Today our moles were hard at work. They have uncovered a couple of rumors for you to gobble up with your chocolate bunnies and peeps. The first concerns our old friends at NVIDIA. The rumor here is that they have decided to take Fermi GPU's that do not pass QA at any acceptable speeds and resell them to Matel for their new model of Easy Bake Oven.

Jen Sun Haung, NVIDIA's CEO was quoted as saying they felt that by using a Fermi over the traditional light bulb new owners would be getting a 50% decrese in cooking times. The new program will be dubbed TWIMTBB (The Way it's Meant to be Baked). Easy Bake Ovens with Fermi inside will hit the stores sometime in June. There was no word on pricing, but some sources are saying they expect the new Fermi based "nuclear" Easy Bakes to be over $200. An ASUS engineer was also quoted as saying "we can overclock it, too" while a source at GIGABYTE referred to needing more copper in the design.

Next up was an interesting rumor that was heard in the executive wash room over at Google.

Today the USB Implementers Forum held its Taipei SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference 2010 and we were in attendance at the event to check out all of the latest cutting-edge developments to come to the new USB 3.0 connectivity standard.

One of the exhibitors was ASMedia who is a Taiwanese IC maker. These folks were showing off one of the more exciting demonstrations in the exhibitor area. They had an ASUS powered system hooked up with a Crucial RealSSD C300 SATA 6Gbps SSD connected via USB 3.0. The SSD was able to be connected to the system via USB thanks to the use of an ASMedia USB 3.0 controller bridge device that translates SATA 3.0 to USB 3.0 data signals with the ASM1051 chip.

In the video above that we produced and uploaded to YouTube, you get a look at performance numbers of the same SSD hooked up via USB 2.0 with a direct comparison to the aforementioned USB 3.0 setup.

Any chance it gets, NVIDIA will take a stab at Intel and push the importance of the graphics processing unit over the traditional CPU for a whole range of computing tasks with modern computing. Especially when it comes to Intel's low-cost Atom processor platform, NVIDIA will jump through hoops on fire to bring the big Intel down whenever, wherever and however they can.

That is business though, don't mistake it and in this particular case, we like it - a lot. Microsoft just released its Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview and if you didn't know, IE9 will support GPU-accelerated HTML5, JavaScript and Direct2D technologies. Chris Pederson from NVIDIA in a video recently uploaded to YouTube, discusses the performance of a next-generation ION netbook compared to a standard netbook without ION graphics.

In a side by side presentation, Pederson shows off a few examples of how in the future consumers will want to have a system with adequate graphics to improve the changing Internet experience. Demonstrations are displayed such as map rendering and some test games from Microsoft and puts a very good light on ION equipped netbooks.

Today seems to be the day for world records to be broken in the performance area and probably loads of LN2 to be consumed around the world.

Corsair just sent out an announcement that using no less than eleven new Force F200 SSD drives with an Areca 1680i RAID controller (the same one I personally use - it's impressive!) were able to smash the PCMark Vantage world record by almost 2,000 points.

The previous record holder, SteveRo from Xtreme Systems, managed to score 31,333 PCMarks also with a new Intel Core i7 980X processor, but obviously not as many SSDs. The Corsair Labs team were able to score a new record of 32,947 PCMarks to beat the former best score by around 5%. You can see the results over at this page.

The folks over at GIGABYTE just clued us into this news and probably won't be happy we are breaking it before them, but that's news folks.

Using an upcoming motherboard known as the X58A-UD9 according to the ORB database, GIGABYTE were able to break the 3DMark Vantage performance world record by around 500 points and get itself right to the top of the list. GIGABYTE claimed in a recent phone call that they now have the "fastest desktop system on the planet". You can see the results at this page, which we managed to hunt down pretty easily.

The feat was naturally achieved with Intel's latest Core i7 six-core processor, the 980X. According to the ORB database, the processor was only clocked at 3818MHz, but that was no doubt a reporting error as I'm sure plenty of high octane LN2 and overclocking was involved. The video card used was a GIGABYTE HD5870 SOC, no doubt also running at insane clock speeds. More reporting issues were noticed with the video card with no clock speeds being reported and the card supposedly only having 1MB of memory - obviously another error there, too.

NVIDIA's new Fermi (GTX 470 and GTX 480) graphics cards have caused a fair bit of a stir in the video card market leading up to and post release last week; some in awe of their performance whilst others in disgust for a number of reasons.

But who would have thought one of NV's own partners, XFX would be so negative about the launch of these new cards that they'd go so far as to tell NVIDIA 'where to go', abandoning this new line-up of high-end cards altogether and refusing to give support; because that's apparently what's just happened!

It's becoming more clear that XFX has a more positive outlook on AMD/ATIs direction in the desktop graphics card market, at least at the high-end segment. In recent press content regarding XFXs Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition, it put the hurtz on NV with comments like "XFX have always developed the most powerful, versatile Gaming weapons in the world - and have just stepped up to the gaming plate and launched something spectacular that may well literally blow the current NVIDIA offerings clean away" and "GTX480 and GTX470 are upon us, but perhaps the time has come to Ferm up who really has the big Guns".

1981 was the year that the first ever annual Computex trade show was held in Taiwan and show organizers TAITRA are expecting another bumper year according to executives from the pre-show international press conference this morning.

Mr. Yen, executive director of TAITRA, commented that the 30th annual trade show to be held from June 1st through till the 5th is expected to see even higher attendance numbers due to a larger confidence in the ICT business compared to this time last April. He also noted in his speech that it is expected that more than 42% of international buyers will come from mainland China, noting that previously disallowed direct flights between the mainland and Taiwan have assisted those numbers.

Press gathered at the event were told that the technology trends for Computex Taipei 2010 are cloud computing, 3D displays, Google Android and e-reader devices. Yen commented that we could expect to see many (product) surprises from Taiwanese companies at this year's show in these product categories.

This afternoon TAITRA shipped ourselves and many other international press over to the MSI headquarters for a look at some of its new and upcoming products in the mobile space. This was after the Computex 2010 pre-show press conference that was held earlier today and we'll be covering that shortly.

While MSI was showcasing its full range of new notebooks, there were also some all-in-one systems on display. One that got our attention right away was an unreleased 3D capable all-in-one system called, err... it is still new and a model name hasn't been decided on yet. We covered it on video below for you guys to get a closer look.

Did we mention that the panel will also support multi-touch technology and come installed with Windows 7 Home Premium to make that work properly. The Chi Mei made Full HD panel is 23.6-inches in size and of course has a 120Hz refresh rate for the 3D part to work. The system comes with one set of active-shutter 3D glasses also from Chi Mei and extras will be able to be bought, but for what price we were not told. The 3D technology is provided from ATI with the installed Radeon HD 5730 video card.

Whilst not for certain, it appears Apple's next-gen iPhone will be dubbed the "iPhone HD" which they see fit due to the much higher resolution display of 960x640.

The latest news from sources are saying Apple intends to unveil the new iPhone and its accompanying iPhone OS 4.0 on Tuesday, June 22 this year, of which apparently there will be two versions of the phone to come out.

One version will be the standard GSM phone that's designed for networks like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Rogers (Canada), whilst a CDMA version will also be produced that's ideally suited to carries like Verizon, Sprint and Bell (Canada). The reason two separate iPhones had to be created is due to the limitation of the chip Apple is using that cannot provide dual-operation to work on both GSM and CDMA towers.

News first started to emerge of an upcoming monster 12-core processor from AMD some weeks ago after it was leaked by an online retailer. In fact, AMD today announced its new range of Opteron 6000 processors to the world. You can read that announcement over here at their press release.

The lucky lads over at AnandTech managed to get hold one of these new server based processors from AMD, specifically they got their hands on the Opteron 6174 model. Not only did that get one, but they got two along with the required other hardware to compare this 2.2GHz part against the latest Intel Xeon processors in a dual CPU configuration.

We won't spoil all the results, but as you can see from the highly multi-threaded Cinebench 11.5 rendering test above, the AMD system is able to provide very solid results. This is fantastic news for AMD who has struggled for years now against Intel's strong reign in the processor market space.