Samsung has announced a 2.5-inch form-factor drive with 160 GB of capacity.

Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive officer of Sun, published the first pictures of Sun’s upcoming Ultra Sparc processor, code-named “Rock”. The new processor apparently is taking its first steps in initial tests and Schwartz claims that prototype chips “are running billions of instructions already.”

Yesterday, AMD issued a surprising revenue warning and said that especially the resale channel turned sour during Q1. Today, TG Daily learned that AMD’s market share in U.S. desktop retail dropped significantly and handed the majority of the market - which AMD had held for five subsequent quarters - to its rival. Is AMD in trouble?

NEC said it has developed a new LCD for portable devices that achieves a brightness of 550 cd/m2, which is 2.75x the brightness of a comparable conventional small form factor display.

Dell will have its OEM manufacturers in Taiwan volume produce 19-inch widescreen LCD monitors in April, as the popularity of the segment is growing fast in the market, according to industry sources.

Spansion announced its latest MirrorBit supports serial peripheral interface (SPI) family member, the 90nm-made 128Mbit MirrorBit flash at 104MHz frequency (part number S25FL128P) with sampling already started.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) today announced that it would complete 45nm technology qualification and enter production as early as September 2007.

VIA, in response to recent reports from media in Taiwan concerning a chipset licensing deal with Intel, on April 7 stated that the reports are based on rumors and that the company would not comment further on them.

Intel introduced a new quad-core enthusiast processor to bolster its product line for high-performance computers. The new QX6800 CPU increases the clock speed to 2.93 GHz and lifts the price of an Intel enthusiast CPU to a new record level.

Columbus (OH) – 2006 brought earth-shattering changes in the processor market with a competition we haven’t seen in many years. Prices have eroded much faster than in the years before. If you have been following our price/performance charts, it is no secret to you the competition between AMD and Intel in the retail market is reaching new heights almost every week. Time to recap what happened in the past half year and check which manufacturer focused on which segment.

Intel has added two ultra low voltage versions of its Core 2 Duo processor with Merom core to its product portfolio.

AMD today released new performance benchmark results for its fastest Opteron processors and reclaims the performance crown in the 2P dual-core arena. While these specific numbers are on AMD’s side, it really depends on your view, which company has the fastest 2P processor: Intel points to its quad-core CPU and says nothing has changed in the performance arena.

Cupertino (CA) – When four cores are not enough, then there is now the option to equip Apple’s Mac Pro dual-socket desktop system with two limited production quad-core processors. Of course, the privilege of owning an eight-core Apple, especially with a processor that isn’t part of Intel’s volume product portfolio yet, doesn’t come cheap.

Samsung Electronics has announced its new SpinPoint S166 series of silent and high-speed hard disk drives (HDDs).

Philips Lumileds recently announced the immediate availability of its Luxeon Rebel power LED, which is 3×4.5mm with a foot print area 75% smaller than other surface mount power LEDs.

Spansion has unveiled its MirrorBit Eclipse architecture that combines MirrorBit NOR, ORNAND and Quad flash memory on a single die.

Sunnyvale (CA) – Performance memory maker today announced an upgraded version of its “Reaper” memory, which comes with an attached heatpipe cooling system. The new PC-9200 modules increase the clock speed of the previously announced PC-8500 memory from 1066 to 1150 MHz. The external, fin-array heatspreader that is connected to the memory module via a heatpipe remains unchanged. The same goes for timings, which are 5-5-5.

Taipei (Taiwan) – Transcend is jumping on flash hard drive bandwagon and today announced a 16 GB version of its Express Card series that now carries a ‘solid state disk’ label.

According to the current product planning of vendors, if all goes as scheduled, Intel's next generation notebook platform, Santa Rosa, is set to hit product shelves in the first half of May, according to DRAMeXchange, which noted that from the timetable, both the shipments of full system and barebone notebooks will be a major focus of PC ODMs at the end of April.