DDR3 spot pricing has been stable for several weeks; however, with several contract price increases the gap between spot and direct is narrowing.

In addition to a DRAM recovery, the NOR and NAND flash memory market has been extremely active. The volume of requests for Spansion and Numonyx flash memory has tripled over the last two months.

A new super central processing unit (CPU), jointly developed by Japan's big chipmakers and funded by the Tokyo government, is coming up to challenge Intel.

Converge has tracked increased demand from module manufacturers for 128x8 DDR2 chips, both in PC667 and PC800 speeds. However, there are mixed opinions on why the market has become so tight for these modules.

Converge also reports that demand for DDR3 modules remains strong, with supplies limited, and that Xeons and AMD Opterons are the drivers for cost savings in the CPU space.

AMD's first quarter earnings, as expected, show the amount of red ink on the company's balance sheet is growing. Still, there was a slight bump in processor revenues, though unfortunately the company's GPU business is still down.

AMD spin-off Global Foundries will take an "agnostic view" of the market according to its head of communications, Jon Carvill.

AMD plans to announce Tuesday that it will split into two companies - one focused on designing microprocessors and the other on manufacturing them. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms will inject at least US$6 billion into the two firms, mostly to finance a new chip factory that AMD planned to build near Albany, NY, and to upgrade one of the company's existing plants in Dresden, Germany.