Hard disk drive makers Seagate and Cornice have ended their feud and granted themselves 20 months' breathing space before they're allowed to start fighting again. The two companies this week said they had dismissed their lawsuits and countersuits and "agreed not to sue each other for patent infringement through the end of 2007".

Intel is to update its Core Duo processor line, the chip maker has told customers, with samples of new T2400, T2500 and T2600 65nm dual-core processors shipping by early May. Some may go out the door before the end of April, we understand.

VIA today said it will begin shipping its first single-chip chipset for its C7 and Eden CPUs later this quarter, the better to pitch the low-power x86 processors at embedded applications. Cramming North Bridge and South Bridge components into one chip reduces the motherboard area requirement by 34 per cent, VIA said.

Hitachi will ship its latest 3.5in desktop hard disk drives in Q3, the company said yesterday. The new units will feature the company's latest, 160GB-plus, 1.2bn bits per square inch density platters allowing it to deliver 500GB of storage capacity using just three disks, reducing drive complexity and power consumption.

Freshly leaked Pentium D pricing information has added weight to claims that Intel will ship the next model in the series, the 960, at the end of this month before slashing prices in Q3 when its next-generation architecture 'Conroe' processor debuts.

AMD's Fab 36 has begun making the company money, the chip maker announced today. Processors rolling off the plant's production lines last month became the first parts to be shipped to paying customers, the company said.

Roadmap AMD's next-generation AMD64 core, codenamed 'K8L', has begun appearing on the company's roadmap under that name, kicking off with a H1 2007 appearance, according to documentation leaked on the web. So has upcoming CPUs' support for 800MHz DDR 2 SDRAM.

ATI's upcoming Theatre 650 Pro digital TV chip has achieved PCI Express certification, Reg Hardware can reveal, paving the way for the part's formal introduction. The graphics specialist's RS600 chipset has also passed the PCI-E test.

Infineon's memory division will become a separate entity - named Qimonda - on 1 May, the company said today.

Based in Munich, Qimonda will remain an Infineon subsidiary until it's IPO'd - though the parent company gave no indication when that may happen.

Nvidia has formally rolled out three new workstation GPUs - the Quadro FX 350M, 1500M and 2500M - that Dell has announced will be used in its latest Precision high-end laptops.

ATI last night reported its highest quarterly sales yet. During the three months to 28 February 2006 - ATI's second quarter of fiscal 2006 - the graphics chip company realised revenues of $672m, up 13.7 per cent on the previous quarter and 10.5 per cent on Q2 FY2005's total.

AMD may have put back the release of its anticipated dual-core Turion 64 X2 mobile processors to June, sources cited by website DailyTech have alleged. If the chip maker does indeed delay the chips' debut, it's also likely to reschedule the release of the parts' single-core siblings, the report claims.

AMD will next week take its single-core Opteron 8xx and 2xx families to 3GHz and speed-bump the dual-core line-ups, it has been claimed. The move will see the arrival of Opterons with model numbers 256, 290, 856 and 890.

Asus will begin shipping a dedicated physics processing board based on Ageia's PhysX PPU in May, the company said today. The card contains 256MB of memory dedicated to environment calculations designed to make virtual worlds feel more real to game players.

Nvidia hasn't announced its GeForce Go 7900 GS mobile GPU yet, but Toshiba yesterday said it has begun shipping a gaming-oriented notebook which delivers "state-of-the-art graphics" thanks to the new chip, 256MB of graphics memory and a 17in TruBrite display.

Motherboard makers MSI and Gigabyte have denied claims they've been talking about a merger - even though, by their own admission, they have discussed the possibility more than once.

iPods and other MP3 players look set to become much cheaper thanks to a dramatic decline in the price of NAND Flash chips. According to memory industry watcher DRAMeXchange, NAND Flash prices on the spot market have fallen by more than 50 per cent since the start of 2006. It said 2GBb and 4Gb NAND Flash chip prices fell by 63 per cent on average. Other parts saw their prices drop by at least 43 per cent.

Future incarnations of Bluetooth will be based upon ultrawideband (UWB), the wireless technology's steering organisation announced today. It said it will use the version of UWB specified by the WiMedia Alliance (WMA) to create a version of Bluetooth that will operate in unlicensed spectrum using chipsets scheduled to sample in Q3 2007.

Intel wants notebook component makers to agree to a series of connectivity standards to simplify the swapping of parts.

Earlier this month, the chip giant launched what it calls the Interchangeability Initiative to promote the idea.

Fujitsu has launched a 200GB Serial ATA 2.5in hard disk drive designed for notebook computers, the most capacious of its kind, the company claimed today. It said the drive's size makes it ideal for vendors who want to equip their laptops with PVR functionality, or for anyone producing "digital home appliance" products.