ATI Radeon 9500: following Radeon 8500LE...

Ziff Davis: on the way to bust?

Will Athlon XP 333 support MHz FSB or not?

Palm and Dell search for Taiwanese PDA partners

AMD, Infineon and UMC: the official technological partnership

xD-Picture flash memory from Olympus and Fuji

Medea VideoRaid RTS — 480GB of data in a 5-disk storage array

SISR658 PC1066 RDRAM chipset — officially

ATI Radeon 9500: following Radeon 8500LE...

The idea is clear: having the same R300 core, pinout, and similar specifications, Radeon 9500 will cost considerably less than the top-end Radeon 9700.

Radeon 9500 announcement, according to the company, will enable to fill a price niche, created after the release of latest RV250/R300 — Radeon 9000, Radeon 9000 PRO and Radeon 9700. The suggested prices for these cards make $109, $129 and $399, respectively. Radeon 9500 boards will cost about $270 to compete with NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 products.

Ziff Davis: on the way to bust?

Ziff Davis Media officials refrain from any comments, but do not decline that finance restructurization will be announced on Friday.

According to some undisclosed publishers, in case Ziff Davis Media fills the ruefully known Chapter 11 about bankrupt persecution protection, company stock holders will receive new obligations, cash and a share of the new company as a compensation. According to some analysts, the bankruptcy announcement will do only good to Ziff Davis Media, from the long-term point of view, as it will let the company use more stable marketing policy.

As you know, the company has recently closed Yahoo Internet Life — 1.1-million drawing online magazine, that brought Ziff Davis Media only $30 million losses during the last 7 years, according to Mediaweek. And during the last half-year 6 of 15 published company editions were closed as well, including Family PC, Expedia Travels, Interactive Week and eShopper. Smart Business was turned into an information bulletin, and it´s staff was mostly fired. The company continues to publish PC Magazine, it´s drawing makes 1.23 million. Besides, there are also three technological magazines and five game editions, including the recently announced Xbox Nation.

Will Athlon XP 333 support MHz FSB or not?

An unclear and surprising message appeared in AMDMB news: its author claims that, according to the information he got from his sources in AMD (undisclosed), the company is now seriously deciding whether to release new Athlon XP with 333 MHz FSB!

It obvious that coming release of new 2400+ and 2600+ processors won´t become a very outstanding event on the background of 0.13-micron process technology, moreover, there´s Intel, planning to release 3 GHz Pentium 4 before the year-end...

Clearly, just another clock rate increase won´t help AMD much. The author of that message claims that now AMD researches the second revision of Thoroughbred core. The new, unannounced core version (having all chances to stay in the lab forever) showed surprisingly good results. As rumoured, it has been already tested with 2.0 GHz (2400+) and 2.13 GHz (2600+) clock rates.

And now — the essence. At some conditions, such as successful "Thoroughbred rev 2" test results and radical marketing plans change, we might see Athlon XP supporting 333 MHz FSB! The insider source reported the final decision is to be drawn withitn three weeks.

Barton hasn´t sounded any news yet. Though, it has been said that "Thoroughbred rev 2" might turn out to be that Barton core.

I remind you — this is an unapproved rumour, so be sceptic enough about it.

Palm and Dell search for Taiwanese PDA partners

According to Taiwanese The Taipei Times, Palm and Dell Computer are now searching for Taiwanese partners for large PDA orders.

Also, according to some information, Palm currently negotiates with Asustek Computer, Inventec and Wistron about release of its Palm Pilot PDA line.

Dell, planning a great debut on the PDA marker before X-mas sales, is going to order up to 1.5 million PDAs from one or several Taiwanese companies and currently negotiates with Compal Electronics, High Tech Computer, Mitac International and Wistron.

AMD, Infineon and UMC: the official technological partnership

At last, this tangle of relationships was officially untwined and these three companies announced plans for uniting their engineering facilities for the joint development of 65/45 nm technological manufacturing platform for 300 mm wafer production.

Initially, all resources will be united at UMC fab in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Actually, Infineon will continue the current contract with UMC about 180/130 nm process technology development and join AMD and UMC in their work.

xD-Picture flash memory from Olympus and Fuji

Olympus and Fuji Photo Film, having together developed the xD-Picture ("eXtreme digital") flash memory standard, announced the release of new card lines.

xD-Picture cards are similar to the popular SmartMedia in size, but still are smaller and lighter: their volume is about 0.85 cubic cm, size — 20.0x25.0x1.7 mm, weight — 2g. in the future xD-Picture Card will have up to 8GB capacity. They are compatible with many current digital cameras that feature Compact Flash slots (via a special adapter) and will be priced similar to SmartMedia cards.

xD-Picture flash memory will be produced in cooperation with Toshiba Corp. (SmartMedia brand owner, by the way) and will appear in retail already in fall, first, wuth Olympus and Fujifilm digital cameras.

In August we´ll see 16MB, 32MB, 64MB cards, in September — 128MB ones. And already in December 256MB cards will be announced. 512MB, 1GB and 8GB cards are expected on the market within 2003.

Medea VideoRaid RTS — 480GB of data in a 5-disk storage array

VideoRaid RTS is designed for non-linear editing (NLE), 2D/3D animation and game video creation.

VideoRaid RTS array is a 5-disk device of up to 480GB total capacity. It supports Ultra160 SCSI interface and features up to 100 MB/sec data transfer rate. One gigabyte of VideoRaid RTS costs about $7 in 160GB, 320GB and 480GB configurations. The junior model will cost $2800.

SISR658 PC1066 RDRAM chipset — officially

The new SISR658 supports maximum 4GB of RDRAM PC800/PC1066.

SISR658 features SiS963 Southbridge, 1GB/sec improved MuTIOL bridge interconnect and supports AGP 8x, six USB 2.0 ports, 100Base-TX Ethernet, 5.1-channel audio, up to 6 PCI slots.

According to SiS, the new chipset will support at least up to 3 GHz Pentium 4 processors.

Any additional information is expected closely.

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