There has obviously been a fair amount of buzz going on in the market about SSD (Solid State Disks) as of late, as pricing continues its downward trend.  In addition performance has continued to improve with SSDs as the technology matures.  Recently, announcements from major OEMs like Samsung have promised fairly impressive offerings with read/write performance that would rival most standard spinning disks and of course sub 1ms access times that literally no standard rotational media could come

Nvidia is planning to start mass producing its latest Intel platform IGP chipset, the GeForce 9-Series mGPU nForce 730i MCP (MCP7A), in the middle of August with motherboards likely to appear in the market by early September, according to sources at motherboard makers.

The MCP7A will come in two versions, the MCP7A-U with a GeForce 9400 graphics core and the MCP7A-S with GeForce 9300 graphics. The two versions have the same specifications except the GeForce 9400 features a core frequency of 580MHz and shader frequency of 1500MHz, while the GeForce 9300 will be clocked at 450MHz and 1200MHz. The MCP7A support a FSB up to 1333MHz, dual-channel DDR2 or DDR3 memory, and PCI Express 2.0. The GPU is based on Nvidia's G86 graphics core, which supports DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, includes 16 built-in stream processors, and supports HDMI, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and D-sub connections.

Intel Statement on Latest European Commission Action SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Intel Corporation today issued the following statement in response to allegations contained in the new Statement of Objections (SO) issued by the European Commission: We’re naturally disappointed the Commission has decided to issue a new SO. The issuance of a second SO suggests that the Commission supports AMD’s position that Intel should be prevented from competing fairly and offering price discounts which have resulted in lower prices

Free access at AT&T hotspots for iPhone users was first announced at the beginning of May.  Then it was disabled.  It was reannounced today, but once again, it was a mistake.  Why they keep doing this, who knows?The notice, which was still live at 8:30 a.m. PDT but then was removed by 9:30 a.m., said: “AT&T knows Wi-Fi is hot, and free Wi-Fi even hotter, which is why we are proud to offer iPhone customers free access to the nation’s largest Wi-Fi hot-spot network with more than 17,000

While gutsy users have been upgrading their Sprint Touch smartphones for weeks, HTC and Sprint have finally made the upgrade official.  Head on over to HTC’s web site for the download.

Find out more about the Sprint Touch by HTC…

UPDATE 7:32PM: HTC has pulled the update from their site.  No word yet on why, but we’ll keep you posted.

As the Yahoo! shareholders meeting on August 1st rapidly approaches, Yahoo! is preparing. They sent a letter to their shareholders on Thursday, urging them to vote against a proposal by Carl Icahn which could result in the unseating of some of all of the Board of Directors. The letter, from CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock was also filed with the SEC Thursday afternoon. The letter is pretty long, but pretty contentious as well. There’s no doubt that the battle has just begun. Some high (or low) lights:

The TW3X2G1600C9DHXNV memory kit is the first and only Corsair memory kit that uses Samsung based memory ICs. That gives this kit a leg up over other companies as it is offering the latest in memory ICs. This specific memory kit has been verified to operate at 1600MHz at latencies of 9-9-9-24 at 1.8V VDIMM by Corsair, but as you will see later in our article you can pull off timings of 6-7-6-18 at 1600MHz with some extra voltage.

AMD today announced that its board of directors elected President and COO Dirk Meyer as the companys chief executive officer. Meyer succeeds Hector Ruiz, who will become executive chairman of AMD and chair of the board of directors. As executive chairman, Ruiz will ensure a smooth executive leadership transition, focus on driving the companys asset smart strategy to completion, and assist with high-level government and strategic partner relations.

Dirks election to CEO is the final phase of a two-year succession plan developed and implemented jointly by AMDs board of directors and executive team, said Robert Palmer, lead independent director. Under Hectors strong leadership, AMD drove the industry adoption of pervasive 64-bit and multicore computing, became a trusted enterprise-class partner to leading technology suppliers and significantly expanded its global footprint in high-growth markets like China.

Todays top video games use complex programming and rendering techniques that can take months to create and tune in order to get the image quality and silky-smooth frame rates that gamers demand. Thousands of developers worldwide including members of Blizzard Entertainment, Crytek, Epic Games, and Rockstar Games rely on NVIDIA development tools to create console and PC video games. Today, NVIDIA has expanded its award-winning development suite with three new tools that vastly speed up this development process, keeping projects on track and costs under control.

These new tools reinforce our deep and longstanding commitment to help game developers fulfill their vision, said Tony Tamasi, vice president of technical marketing for NVIDIA. Creating a state-of-the-art video game is an incredibly challenging task technologically, which is why we invest heavily in creating powerful, easy-to-use video game optimization and debugging tools for creating console and PC games.

AMD today reported second quarter 2008 revenue from continuing operations of $1.349 billion, a seven percent decrease compared to the first quarter of 2008 and a three percent increase compared to the second quarter of 2007. As part of its previously communicated review of its non-core businesses, AMD decided to divest its Handheld and DTV product businesses, and therefore is classifying them as discontinued operations for financial reporting.

In the second quarter of 2008, AMD reported a net loss of $1.189 billion, or $1.96 per share. For continuing operations, the second quarter loss was $269 million, or $0.44 per share, and the operating loss was $143 million. The results for continuing operations include a net favorable impact of $97 million, or $0.16 per share as described in the table below. Loss from discontinued operations was $920 million, or $1.52 a share, including asset impairment charges of $876 million, or $1.44 a share.