It's time to wave farewell to AMD's Athlon brand and welcome in its place... er... Phenom. According to online reports, that's what AMD is going to start calling its high-end desktop chips.

Intel is set to release in two months' time a version of its Core 2 Quad four-core processor that consumes less power than the chip available today.

It's the "world's fastest GPU", Nvidia claims, though it may not be long before AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT grabs the title from the GeForce 8800 Ultra, released today as forecast.

True believers and Golden Palace Casino take note: we have just received news that Our Lord has manifested himself in a four-gig Samsung Flash memory chip - complete with beard and ethereal "flower petal halo" effect.

Chip maker Nvidia can be seen striding around the graphics arena, arms raised, muscles flexed after giving Intel a mighty thrashing in the first-quarter contest. Nvidia wrested leadership of the desktop graphics market from the chip giant, Jon Peddie Research (JPR) revealed today.

Samsung has begun pumping out 16Gb (2GB) Flash storage chips, the first chip maker to do so, it claimed this weekend. It maintained the parts have almost double the speed off its current Flash offerings.

How do you tell a real hardware geek from a crowd of dilettantes? The genuine article will be found reading a review of over a hundred PC power supply units. As for the true hardware geek, he's the guy that wrote it...

AMD's anti-trust trial against Intel hasn't even started yet, and the companies are already pinching, scratching and pulling hair.

Two days ago, AMD's upcoming ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was given an early and unscheduled trip through the latest benchmarking software. Now it's the turn of the Radeon HD 2900 XTX.

Nvidia has updated its graphics-cards-in-a-box Quadro Plex VCS rendering unit to include workstation-class GPUs derived from the GeForce 8800 family.

With AMD's horrible first quarter now out in the open, analysts have started to deliver fresh data that documents just how much market share the chipmaker ceded to Intel in recent months.

Intel's share of the x86 processor market rose to 81 per cent during the first quarter, according to data from Mercury Research. That total is up from 74 per cent of the market in the previous quarter and 74 per cent again during the first quarter of 2006.

How will AMD's upcoming ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT perform. Pretty darn quickly, it would seem, if preliminary tests posted on the web ahead of the troubled chip maker's official release date prove correct.

Intel has extended its line of desktop dual-core Core 2 Duo processors, adding an extra model to the set limited to an 800MHz frontside bus and beefing up the cache size of a number of 1066MHz FSB versions.

Intel pruned its processor prices earlier this week, as anticipated. The cuts include knocking 38 per cent off the price of the Core 2 Quad and up to 40 per cent off Core 2 Duo CPUs.

Cash-starved AMD put out its hat on Monday, offering up to $2.2bn in convertible notes to help it raise money.

First IBM, then Intel, now Samsung. The South Korean chip maker today said it too was going to implement the 'Through Silicon Via' (TSV) technique to allow it to stack layers of chip dice more efficiently.

Intel once again increased its lead over arch-rival AMD during Q1, as its share of world x86 chip sales rose above 80 per cent - the first quarter it's done so since Q3 2005.

AMD is reporting today a first-quarter loss of $611m amid a price-war to hold market share won back from rival Intel. The loss is larger than analysts expected, and AMD chief financial officer Robert Rivet calls the performance "disappointing and unacceptable".

IDF How soon will we be merrily running our applications and games on four-core systems? Market watcher iSuppli reckons only a few will go quad-core this year, but by the end of 2009 - just over 18 months away - half of us will have takens that step.

IDF How might processors based on Intel's upcoming 45nm 'Penryn' architecture perform when compared to today's 65nm CPUs? The chip giant today posted test results to give us an indication of what to expect the Core 2 upgrade hits the market.