That photo they showed was not the actual chip, just a mockup of what it might look like. They made that fact hard to find in the captions. For anything new to get uncovered with this story, one of the sources to the bloomberg story needs to come forward with more information. Or some other engineer from amazon/elemental/apple who was supposedly involved in the detection of the chip. The article was written like breaking news with the assumption that more information would imminently become public, but that hasn't happened. Additional denials by Supermicro, apple, amazon, or governments don't really add the the discussion.

The goal of a company isn't to make employees rich, or even to treat them fairly. The goal of a company is to make money for the shareholders. The directors have a legal obligation to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders and often this is at odds with the interest of the employees, customers, or the general population. Laws are used to protect this second set of people from the decisions of companies. I think it's dangerous to assume that a company should voluntarily act ethically or treat employees fairly because this leads to the conclusion that laws and regulation aren't necessary. In this case, if it isn't already illegal to require employees to give up previous compensation to keep their jobs, it clearly should be illegal. Citizens should push legislators to create this law. One of the current problems in the US is that corporations themselves have enormous political influence which obviously makes it difficult for legislators to protect citizens from unethical or unfair behavior like this.

Can someone post a link to the full-text of the European Commission's report against Intel? It would be interesting to see the actual evidence that they found proving that intel did these things. Are there emails, cancelled checks, or what? If the payments were "hidden" how did they find them? All I can find on the EC website is the press release.

That is exactly correct. The Q of a resonator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-factor#Electrical_systems/ or oscillator determines it's efficiency at turning electrical energy into a usable oscillation. The real significance of this new resonator is that it can be incorporated into the same piece of silicon that the electronic circuit is built on. Currently if a circuit needs a high quality clock or RF signal it uses an off chip crystal oscillator to generate a reference clock usually at 10s to 100s of MHz and then multiplies it up to the frequency needed on chip with an on chip Phase Locked Loop (PLL). PLLs work great, but they take up valuable area and power. Also they are one of the few analog circuits left on most modern microprocessors so it is expensive to keep specialized analog engineers (of which i am one) on staff to design the PLL. If this oscillator/resonator works as described and can truly be integrated into advanced CMOS manufacturing processes, it would eliminate the need for an off-chip quartz crystal and reduce the cost of the system. You probably have about 15 quartz crystals inside your computer now humming along at different frequencies to create the reference clocks of your cpu, memory, pci bus, cdrom, display, wireless, bluetooth, etc. These could potentially all be removed significantly reducing the cost of a computer system and other electronic gizmos. It could also reduce the size and increase battery life of handheld wireless devices. Whether it lives up to the hype that the researchers and reporters of technology review are creating is the big question. Martin