A Panasonic internal Blu-Ray Disc writer will ship in June, the electronics giant has said, but like the similarly spec'd models announced by IO Data, the LF-MB121JD isn't going to come cheap.

Sapphire is to rename its water-cooled ATI Radeon X1900 XTX-based video cards. Out goes the 'Blizzard' moniker, replaced by the less appropriate 'Toxic', the graphics card company announced this week. Britney Spears may like it, we guess...

Storage specialist IO Data has said it will ship internal and external Blu-ray Disc writers in just over a month's time. The company said it will launch the two products in Japan and the US simultaneously.

Seagate is on the verge of announcing a 3.5in desktop hard drive with a capacity of 750GB - increasing the Barracuda 7200.10 line's maximum storage space by 50 per cent. Seagate hasn't formally announced the 750GB model, but it is already beginning to appear on the company's marketing material.

Intel appears to be preparing to release a second low-end Pentium D 9xx processor next quarter, in addition to the anticipated 925 chip that turned up on company roadmaps earlier this year. The two desktop dual-core processors lack support for Intel's Virtualisation Technology (VT).

Intel has quietly introduced a pair of 'Yonah'-based ultra-low voltage processors, both of which are believed to consume no more than 5.5W, but contain only one processing core and run over a reduced 533MHz frontside bus.

Intel will drive the adoption of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) with the introduction of 'Santa Rosa', the next generation of its Centrino notebook platform, it has been claimed. So far, the only Intel-based machines on the market that use EFI instead of older BIOS technology are Apple's latest desktops and notebooks.

Rambus saw is first-quarter income slide despite a year-on-year jump in sales, the memory technology developer announced last night. Revenues for the three months to 31 March 2006 reached $47.2m, up 36 per cent on Q1 FY2005's $34.7m and up 13.5 per cent on the previous quarter's $41.6m.

AMD has reportedly rescheduled the release of its Socket AM2 platform, bringing forward the launch date from 6 June to 23 May, the better it seems to get as much of a lead on Intel's next-generation architecture processor, 'Conroe', as possible.

Seagate has updated its Cheetah 15K enterprise-oriented hard disk drive line-up with a model that incorporates perpendicular recording technology and takes the 15,000rpm drive family's capacity to 300GB - more than double the current top-of-the-line model's 147GB.

Nvidia has formally unveiled the GeForce Go 7900 mobile graphics chip family notebook maker Toshiba pre-announced last month. Then, Toshiba debuted a laptop based on the 7900 GS - today, Nvidia added the 7900 GTX to the line-up.

AMD is working on a way to make a multi-core processor appear to the host operating system as a single-core chip, it has been claimed. If true, the move turns on its head the drive to develop multi-threaded apps the better to take advantage of multiple cores.

ATI has denied claims that it has scaled back or postponed its plan to adopt an 80nm chip fabrication process this year. Industry insiders had alleged two GPUs due to ship in Q3 will now be fabbed at 90nm and not the smaller node as planned.

Nvidia's next-generation single-chip integrated chipsets have begun to appear on the company's roadmap, with three SKUs pitched at the upper and lower reaches of the mainstream-system, and the value-system market segments.

ATI has posted the latest version of its Catalyst drivers. Release 6.4 incorporates Linux support for the chip maker's Radeon X1300, X1600, X1800 and X1900 GPUs, and tweaks video quality on Windows systems courtesy of a few adjustments to the Avivo engine.

Do AMD and Intel have something to tell us? Is their cutthroat rivalry a sham? Are they really in business together? If online retailer Ebuyer.com's website is anything to go by, the two chip makers must be in cahoots.

Intel's as-yet-unannounced Celeron M 4xx series - the first budget-priced processors derived from the chip maker's 'Yonah' core - have gone on sale in Japan, according to local news sources.

ATI is preparing to release a cut-down version of its Radeon X1900 XT and XTX GPUs, reducing the chip's pixel shader complement from 48 to 36 and knocking back its clock speed. The part will ship as the Radeon X1900 GT, it has been claimed.

ATI has formally renamed its Radeon Xpress 200 chipset to CrossFire Xpress 1600, the company's website reveals. Such a move had been anticipated - a number of motherboard makers have already begun cutting and pasting the new name into existing product documentation.

BenQ is to sell its optical drive operation to fellow Taiwanese manufacturer LiteOn IT. This gets it closer to shedding the last of its component businesses and focus entirely on end-user products, including phones, notebooks and consumer electronics equipment.