Sumner Lemon

Taiwanese hardware maker Giga-byte Technology Co. Ltd. has stumbled upon a faster way to boot up PCs based on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system. Giga-byte's iRam is a PC add-in card with four DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic RAM memory) slots that's designed to be used as a PC drive. Because the iRam uses DRAM rather than a hard-disk to store information, data can be retrieved from the drive up to 60 times faster than is possible with a hard drive, according to Giga-byte, which showed the board at the Computex exhibition in Taipei this week.

Hoping to take a larger share of the global market for computer processors, Via Technologies Inc. announced that its latest chip, the C7, will soon go into mass production. The C7 will initially be available in 1.5GHz and 1.8GHz versions and offer substantially more processing power than the company's existing C3 chips.

China's largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), is close to finalizing the terms of a loan worth up to US$600 million, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Taiwanese hardware vendor Via Technologies Inc. plans to introduce a range of low-cost computer designs aimed at users in emerging markets, a company executive said Wednesday. The designs are part of a Via project called Terra PC and will be unveiled at the Via Technology Forum (VTF), scheduled for the first week of June in Taipei.

Lenovo Group Ltd. announced Sunday that its acquisition of IBM Corp.'s PC unit has been completed, saying the process was finished ahead of schedule.

Two Americans have been sentenced to jail in Shanghai for selling pirated DVDs over the Internet, China's state-run media reported Wednesday. Randolph Hobson Guthrie III, Cody Abram Thrush and two Chinese accomplices were charged with selling pirated DVDs for US$3 per disc over eBay Inc.'s auction Web site and another site, called Three Dollar DVD, according to the official China Daily newspaper.

A report by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has rebuked several countries, most notably China, Japan and India, for hampering the access of U.S. companies to their domestic markets for telecommunications services and equipment.

Lenovo Group Ltd. likely offered concessions to U.S. government officials in order to win approval for its US$1.75 billion acquisition of IBM Corp.'s PC business, but any deal is unlikely to have a negative impact on the Chinese company's business, analysts said Thursday.