As we revealed earlier on today, AMD has decided to take its price war right to the gates of Chipzilla central and has further revised its pricing on the Athlon in a bid to make Intel hurt.

Our information is that AMD has decided to make the Athlon 700 its sweet spot -- cutting the price by a staggering 60 per cent next week.

Here is the latest distributor pricing, which will hit on the 28th of February next. OEM prices, for quantities of 1000, will be even less expensive.

The Athlon 550 is now terminated. The 600MHz will cost $190, the 650MHz $226, the 700MHz $270, the 750MHz $350, the 800MHz $530 and the top of the range model, the 850MHz Athlon, will cost $750 from next Monday.

Via Technologies fired back at Intel in one of the many lawsuits between the two companies as the Taiwanese chipset maker prepares the release of its first microprocessor.

Via this week said it disputes Intel's claim that it has violated the chip giant's intellectual property and said that it plans to contest the suit. The challenge was filed in a London court.

"We are going to vigorously fight the court actions that Intel has brought against Via," said Richard Brown, director of marketing for the company. "We strongly believe that the patent infringement claims they have made against us are totally without merit."

Spot DRAM prices in Korea are tumbling toward $5 per 64Mb unit, Asiabiztech reports.

What it calls the "benchmark 8Mb x 8, PC-100 chip" is currently trading in the $5.80-6.15 per unit range.

Falling prices throughout the first half of the year will mean that chip vendors are likely to cut back on production -- but not quite yet, according to industry watchers cited by AsiaBiztech. ®

Microsoft will unveil its would-be PlayStation 2 killer, X-Box, next month during the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California.

At least that's what UK trade title CTW is predicting. It reckons Bill Gates will play second fiddle to Lionhead co-founder (and look-alike to The Register's own Mike Magee) Peter Molyneux who will be on stage to demo his upcoming online multiplayer Black and White running on the X-Box.

Since X-Box is increasingly looking like nothing more than a low-end PC with a high-end processor and a black set-top case, such a launch is entirely plausible. Certainly the rumors of late do tend to suggest a finalization of the machine's basic spec at the very least.

Hardware News Round Up

We were privileged this afternoon to have a round table briefing from Dr Albert Yu, a senior VP at the Intel Corporation, and the man who unleashed a 1.5GHz on the world stage earlier today.

We had some of those pesky questions to ask him about the product, and in the process, unearthed some interesting anomalies.

Dr Yu refused to say how much on-die cache was on the processor he introduced today, would not give a delivery date for the product and when we asked him about the die size and how many additional transistors were on the Willamette, he said the die size was "slightly bigger" than the Coppermine.

However, he did say it was unlikely that when Willamette launches on the 1st October or thereabouts, it would reach such 1.5GHz speeds. He said: "It's unlikely it will launch at that speed. This is a very first raw look at the silicon."

Shares in Rambus Ink soared by over $40 on US markets today but no-one can exactly understand why.

Intel fired up a 1.5GHz Willamette at its bi-annual jamboree earlier today, confirming details of its throughput revealed here a fortnight ago.

But Willamette, despite the synchronisation of its bus speed suiting Rambus memory perfectly, will not exclusively use chipsets which just support that memory standard.

Paul Otellini, senior VP at Intel US, is on record as saying today that the company will offer both synchronous memory and Rambus in future chipsets, depending on what the market -- that is its PC customers -- want.

When Timna is introduced, it will be incorporated in sub-$600 devices but will include a subset of the 810 graphics capabilities.

And there's no way this solution, which hasn't appealed to many people because of its limited functionality, can be tweaked to switch the graphics function off, Intel confirmed today.

The inclusion of 810 graphics capability is also unlikely to appeal wildly to a number of third party graphics chip firms, which already feel that their margins are super slim and their market is over competitive.

Senior Intel VP Albert Yu has outlined Intel's roadmap for the rest of the year and promised that by next year, millions of Willamette processors will ship.

By the end of the year, 100s of thousands of Willamettes will be available, said Yu.

Earlier, during chairman Andy Grove's speech, Yu had demonstrated a system running at 1.5GHz, and showed a small chip which he said was a Willamette.

Yu said that Willamettte will use a 400MHz system bus, use Screaming Sindie 2, which will allow 128 bits (2 x 64) to be used by the floating point unit. The integer arithmetical logic unit (ALU) runs at twice the clock speed allowing for higher clock speeds, said Yu. Willamette is optimised for the Rambus platform.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the wraps off new iBooks and professional PowerBooks and bumps up speed of the Power Mac G4 line; the new hardware will be available immediately.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confounded naysayers during Wednesday's Macworld Expo/Tokyo keynote presentation when he took the wraps off new iBooks and professional PowerBooks and nudged up the processor speed of the Power Mac G4.

Jobs said all the new hardware will be available immediately through retailers and Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) online store.

Intel accuses Sun Microsystems of not being serious in supporting forthcoming Itanium chip.

Intel Corp. said today it is considering dropping Sun Microsystems from its roster of partners supporting Intel's upcoming IA-64 platform. Intel and Sun have a contract for Solaris on Itanium, which is the first member of Intel's IA-64 family and is due this year. But an Intel spokesman said that while Intel will honor that contract, it dropped Sun's name from its marketing materials in December and is already putting its resources behind other operating systems, including Linux and Project Monterey from IBM.

The spokesman confirmed published remarks by Intel executive VP Paul Ottelini, who told the San Jose Mercury News that Sun is not serious about supporting the Intel platform.

Symbian -- the consortium of cellular manufacturers Nokia (NYSE: NOK.A), Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERICY), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Matsushita and Psion Software -- will demo "Quartz," a color tablet-style device that shows streaming multimedia over existing GSM phoneworks, and "Crystal," a more PDA-like handset, at the Symbian Developer Conference and Exhibition, which starts Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif.

Samsung and Hyundai both announced high-speed SDRAM chips aimed at graphics card vendors, yesterday.

Hyundai's 2Mb by 32-bit double data rate SRAM cleverly comes in 3dfx-friendly 143MHz, 166MHz and 183MHz clock speeds, neatly matching the clock rates of the card vendor's current Voodoo 3 line-up.

The 0.22 micron chips are currently sampling, with volume production to follow next quarter. The parts will then ship at $15.50 per 1000; the current, sample price is $21.

Call it kiddie convergence. For the first time ever, the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere is dedicating an entire exhibit area to high-tech playthings. Will Barbie ever be the same?

Intel will this week begin to outline to software developers the reasons why they should start to take advantage of the additional multimedia/internet extensions in the next generation of its IA-32 processor, Willamette.

At the same time, the company will provide software developers with a number of tools and algorithms to optimize existing applications for the chips, which some say will debut on the 1st of October this year.

Developers are being advised to use the Fortran, C, and C++ compilers, said Kea Grilley, director of platform marketing of Intel's desktop products group, today.

We know from an Intel document that it will chop prices on its chips on February 28th. And now we learn that AMD will also slash its prices across all members of its Athlon range, and on the same day.

These will be the AMD prices on its premier Athlon K7 line of processors in a fortnight.

The 500MHz Athlon will drop to $54, the 533MHz to $70, the 600MHz to $189, the 650MHz to $243, the 700MHz Athlon to $344, the 750MHz Athlon to $474, the 800MHz Athlon to $672 and the newly released 850MHz to…err $850.

AMD is clearly doing rather nicely out of The Great Coppermine Shortage. The company announced on Friday it expects chip sales for the current quarter (due to end next month) to at least match, if not exceed, those of the previous three-month period.

That quarter included Christmas and all the extra spending on new PC kit that goes with it. Holiday quarters are typically so strong, they make for a slow sales between January and March. It's quite something to see this period's sales get close to those of the Christmas quarter, let alone match or even surpass them.

Taking a decidedly unconfrontational tone, AMD simply highlighted stronger than expected demand for low-end CPUs and "robust" trade across the range. AMD has done much of late to grasp the speed lead from Intel, but the company's currently much-expanded sales are really more down its arch-rival's weaknesses than its own strengths.

The Intel Developer Forum starts tomorrow but the chip company has already announced that there will be eight Itanium (Merced) systems being displayed at the bi-annual jamboree.

Compaq, Bull, Dell, Siemens Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC and Silicon Graphics as was will all show prototype server and workstation prototypes.

Just in case we blink and miss it by accident, Intel will claim that there are now thousands of prototype server and workstations using the Itanium chip and running OS's including 64-bit Linux, Monterey 64 and 64-bit Windows.

The FMD-ROM disc planned for release has 10 (!) layers, compared to a maximum of 2 for a CD, and maximum of 4 for a DVD. What’s even scarier about the disc, which is of the same size as a CD or DVD, is that it can store up to a massive 140GB!

A Hardware News Round up for the week from various sites.

Documents Intel has sent its system manufacturers are outlining its plans for the phasing in of the flip chip technology and the departure of the Slot One configuration (SECC2).

According to the documents, Intel will offer Slot One versions of its Coppermine processors within 30 days of offering equivalent processors in the FC-PGA (flip chip configuration). It will do so until the end of this year. The 1GHz frequency is likely to be the last in the Coppermine series. Intel has acknowledged it may not be able to provide wide availability of Slot One, however.

Intel is also scrapping three server motherboards based on the i820 and i840 chipsets, according to the inside documents, which were supposed to launch in the next couple of weeks. These, apparently, are called Pine, Hemlock and Willow and are server motherboards. Lancewood may be re-worked to support Coppermine processors. The memory translators for these chipsets do not work as well as Intel wanted. The chip giant could have redesigned the mobos, but instead has decided to recall the whole caboodle.

AMD has launched its 850MHz chip, the fastest Athlon to date, a whopping three days ahead of schedule.

Originally slated for a Valentine's Day debut, 850MHz -powered PCs are on sale from IBM, Compaq and Gateway today in the US.

It will take a little longer for delivery - Compaq is quoting upwards of 20 days overnight for its 850MhHz offering, the same as for the 800MHz, one webmaster informs us. Not so bad, when you consider the PC vendor is quoting 45 days overnight for delivery of Intel PIII 800s.

In OEM quantities (of 1,000), the Athlon 850MHz costs $849. ®

Connectix has been granted the right to resume shipments of its Mac-based PlayStation emulator, Virtual Game Station (VGS), more than a year after Sony launched its copyright and intellectual property infringement case against the developer.

The judgment, made yesterday by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also paves the way for the release for the Windows version of the emulator, which was in development throughout 1999.

The Appeals Court ruling reverses a preliminary injunction granted to Sony last April. That decision was centered on the District Court's acceptance of Sony's claim that Connectix used copies of the PlayStation BIOS in its VGS development program.

Via's Joshua chip is to be formally unveiled on 22nd February, according to company sources. The low-cost chip is aimed at Intel's Celeron, uses Socket 370, and will initially run at speeds of 433MHz and 466MHz.

Clock speeds of 500MHz and above are due later this year. With the launch of the chip Via will have the opportunity to prove that the low-cost Intel cloning market isn't automatically a bone-yard. Joshua is based on Cyrix's Cayenne core, Via having bought Cyrix from NatSemi last year. Cyrix had been relatively unsuccessful in making inroads into the market, as had Centaur, which Via also bought last year. .

It remains to be seen whether Via has sufficient extra advantages to be able to succeed where Ciyrix and Centaur failed, but greater integration opportunities and the rise of the appliance-like PC may help. Joshua is being fabbed at 0.18 micron by NatSemi.

IBM Wednesday will unveil a new generation of supercomputers it says offers a major performance increase by using IBM Power3 processors with copper interconnect technology.

Called RS/6000 SP, the new supercomputer will offer up to 20 percent greater performance than its predecessor, according to IBM (NYSE: IBM). IBM's supercomputers, which are generally very large and very expensive, tackle computing tasks that require enormous amounts of