 4.0 and the 802.11ac, which sports up to double the speed of existing 802.11n technology, and can be up to six times more power-efficient, even while handling the same amount of data.

Broadcom's new chips can handle FM and conventional 802.11 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and are expected to arrive in early-2013 to be used in smartphones and tablets. Broadcom's new chip uses a 40nm CMOS process and integrates a full Wi-Fi system, including MAC, PHY and RF. Like Bluetooth 4,0, the system can go into a low-power mode, as well as come out of it, virtually instantly, which provides some serious power savings when the system isn't being stressed.

The range of chips is also said to be much better than current 802.11 tech, with throughout hitting 1Gb (gigabit) per second. While the tech would hit smart devices, it will be mostly used at high speeds for home routers, future portable systems, and 2013-onward devices. Broadcom isn't the only company to promise "5G Wi-FI" (which is the consumer name of 802.11ac) chips, which should provide users with more choice, and thus, should keep costs lower.

The Apple vs. Samsung trial is underway at the moment, and it looks like Samsung's legal team have made a pretty bad move, with the team in trouble with Southern District Court Judge Lucy Koh. Samsung have been going on about the 'Sony-style' design mockups this week, and this is what has landed them in trouble.

There were some mockups from Apple designer Shin Nishibori that were designed in order to show how Sony's design sensibilities could be melded with Apple's, in order to create a phone. The design was said by Samsung to exemplify that Apple were working from another company's designs when they were creating the iPhone, which is exactly what Apple are accusing Samsung of.

Apple then pulled out a prototype predating Nishibori's design that dated back to 2005, where they argued that Sony designs were just a riff on what it had done before. At this point, it had negated Samsung's point, in the eyes of Judge Koh. Koh then ruled that Samsung could not present evidence related to these 'Sony-style' designs, or another prototype design that Samsung says it was working on in 2006.

During Take-Two Interactive's Q1 FY13 earnings call, the company said that Rockstar were "making substantial progress" on Grand Theft Auto V, but weren't prepared to share a release date for the upcoming game. The company did acknowledge two screenshots for the game that were released earlier this month, which the company says shows off GTA V's "vast, detailed, open-world setting".

When pushed to reveal whether the game would see a release this financial year, Take-Two said that it hadn't "talked about a release date so can't talk about the credibility of a release date we haven't announced". According to a now-updated Take-Two release schedule, platforms for GTA V are still 'TBA'. This has now sparked the question of "will we see GTA V on next-gen consoles?"

Funnily enough, I mentioned that it would be great if Rockstar could release GTA V on next-gen consoles, over three months ago now. I think we'll see the beginning of console gaming split into two, which I've covered before in previous editorials. A high-end AAA title like this, with a multi-hundred-million-dollar budget, would be shooting themselves in the foot to release the game now with next-gen consoles most likely getting released next year.