This, dear friends, is a sad, sad day. ATI, the name of hope for all PC gamers who were sick and tired of NVIDIA rebadging the same GPU over the past couple of years, is to be no more. The callous souls over at AMD have decided that our little consumer brains aren't sophisticated enough to handle two awesome brands, so they're just axing the use of the ATI moniker from here on out. Product line names will be retained, with the Radeon and FirePro branding still intact, but ATI Eyefinity will now be known as AMD Eyefinity. The first graphics cards to, erm, benefit from the new nomenclature will ship "later this year," and the whole thing is said to have been motivated by AMD's move to Fusion APUs  -- hybrid CPU and GPU chips -- where it's considered beneficial to have a unified branding strategy. Great, but did anyone consider the fact that the graphics wars will now be fought between two teams wearing green jerseys?

Explaining the differences between DRAM and non-volatile storage is about to get that little bit harder, thanks to Viking Modular. The company's decided to "borrow" the DIMM form factor for its latest enterprise SSD offering, equipping it with a 240-pin array to draw power from your spare memory slots. Of course, you'll still need to hook up a SATA cable to get data flowing to this SSD -- at a very respectable 260MBps for both read and write -- but we must admit we're in love with the very idea of it. This new design offers another option  for consolidating storage right onto the motherboard and should help case modders yearning for ever-slimmer enclosures. Alas, the SATADIMM is only available to enterprise and OEM clients for now, but we can't think of any reason why it won't test the consumer waters as well -- if not by Viking, maybe someone else?

It was a beautiful dream, and someone even went to the trouble of pushing some decent proof, but for now at least Valve is denying any Linux version of Steam in the works. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, when asked about the Linux Steam rumors, Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi dropped the word: "There's no Linux version that we're working on right now." Of course, things can change, or Valve could be lying to our face in the interest of a good surprise, but for now we're going assume the worst for our freedom-loving brethren. What, are those penguin tears we see? Don't cry, Tux. Don't cry.

The attempted revival of keyboard PCs  may not have exactly caught on in a big way, but it looks like modder Bart Reardon is certainly a fan -- so much so that he ripped apart a perfectly functional MacBook Air  in an attempt to make his own. While he's not quite finished yet, he has managed to get all the main components to fit under an Apple keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and he's apparently almost ready to replace all the tape holding it together with something more permanent. Hit up the source link below for a look at the complete build process.

Apple's iAd platform looked promising at first glance, and results are rewarding, but advertisers aren't thrilled with the creation process. Apple appears to still want to control and be a large part of the iAd forming process. The WSJ mentions for the greater part of July, just two of the seventeen launch partners of the iAd have achieved any ground with the new advertising platform.

The issues reported show that generally on the iAd platform the ads take eight to ten weeks to complete an ad, with two of the weeks consisting of Apple building the ad itself. This time frame is typically longer than other mobile ad services. Also, Apple does not mention of what audience the ad will be shown to, making the advertisements much more difficult to design. Companies prefer to target a specific audience, but without knowing where their ad is going to be shown it will be hit and miss without extra planning and design. Apple claims that this extra time is actually an advantage to the program, giving higher quality and better produced ads.

Nissan did show positive results from their ads already, with a spokeswoman saying they have seen "exceptional results to date." The company also says that the rate of users showing interest in the ads on the iPhone versus the online portion is 5:1. The Nissian Leaf iAd has a feature to change the color of the vehicle by shaking the iPhone. Interactive advertisement ideas such as that may be responsible for the positive results... More

Neowin and several other publications received the invite that asked us to "come see what HTC has dreamt up 15 September in London". The timing is significant as Microsoft is planning to launch Windows Phone 7 in October. It's possible that HTC may unveil their first Windows Phone 7 launch device.

Pictures of a pre-production HTC Mozart leaked earlier this month, fueling speculation this is the companies first Windows Phone 7 device. There's also talk of HTC introducing a new Android based tablet or a new Android phone - the Ace (HTC Desire HD). Stay tuned for September 15 to see what the company is planning.

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After a brief outage the Apple Store is back with the previously announced 12-core Mac Pro  (and revamped quad- and 6-core models) ready to order. Prices start at $4,999 for a pair of 6-core Xeon Westmere procesors humming along at 2.66GHz, 6GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, SuperDrive, and ATI Radeon HD 5770  graphics. We configured ours with a pair of 2.93GHz CPUs, 2x HD 5770 graphics cards, 32GB of memory, 4x 512GB SSDs, and pair of optical drives for $16,249 just 'cause we could. Ships in 7 to 10 business days... bankruptcy in 365.