HARD DRIVE DATA density has taken another leap forward, although this time it’s thanks to Samsung, of all companies, as it latest EcoGreen F4 2TB hard drive features no less than 667GB of storage space per platter. That means that you only need three platters to create a 2TB drive, something Samsung’s competitors have yet to accomplish.
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ONE OF THE steps that any manufacturer of USB compliant devices has to pass is getting certified by the USB-IF so that the USB device is proven to be compatible with the USB standard. This has been one of the big hindrances for USB 3.0 solutions and it seems to be holding back Taiwanese manufacturers of USB 3.0 ICs to the degree that we won’t see any significant shipments of USB 3.0 compliant chips from Taiwan this year.
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AS MUCH AS Intel wants to get into tablets and smartphones it seem to be an uphill struggle for the company. The problem is that Intel is anything but the only manufacturer of chips that go into these types of devices. ARM and its partners have something of a lead here. As such it looks like Intel is going to have to come up with something extraordinary to convince partners to move away from ARM and onto its x86 platform for these types of devices.
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WATERCOOLING, THE CHOICE of, well at least some overclockers, but it seems to be mostly used as a marketing tool these days without any real market penetration. Kingston has just announced three sets of HyperX H2O memory modules (which we spied back at CES), all of which feature support for water cooling. We just can’t quite figure out who is going to buy these new modules.
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ATOM MOTHERBOARDS MIGHT not be the most exciting products around, mostly because they don’t tend to differ all that much from each other. Gigabyte’s latest Atom board, the GA-D425TUD and HA-D525TUD are some of the first Atom D425 and D525 boards we’ve seen with DDR3 memory support, with more likely to follow.
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IF YOU THINK USB 3.0 is fast, think again, Gigabyte has announced that it’s delivering support for UASP or USB Attached SCSI Protocol which is set to boost the data transfer rate for compatible UASP devices by as much as 20 percent over the current USB Mass Storage specification that has been the standard so far.
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NETWORKING OVER POWERLINES has yet to become a huge hit and it suffers from the same theoretical maximum speeds as Wi-Fi, but that hasn’t stopped the HomePlug Powerline Alliance from moving forward with further improvements to HomePlug AV. The continuation of the standard is of course called HomePlug AV2 and we can’t quite figure out why it’s not called HomePlug HD or 3D, as everything these days seems to include one of those terms or it’s just not hip enough.
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WE’RE STILL AT least a couple of months away from AMD’s Ontario announcement and even longer from Llano, but some very early performance figures have tipped up online courtesy of, well, distributed computing. To be more precise details of various distributed computing apps being tested on AMD Llano and Ontario systems have appeared on BOINC or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing if you prefer.
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IS THAT 32GB SSD getting a bit on the small side? Not to worry, Super Talent has announced that it’s getting ready to ship its new UltraDrive MX range which tops out at no less than 480GB. That should be enough space to compete with most notebook hard drives at least, but the real question is, can you afford one?
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ACCORDING TO Digitimes, AMD is getting ready to sign a deal with Renesas that will give AMD access to Renesas USB 3.0 implementation. This would allow AMD to quickly implement a stable USB 3.0 solution into its chipsets without having to spend time and money on developing its own solution and more importantly, software stack.
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THE RUMOURS OF Apple’s new products proved to be mostly right, at least up to a point. We’ve got new CPUs and graphics cards in most of Apple’s line-up and the new 27-inch monitor materialised alongside with the Magic Trackpad. What we didn’t expect was the Apple Battery Charger, a product that has clearly been missing in Apple’s product range.
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IF YOU’VE BEEN putting off buying a new shiny iMac or Mac Pro you might just have done yourself a favour, at least if the rumour that Apple is set to unleash a wealth of updated products tomorrow are true. So what are Apple’s fanboys and fangirls hoping will be unveiled tomorrow? Well, a lot of new kit with shiny new features, that’s what.
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AMD SEEMS TO be having a bit more luck with notebook manufacturers these days as its most recent mobile processors are turning up here, there and everywhere. The latest sighting is in the latest 11.6-inch notebook from Dell, the Inspiron M101z that have quietly made an appearance on Dell’s UK website.
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IF WE’RE TO believe what is meant to be Intel presentation slides of its upcoming Sandy Bridge processors that were embedded in a video posted on YouTube by HKEPC, it looks like Intel’s LGA-1155 processors will have very limited overclocking potential. The reason for this is because Intel decided to “help” with the cost cutting by implementing a clock generator built into the chipset, rather than relying on an additional chip on the motherboard.
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THERE HAVE BEEN a lot of demos of dual screen notebooks over the past couple of years by several different companies, least not by the Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, but as things turns out; Toshiba is set to be the first company to actually offer a retail product in the shape of the Libretto W100.
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