It looks like Nvidia is continuing to burn bridges with possible clients in its bid to continue its stiff competition with ATI.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has accused Intel of unfair chip pricing even though he also daid that his company will not be filing any antitrust lawsuits against the top chip maker.

Huangs pronouncements may be considered strange considering that the company is in a partnership with Intel in making graphics chips that are paired with the Atom. Huang said that Intel sells the Atom for $45 but a three-chip set is sold at $25 as a way of “luring business away.” Huang said that this practice is unfair and that companies like Nvidia should be able to compete and serve the market.

Although Huang has a point — Intel was recently ordered by the European Commission to pay a fine of 1.6 billion euros for its illegal competition practices against rival Advanced Micro Devices — saying something negative against a company you’re currently in business with would still raise eyebrows.

Hewlett-Packard along with its Compaq division has recently issued a recall of approximately 70,000 notebook PC batteries because of fears that these batteries could overheat.

The lithium-ion batteries that are contained in certain notebook computers were the subject of two reports that were submitted to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission as well as Health Canada. The said reports were said to contain examples of minor property damage.

The batteries affected by the recall were those manufactured between August 2007 and March 2008. Among the computer models that likely contain the faulty batteries are:

HP Pavilion
dv2000
dv2500
dv2700
dv6000
dv6500
dv9000
dv9500
dv9700
dv6700

Compaq Presario

A900
C700
F700
V3000
V3500
V3700
V6000
V6500
V6700

HP Compaq

6720s

The recalled batteries will also have the following barcode levels. Please note that the ^ denotes any letter or number in the code:

62940^^AXV^^^^
65033^^B7U^^^^
65033^^B7V^^^^
65033^^BGU^^^^
65035^^B7U^^^^
65035^^B7V^^^^
65035^^BGU^^^^
65035^^BGV^^^^
67059^^V8U^^^^
67059^^V8V^^^^

It is interesting to note that the last time a battery recall happened, which was in 2006, it began a series of recall announcements from a number of companies. This means that this could be the beginning of a massive recall move from other companies as well.

Despite the tight worldwide economic crunch, Seagate announced that it expects to a good showing for its quarterly revenue because of an increased demand for hard drives.

Based on its preliminary third quarter results, Seagate said that it expects to post $2.1 billion in revenue for the third quarter ending April 3. This is bigger than its expected target of between $1.6 to $2 billion.

Seagate is citing the good performance to the increased market demand for 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch ATA drives. The company is now expecting that its fourth quarter earnings will again exceed expectations with earning of between $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion.

The global economic crisis is really making its presence felt in the computer hardware industry with the regular news of company reorganizations and various measures being undertaken to weather the economic storm.

One significant news that has come out recently is Taiwan’s decision to set up a new company that aims to band together various local memory chip manufacturers and infuse it with technology that it will get either from Elpida of Japan or Micron from the US.

The Taiwan government is spearheading this so called restructuring the the country’s dynamic random access memory manufacturing sector in the hopes of helping it get its footing and make it more stable because at present, it is suffering from heavy financial losses in the last few quarters because of so much oversupply.

The foundations of this move was actually begun last December when Taiwan’s top DRAM makers, namely Powerchip, Nanya Technology and ProMOS, began working with the government on formulating a restructuring plan that would lead to proposals to team up with Elpida and Micron.

The new company will be called Taiwan Memory Company and this new entity will initiate and continue research, production and brand marketing so that it could better compete with the leading global players like Samsung and Hynix.

It really surprised me when I read the news that Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will be holding a joint press conference next week. What floored me was Intel’s decision to go into partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC is considered as on of the largest semiconductor foundries in the world and has been manufacturing chips for other companies that do not have their own fabrication plants like nVidia.

At this point no one knows what the partnership will entail. There’s talk that the Atom or one of its other processors may be outsourced to TSMC as it prepares to upgrade all of its fabrications plants over the next two years to the tune of $7 billion. Intel has already closed older manufacturing sites as preparation for this improvement project. There is also talk that intel will leave the production of 200 mm wafer fabrications to TMSC, leaving Intel to concentrate on the leading edge 300 mm wafer production.

I can’t wait for the announcement on Monday.