Qimonda
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Infineon CEO wants to sell flagging Qimonda unit... badly
Little known tidbit for those not keenly watching the happenings at Infineon: the firm was forced to write down the value of its Qimonda stake by €1 billion ($1.57 billion) in April. Not surprisingly, Infineon's head honcho is about ready to rid the company of the flagging unit, making quite a few direct statements in a Germany daily saying as much. For starters, CEO Peter Bauer stated that "a complete sale is possible as is a sale of a minority stake," and he continued by affirming that it was already "speaking to financial investors and other companies in the industry." Just in case you had any doubts whatsoever that this cat was serious, he proclaimed that "[the firm] was working with utmost urgency on the question how to close the chapter on Qimonda as quickly as possible." Unrequited love at its finest.
Next-generation ATI Radeon cards to pack GDDR5 memory
A full six months after Samsung took the wraps off of GDDR5 memory, along comes word from AMD that the next-generation ATI Radeon graphics cards will boast said technology. Apparently AMD will be tapping Qimonda for its supply of GDDR5 modules, which should boost gaming performance as well as benefit stream processing, "where GPUs are applied to address complex, massively parallel calculations." As Hot Hardware points out, the release comes just weeks away from the rumored debut of the Radeon 4000 series, so if our deductive reasoning is sound, we'd surmise that the looming Radeon 4800 will indeed feature GDDR5.[Via Hot Hardware]
Sony and Qimonda form joint venture to design DRAM chips
Barely a fortnight after Sony disclaimed reports that it was pondering the sale of its PS3 chip production facilities, the firm has decided to partner up with Qimonda in a 50-50 venture "to design DRAM chips for consumer and graphics applications." The new entity will be dubbed Qreatic Design, will be based in Tokyo and is scheduled to start operating by the end of 2007. Of note, financial terms of the deal weren't released, but Qimonda's chief executive did state that the agreement would "support its future product design and solutions development and would further pave the way for product diversification in non-PC applications." [Warning: read link requires subscription]
