Western Digital today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market. Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WDs existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units. Todays acquisition strengthens and accelerates WD's ability to get to market with additional SSD products this is a very good move as SSD's are starting to take off and are seen as the replacement to hard drives.

We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD, said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WDs solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the first expansion HD module for the VIA EPIA-P710, the VIA P710-HD. Featuring the powerful 4300E embedded graphics processor from S3 Graphics, this first Pico-I/O module for stackable Pico-ITXe boards delivers Hi-Def video playback and advanced graphics in an extremely low power, compact form factor.

The VIA P710-HD module is based on the S3 Graphics 4300E embedded graphics processor and includes 256MB of dedicated GDDR 2 on-board memory, supporting separately configurable dual DVI, HDMI and S-Video ports at resolutions up to 2560 x 1600 with 2-channel LVDS and an analog VGA header also available. The S3 Graphics 4300E is designed to offer extreme power efficiency with a total graphics subsystem TDP of less than 8 watts. The S3 Graphics 4300E embedded graphics processor boasts a highly programmable video core, fully compatible with Blu-ray Disk technology with codec support including WMV9 HD, MPEG-2 HD, VC-1, H.264 and AVS, all within a ruthlessly low power envelope.

Adults who play a lot of action video games may be improving their eyesight, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. They said people who used a video-game training program saw significant improvements in their ability to notice subtle differences in shades of gray, a finding that may help people who have trouble with night driving.

For the study, the team divided 22 students into two groups. One group played the action games “Call of Duty 2” by Activision Blizzard Inc and Epic Games' “Unreal Tournament 2004.” A second played Electronic Arts Inc's “The Sims 2,” a game they said does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The two groups played 50 hours of their assigned games over the course of nine weeks. At the end of the training, the action game players showed an average of 43 percent improvement in their ability to discern close shades of gray, while the Sims players showed none.

The Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) Group plans to relocate part of its production facilities in China back to Taiwan later this year, the group's chairman Terry Gou said during an employment fair held by Taiwan's government on March 29 in Taipei.

While endorsing the government's efforts to create more job opportunities in an attempt to rein in rising unemployment rates in Taiwan, Gou also urged the government to cultivate a more favorable business environment so that more local enterprises are willing to build their bases in the home market. When asked if he has seen signs of recovery in the economic market, Gou commented that the global economy will not fully recover until 2012, although the electronics industry has recently experienced an influx of short lead time orders, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

At just 65W, Intel’s new S-series quad-core processors have a TDP (thermal design power) rating that’s 30W lower than traditional Core 2 Quad chips, which are all rated for 95W.  In fact, the only other 65W chips Intel offers are from the Core 2 Duo line-up of dual-core processors. The beauty is, these new lower power chips perform just like true quad-cores of course but produce a lot less heat and consume less energy.High performance quad-core chips with the thermal envelope of dual-cores? It almost sounds

Today, Western Digital entered the Solid State Disk (SSD) market through the acquisition of SiliconSystems.  Now that the $65 million cash deal is complete, integration into Western Digital begins immediately. SiliconSystems will now be known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit. SiliconSystems sells its SiliconDrive products to the embedded systems market for use in servers and storage devices. The drives are also used in areas such as network-communications, industrial, medical, military, and aerospace

MSI 790GX-G65 AM3 Motherboard Review @ OCC and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

“Well, when it comes down to the wire, apples to apples, the DDR3 memory support does give the AM3 processors a bit of a lead. In just about every test there was an increase when using a 790GX based board with DDR3 memory support over DDR2 memory support. If you are in the market for a new system, then I highly suggest going the AM3 route. However, in my opinion, if you are already running a strong DDR2 based AMD system, then the cost does not justify the minimal increases that you will currently get. All of that aside the MSI 790GX-G65 is a rock solid board with great features that will make any enthusiast smile. The overclocking on this board was very easy and has been one of the stablest I have seen with minimal tweaking. The added ability to overclock using hardware dip switches will allow even a novice the added joy of pushing their hardware beyond the limits.”

PCs are increasingly becoming an item that people want to personalize to suit their performance and lifestyle needs and preferences. As a result, we’re seeing more and more computers with custom colors and unique styling. Dell’s new Inspiron slim and mini-towers offer plenty of design and personalization options for customers. The new Inspiron desktops let people express themselves through a choice of eight color options, slim or mini-tower sizes, and custom configurations. Color options include Piano Black,

While most of the world keys in on Intel, AMD and ARM, VIA is quietly slinking around the corner waiting to steal away some of that precious market share. After debuting a potent solution for 1080p-capable netbooks and bringing its IVP-7500 into motor vehicles, the company is now flaunting its P710-HD module, which does its best to turn the VIA EPIA-P710 Pico-ITXe board into a multimedia playback powerhouse.Indeed, the P710-HD is the first expansion module ever created for EPIA-P710, boasting the 4300E embedded

Hot on the heels of ARM’s ground-breaking Mali announcement at the Game Developers Conference comes a new pair of introductions from the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California. First and foremost, the company has revealed two new models for the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor and for the Cortex-M3 processor. According to ARM, these newcomers are engineered to enable:Product Benefits: Develop and optimize software applications, middleware and drivers for platforms based on new ARM CPUs – ahead