We saw a surprise announcement from ASUS and Gigabyte in a press conference that took place today in Taiwan where a new company is borned with a capital of NT$8B or US$244M. Gigabyte Channel Business Unit comprises of motherboards and graphics cards business is detached from Gigabyte and a new company is formed together with ASUS investing in it. The "old" Gigabyte will only comprises of networking communication, digital home and PC systems. The share allocation of the new company is 51% Gigabyte and 49% ASUS but the company name is not confirmed yet. The brand name of the products from this new company will still be Gigabyte and will start its operation from 2007 onwards. ASUS will continue as per normal selling ASUS branded motherboards and VGAs. Perhaps the new company will be called Gigasus.

Intel will unveil five models of its 65nm notebook-use Merom processors by the end of July, when the company will also launch its Core 2 Duo Conroe desktop CPUs, according to a July 17 report in the Chinese-language Commercial Times. However, despite the early launch, volume shipments of Merom CPUs are still expected to start in mid-August, following the original schedule, the paper said.

Aiming to counter pressure from the launch of Socket AM2 Sempron processors by rival Advanced Micron Devices (AMD), Intel plans to further cut the prices for the complete line up of its entry-level Celeron D processors in late October following a planned price reduction for the majority of the lineup on July 23, according to sources at Taiwan motherboard makers.

If you like to watch high definition video-- and we mean really, really like to watch it-- then Pioneer has a new 50-inch plasma on the market that promises unrivaled picture quality and realism -- for a pretty steep price. We first heard of the Elite PureVision PRO-FHD1 back at CES in January, where we instantly knew from the specs that this was a pretty special model: it delivers full 1080p resolution using over two million pixels that are just .576 millimeters across, features a 3,000:1 contrast ratio and 1,000cd/m2 peak brightness, and sports two HDMI, one DVI, and one component input.

 The AM2 Socket AMD launched recently still has it's fair share of supporters and users. We take a brief preview of DFI's upcoming offering of NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI packed in AMD's freshly baked AM2 socket. Yes, it is more of a Press Release/Advert, but we have left out most of the Marketing talk and focused on the juicy parts...