Elpida Memory on August 6 announced that it has reached an agreement with Qimonda, which is now in insolvency proceedings, to acquire the Germany-based chipmaker's technology licenses and a portion of the design assets related to graphics DDR (GDDR) chips.

Micro-Star International (MSI) has recently launched AMD 785G chipset-based motherboards. The MSI 785G series motherboards feature MSI's Active Phase Switching (APS) technology to allow automatic power-usage adjustment based on system loading, the company highlighted.

Average global pricing for commodity electronic components is expected to rise by 2.3% sequentially in the third quarter of 2009, thanks to shortages and resulting price hikes for memory chips, according to iSuppli. With DRAM accounting for 9.1% of global semiconductor revenues in 2008, the price increase in this area is having an inordinate impact on overall component costs.

Nvidia has announced that Hewlett-Packard (HP) is adopting up to two Tesla GPUs in its Z800 workstation for the high-performance computing market.

Worldwide sales of semiconductors for second-quarter 2009 totaled US$51.7 billion, up 17% on quarter but still 20% lower than the US$64.7 billion reported for second-quarter 2008, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). In June, the sales continued sequential growth to US$17.2 billion.

Spot prices of both DRAM and NAND flash enjoyed a big sequential jump this week (July 27-31) upon news that Samsung Electronics raised its DDR2 prices and Toshiba suffered from a power outage at its NAND flash fab, according to inSpectrum.

Production cutbacks and demand for restocking inventory from emerging markets pushed up NAND flash ASPs by about 20% sequentially in the second quarter of 2009, according to DRAMeXchange. The price rally contributed to major NAND flash suppliers' revenue growth for the quarter.

Micron Technology has announced what it claims to be the industry's first DDR3 load-reduced, dual-inline memory module (LRDIMM) for servers. The new LRDIMMs will be manufactured using Micron's 1.35 volt, 2Gb 50nm DDR3 memory chips.

VIA Technologies has announced that Aaeon Technology has adopted its C7 and Eden processors in its the latest ETX motherboard.

Storage and networking solution provider LSI has launched a new generation of MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller cards based on 6Gb/s SAS technology and announced its new channel strategy for worldwide customers.