It looks like the reports of the closing of 3D Realms might have been exaggerated. According to the company itself (which just laid off the majority of its development staff) it will continue as a much smaller company.

The issue here is that just about everyone that was working on Duke Nukem Forever is gone now (they were part of the group that got let go). So what is to become of Duke? If the rumors are right then 3D Realms will try to find a partner to help them complete it. If not then Take Two's lawsuit might grab hold and Duke might get a new owner.

In the end since this new title has been in the works for as long as anyone can remember I have to wonder if it will ever see the light of day, much less your system.

nVidia is having a little bit of trouble with their insurance. It seems that after they had that little spot of trouble with the defective GPUs and MCPs in Dell, HP and Toshiba Laptops they made a claim on their insurance.

The problem is that they did not give any details of the issue. They simply sent a bill over and expected the money in return. To National Union Fire Insurance Company (NUFI) this was simply not good enough.

They asked for some more information so they could determine if this payout was proper and all was well. nVidia did not give them the requested information, and in some cases flat out refused to give it.

nVidia is jumping on the AMD bandwagon, well sort of. As of right now nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is saying that Intel is using anti-competitive pricing to prevent ION from entering the market.

Speaking at the Reuters Technology Summit Huang said that nVidia was not planning any legal action yet but that they "have to do whatever we have to do when the time comes". It seems pretty clear that this is a direct threat and not a simple statement.

Make no mistake the timing of this is not a coincidence either, this coming on the heels of the $1.45 Billion fine that Intel just receive shows that Huang feels this threat will motivate Intel to act differently towards ION.

GlobalFoundreis and T-RAM Semiconductor have entered into an agreement. The Agreement is a joint development agreement that centers around T-RAM's Thyristor-RAM embedded memory.

GlobalFoundries is excited (as is to be expected) about this as Gregg Bartlett, Senior Vice President of Technology and R&D at GLOBALFOUNDRIES stated "We are pleased to be jointly developing T-RAM memory for 32nm and 22nm technologies. T-RAM's embedded memory technology shows a great deal of potential for use in low-power, high-performance dense cache applications for advanced technology nodes."

The question now is what and whose advanced technology nodes will this new memory go into. There are still rumors that TSMC cannot get the 40nm process working right. So this could mean more business for GF if the persistent rumors are true. The Deal with T-RAM only makes things more attractive.

Dell has pushed a new 10.1-inch netbook out on the market under the Latitude name no less.

The new netbook will be called the Dell Latitude 2100 (to avoid confusion) and will be aimed at education, not gaming or entertainment.

The book will have some decent specifications if you are looking for something light-duty. There are options for an, antimicrobial keyboard ( to prevent the spread of disease I guess), A 10.1-inch LCD screen with a touch screen option, an Intel Atom N270 CPU and a choice of three operating systems - Microsoft Windows XP Home, Vista Home Basic or Linux Ubuntu. Pricing should start at around $369.

Yesterday we told you NVIDIA already had working silicon for the G300 GPUs, albeit very early A1 engineering samples. Now it looks like someone has spilled the beans and let us all know the clock speeds for the card.

As of now, the core is clocked at 700MHz, the shaders at 1600MHz, and the memory at 1100MHz. This gives the card a theoretical capacity of 2,457 GFLOPS and 281.6GB/s memory bandwith, which is quite impressive.

NEC has introduced the world's first USB 3.0 host controller, the µPD720200.

The new host controller supports the finalized SuperSpeed USB standard, allowing for transfer speeds up to 5Gbps and is fully backwards compatible with all previous USB standards.

NVIDIA is working hard to get their next generation cards ready to go and they already have the A1 batch of engineering samples taped out.

All is not well however as the company is having issues with the 40nm manufacturing node of TSMC. TPU says that NVIDIA is looking for someone to manufacture the chips in an attempt to alleviate this problem.

With ION raging about the ability to play 1080p video on a 10-inch screen we see what may be a much more attractive option coming out of a rumored Acer box.

The netbook in question could be called the Acer Aspire On 571 (not to be confused with 751). It features a Atom N280 (1.66GHz) and a Quantics Q1721 Multimedia Processor, this will take the burden of encoding and decoding the H.264 media content off of the CPU. The 10.1-inch display is a full 720p (which is more than enough on a 10-inch screen)

no word on pricing or when this will hit the streets but it looks promising.

Super Talent has released a new firmware upgrade for their UltraDrive SSDs and have also announced that all new UltraDrive SSDs are shipping with the new firmware.

The new firmware, version 1370, provides an increased maximum sequential read speed for both the UltraDrive ME and UltraDrive LE, bumping them up to 260GB/sec maximum. Sequential write performance has also been increased, driving the UltraDrive ME to 200GB/sec maximum and the UltraDrive LE to 210GB/sec maximum. Because of the increased performance, Super Talent is touting the drives as the "fastest SATA 3Gb/s SSDs in a small 2.5" form factor."

The upcomming Crosshair III Formula motherboard from ASUS has been spotted in the wild and the board is expected to debut at this year's ComputeX.

The Crosshair III Formula features the AMD 790FX chipset while the previous board utilized the nForce 780a SLI chipset. As this board only has two PCIe X16 slots, it will only support CrossFire and not SLI.

In more netbook news the Asus EEEPC 1008HA Seashell should hit the world market on the 18th. This thin offering from Asus has caught the attention of many websites over the last few days and seems to be one of the best out right now.

Of course you cannot have a premium product without a premium price. The Seashell will retail for about $429.

Specs should be an Atom N280 (1.66GHz) 1GB DDR2 800 RAM, 160GB HDD, 10.1-inch screen (1024x600) WiFi (b/g/n) Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a couple of USB ports. Battery life is looking to be around 6 hours, not too bad for what you are getting.

Some food for thought today, especially on the heels of the Intel Anti-Trust fine. It seems that RealNetworks is filing an Anti-Trust complaint against the MPAA and the DVD Copy Control Association.

The complaint alleges that the studios together with the DCCA conspired to control DVD media. This represents a horizontal conspiracy. To make matters even more interesting RealNetworks uses the MPAA's own testimony in recent court proceedings against Real as proof of this.

Read more here

Also at the MSI notebook press conference held earlier today in Taipei we saw MSI's U200 based Intel Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform running Windows 7 Ultimate RC build 7100, alongside a bunch of other MSI mobile products.

The U200 managed to score a Windows 7 performance score of 2.8 which is slower than the netbook running Vista which managed to score 3.2. This may just come down to the fact that the Windows 7 system is using less mature drivers or the system may not have been configured fully.

Jointly with Intel and Microsoft, MSI held a pre-Computex press conference earlier today in Taipei to unveil its range of X-Slim notebooks including the X340 (13"), X400 (14") and X600 (15.6"). They aren't a slim as American maker Apple has got their products, but they are still pretty impressive.

The star of the show and the product which got the most snaps by fellow media was MSI's upcoming U200 netbook. You may be familiar with MSI's U100 series of netbooks using Intel's famous low power Atom processor. The U200 netbook is based on Intel's Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform and we were lucky enough to get hands on with it.

For those that were hoping to keep AGP alive for a little longer I have some bad news. A recent ad on Amazon for a Powercolor HD4770 AGP card was a typo and nothing more.

The gang over at Fudzilla contacted Powercolor and they responded saying they had no plans for an AGP flavor of HD4770. They did admit to thinking about an AGP 4600 but nothing else.

It seems that although AGP is still out there, it is not going to get the top latest 40nm from ATi.

After Intel got hit with a $1.45 Billion fine AMD of course was going to have its say.

What did AMD say? Well about what you would expect them to, they said that Intel was evil and they got what they deserved. Of course the failed to mention that they gave Michael Dell a huge break per CPU to get the Dell business in the US back in the Athlon 64 days. They also forgot to mention that they jacked up the prices of the retail CPUs to help pay for this little discount.

But hey who remembers all that...

Intel got a serious slap in the face from the EU as they levied a $1.45 Billion (yes with a "B") US Dollar fine on them for violating Anti-Trust Laws.

The 9-year investigation was kicked off when underdog AMD complained to them that Intel was unfairly forcing them out of the market. Now I will say that Intel has some...interesting marketing practices but are they really any different from any other manufacturer?

I mean NewEgg offers rebates, CDW offers customer loyalty benefits as does Dell. I can actually remember being offered a 48-Inch LCD TV from Dell if I bought a large server purchase before the end of the month.

We've just been sent a rather interesting picture from a Taiwanese motherboard maker.

After MSI announced its first motherboards with Power Over eSATA recently, we just had to get a look at one of the compatible cables to get a full grasp of the technology. And as it turns out, it seems like MSI isn't the only one to take on the new eSATA concept released by SATA-IO earlier this year.

The shot below is of a Power Over eSATA cable that bridges from a single eSATA port to a connector that includes the normal SATA power and data connectors. You'll end up seeing cables like this at the start and later "normal" single eSATA cables that transmit both data and power.

There is an interesting article over at Fudzilla that should be of importance to gamers. It seems that Intel's Turbo Mode (which dynamically overclocks a single core in the event of a non SMP/SMT aware application) can push the new i7 975 up to 3.6GHz.

For some reason Fudzilla seems to think this has something to do with the overclockability of the CPU. This is simply not the case. It is just an advanced more to recover performance for single core only applications and games.

Read more here