Qualcomm's making its own chips now; based on the ARM processor architecture. The chip, code-named Scorpion, will run at 1GHz, & is intended for the mobile phone market. Dunno how well they're going to fare against Intel now that ARM's market presence has noticably shriveled...

"Scorpion, designed for implementation in a 65-nanometer manufacturing process, is intended for inclusion in mobile handsets where it would provide 'consumer electronics' features, as well as providing superior mobile performance at reduced power consumption, Qualcomm said."

Couple of interesting notes in this short piece over at DigiTimes. Though nothing "new," they do say that AMD has started sampling their M2 chips to the mobo manufacturers, & that NVIDIA will be releasing two new chipsets to go with the socket change.

."Except for the Manila series, the Windsor and Orleans lines will integrate AMD’s “Pacifica” virtualization technology, the makers noted. The dual-core Windsor CPUs will be part of AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 line, whereas the Orleans will be featured in the Athlon 64 series with the Manila to be part of the Sempron processor line, according to the makers."

DigiTimes is reporting that we're going to be seeing some new chips from Intel sometime soon. The releases should be followed by price cuts early next year.

"The Pentium 4 672 and 662, both which support virtualization technology, is to be introduced on November 13, and the Celeron D 355, which promises a boost in clock speed for the Celeron series, will be introduced on December 25, indicated the makers, who added that Intel will also be introducing a series of 65nm processors for desktop PCs and notebooks."

It's well known that in order to run Windows Vista well, you're going to need some decent graphics hardware; but what about the OEM market, whose PCs almost always have integrated graphics? Well, that's where the VIA KM890 steps in. In response to the increased hardware requirements VIA's newest integrated platform boasts DX9 support, & is aimed squarely at Vista.

"VIA Technologies today announced its VIA K8M890 core logic chipset featuring the new S3 Graphics DeltaChrome Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) core designed to meet the requirements of the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system and rising high definition video standards."