After months of speculation, Nintendo has finally announced the last details of its next generation video game console – Wii. The Wii wil be released on November 19 of this year, and will go on sale at $250.

The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess remains the company’s flagship title, and a copy of Wii Sports will be packaged with each console. Like the GameCube before it, the Wii will once again not be launching with a Super Mario title. Nintendo expects to have 25 to 30 titles available for the console by the end of the year (just in time for Christmas, perhaps?).

Games included in Wii Sports include tennis, golf, baseball, and more, all of which utilize the Wii controller’s motion sensitivity. Each system comes with just one controller, and also includes a nunchuck attachment.

If you’re looking to pick up a Playstation 3, also on sale in November, good luck. Nintendo will be shipping approximately 4 million Wii units to the US by the end of the year, while PS3’s shipped to the US will be nearly half of that number.

The Nintendo Wii will also be much more affordable than the PS3, which will cost at least $500 for the lowest level model.

The battle of the game consoles is just beginning. Which one will you be buying? (or hoping to buy? or maybe hoping to receive as a Christmas present?)

While it is purely speculative, at the moment, word has been spreading that AMD may decide to drop the ATI brand name and label all products under the singular AMD label. Want to know what’s spurring the talk? Well, marketing manager for AMD, Richard Baker, has made it clear that AMD took over ATI and that it was not a merging of two companies. On top of that, the head P.R. guy at ATI, Chris Hook, has been quoted saying that he has “no emotional attachment” to the ATI brand. Are we about to see the end of the ATI brand? Only time will tell.

I’d personally be very surprised if they dropped any of those product names or the brand ATI itself.

Every single point in this News Flash is interesting so I’m just posting the full quote. It’s good to see that the rumors about the chipset licenses are not true. ATI got a big new friend now and everyone who runs an AMD CPU should consider ATI in the future .

On ATI’s Intel License: There is no truth to the rumor that Intel has pulled ATI’s chipset license. We continue to ship Intel chipsets under license.

On AMD’s commitment to GPUs: The merger with AMD reinforces ATI’s position as the world’s best GPU supplier. AMD is absolutely committed to maintaining and extending that leadership. The merger gives access to AMD technologies and resources – for example, custom memory design – which will raise performance and reduce costs, further increasing ATI’s competitiveness. Also, AMD has been extraordinarily effective in the channel, and access to their know-how, experience, and network, will be a powerful plus for ATI.

On Intel platforms: AMD acquired ATI so it could be the world’s number one graphics processor supplier. AMD is absolutely committed to supporting graphics on Intel platforms. Hector Ruiz, AMD’s CEO, made this completely clear on the conference call that announced the merger. He stated that AMD wanted to increase choice in the market, and that included ATI graphics on an Intel platform.

On the gift to Nvidia: Nvidia has seen the writing on the wall, and doesn’t like what it’s saying. The PC market is a tough place to be without any friends. ATI now has all the resources of AMD behind it, and will be producing faster, more compact GPUs and reaching the channel more effectively than ever before. Nvidia’s words are bravado, designed to confuse the market while the company tries to find a way to compete now that it’s standing alone.

Intel insiders have confirmed to DailyTech that the license for ATI to manufacture chipsets for the Intel bus has not been revoked. ATI’s board of directors recently approved a takeover bid from AMD which would make ATI a division of AMD if approved.

A report on The Inquirer yesterday claims “ATI had its chipset bus license pulled, or at least not renewed by Intel.” Aside from the fact that it is probably not legal for Intel to retract the agreement, the cross-license agreement between Intel and ATI has not come up for review either. It’s not impossible to fathom that Intel would opt to not renew the ATI cross-license agreement, but at this time the agreement is still working and will continue to function until an announcement is made by Intel and ATI.

This seems to be turning into an interesting story..

AMD & ATi have officially announced their plans to merge.

The rumour mill had been running for a good month or two about AMD planning to merge with ATi.

AMD have announced their merger under a “Processing Powerhouse” slogan.

According to AMD, the companies will become a new competitor, better equipped to drive growth, innovation and choice for its customers in commercial and mobile computing segments and in rapidly-growing consumer electronics segments. The transaction, valued at US $5.4 billion, is expected to close in Q4 2006 subject to approval by ATI shareholders, court approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

AMD and ATI will develop commercial platforms that deliver simplicity, stability, and manageability in graphics-rich and mobile environments. As a combined company, AMD and ATI will advance mobile computing by delivering integrated platforms that are designed to extend battery life while optimizing graphics and media processing. AMD and ATI will deliver highly-integrated, low-cost, power-efficient solutions to meet the expanding demands of billions of new users in emerging markets.

That’s an interesting evolution. AMD will encounter problems with the new Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and this seems to be a step forward to the battle.

No matter how advanced the technology is, sooner or later it will migrate to mainstream and even entry-level microprocessors. According to a report from an Asian web-site, AMD Sempron processors will acquire second core as early as in the Q3 2007, a year from now. “AMD’s entry-level processors will all feature dual-core architecture by the third quarter of 2007, when its last single-core CPU – the Athlon 64 – will start to be phased out in the market,” a news-story over DigiTimes web-site claims, citing industry sources.

The dual-core AMD Sempron chips, which are likely to be called Sempron X2, are expected to be produced using 65nm process technology, thus, will not consume a lot of power. Cache sizes and clock-speeds are unclear, however, the chips are to be compatible with socket AM2 and will feature dual-channel PC2-6400 (DDR2 800MHz) memory controller.

Sounds like the dual-core Technology will be something to count on. I still remember the Intel hyperthreading technology (HT) which weren’t that successful in the end.