"We have decided to rebuild our ram line up using the best quality components available, from companies such as Micron and Infineon. We can now offer faster products at the same low cost "; said Armando Talamantez, VP Product Development.

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TechExtreme has posted a report on AMD's decision to cease production of some key CPU chips. The discontinuation notice was given Monday for the older 486 and 586 families, as well as a newer K6 line. More details on this story can be found here.
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VIA Technologies announced that it has commenced volume shipments of the VIA Apollo P4X266, the first core logic chipset on the market to leverage the industry-leading performance, compatibility, and low power consumption of high-bandwidth DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM for the Intel Pentium 4 processor platform. Here are some more details taken from VIA's press release:

The VIA Apollo P4X266 combines a high-speed 400MHz Front Side Bus with support for up to 4GB of high-speed DDR266 SDRAM to fully exploit the high bandwidth of the Intel Pentium 4 processor, yielding performance gains of up to 15% on industry standard benchmarks such as Winstone and Quake 3 demo when compared with equivalently configured systems featuring alternative core logic chipset and memory solutions.

With its support for DDR266 SDRAM, the VIA Apollo P4X266 optimizes system performance by doubling the memory data throughput to a peak bandwidth of 2.1GB per second while maintaining the same cost structure as PC133 SDRAM. It also enables OEMs and SIs to achieve significant savings in overall platform costs compared to Intel Pentium 4 processor based systems featuring RDRAM technology. Based on current pricing, RDRAM modules are more than twice as expensive as DDR or PC133 SDRAM modules with the same capacity.

To maximize the number of configuration options, the VIA Apollo P4X266 supports a choice of 423-pin and the forthcoming 478-pin versions of the Intel Pentium 4 processor, as well as PC133 SDRAM. It also comes with a host of additional performance features, including AGP 4X, ATA 100 support, and the high speed V-Link bus that doubles communication bandwidth between the North and South Bridge to 266MB per second.
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RAVISENT Technologies Inc. announced that Matrox Graphics Inc. will be shipping RAVISENT's CinePlayer DVD 4.0 with the retail and select non-retail versions of its new Millennium G550. CinePlayer offers a unique solution for decoding DVD, Video CD and MPEG-2 video streams, as well as CD audio, Dolby Digital AC-3, LPCM, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 digital audio formats, offering a completely new digital video and audio playback experience. More details on this can be found here, in the press release.
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