The new generation of Intel's Atom platform that was codenamed Oak Trail is now shipping and will being appearing in devices next month.

Nokia is selling its wireless modem business to Japanese chipmaker, Renesas Electronics Corporation for $US200m along with 1,100 employees and the two will form an alliance to develop modem technologies for HSPA+/LTE and its evolution.

A chip company is set to demonstrate its USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chip this week, and a research firm is tipping adoption of the new standard beginning next year with rapid takeup.

In an earnings season when stocks go up if a company posts results that are not as bad as expected, giant chipmaker Intel has joined its financial and healthcare brethren Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson in beating market estimates for Q2. As a result, Intel's stock has soared and could point the way to a market recovery.

The forthcoming 'Pine Trail' Atom chips will deliver smaller, thinner, lighter netbooks with longer battery life, Intel has promised. And desktop PC chipset changes will take HD video into the mainstream.

Number two microprocessor player AMD is gleefully digging the knife into its much larger rival Intel over the US$1.45 billion fine imposed by the European Commission for antitrust activities. AMD, which has never had much higher than 20% market share is playing the EC ruling for all its worth, stating every single case where Intel is said to have abused its dominant market position.

Chip heavyweight Intel has announced a new line-up of its low power Atom processors specifically designed for in-car devices as well as Internet phones. The move comes as widespread processor usage spreads out of compute specific environment to Internet edge devices.

NICTA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre, has held the first public demonstration of a prototype system using a 60GHz Gigabit wireless (GiFi) chip technology. The demonstration of wireless technology claimed to be an order of magnitude faster than anything to date comes after a research effort spanning four years, involving a team of 15 researchers.

Intel has demonstrated a working 32nm-based microprocessor which will be used in mobile and desktop systems slated for production in the fourth quarter of 2009. The new Westmere processors will include a 6-core, 12 thread range code-named Gulftown and promises increased performance over the current Core 2 models.