WE’LL FORGIVE YOU if you don’t know who Coolaler is, but as the story goes, he’s one of the best overclockers in the world. He also has a very active website and forum in his home country of Taiwan and from time to time benchmarks of unreleased hardware end up there. This time around one of the forum members has posted benchmarks of AMD’s Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition.
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SUPER TALENT MIGHT not be the most well known brand when it comes to SSDs, but the company has been coming out with some interesting products and was one of the first to show off a PCI Express based SSD. However, its latest products are going after those who would like to get an SSD but have a really tight budget.
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IT APPEARS THAT rumours of Intel delaying its ultra low voltage Core i5 and Core i7 UM-series processors were off target, as the announced models will be appearing in notebooks this month. Fujitsu already has a 12.1-inch notebook on sale in Asia with the Core i7-640UM processor and other manufacturers are getting ready to launch their new notebooks.
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ALTHOUGH SOMEWHAT BEHIND its main competitor, AMD has today revealed its Turbo Core technology that allows for automatic overclocking of CPU cores under the right conditions. It will only apply to AMD’s upcoming Thuban based Phenom II processor, although we’re fairly certain that we’ll see this technology making its way into other product lines from AMD in the future.
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WHILE MICROSOFT DECIDED to ditch multitasking support in Windows Phone 7, Apple is getting ready to add it to iPhone OS 4 which is set to launch sometime this summer. However, as always when it comes to Apple, everything isn’t quite what it appears to be and this isn’t your common garden variety of multitasking.
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WE ALSO MANAGED to dig up some pictures of MSI’s upcoming 870A-G54 AM3 motherboard which is based on AMD’s 870 chipset and SB850. This looks set to be MSI’s first AMD motherboard with support for both USB 3.0 and SATA3 6Gbps, although the latter is of course a standard feature of AMD’s SB850.
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OUT OF THE three big motherboard manufacturers, MSI has been the most reluctant to add onboard USB 3.0 and SATA3 support to its motherboards, but the company is now getting ready to launch its first product with both features and it looks like it will be an Intel P55 based motherboard.
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LAST FRIDAY HTC unveiled its entry-level Smartphone, aptly named the Smart. It’s running Qualcomm’s Brew platform and is powered by a 300MHz Qualcomm ARM processor. However, what we’d like to tell you about is not the new handset, but instead what happened during the press event inside the Taipei 101.
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DATA ROBOTICS GAINED a lot of interest from both the media and the public when it launched its first Drobo product a few years ago, as its BeyondRAID technology made it easy for the general consumer to get an external, expandable storage solution. Now the company is back with a solution that offers the same features, but with network connectivity, namely the Drobo FS.
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DURING THE USB-IF developer’s conference we had a chat with a representative from Texas Instruments, as the company was demoing various upcoming USB 3.0 solutions, including a USB 3.0 hub design, a USB 3.0 repeater and USB 3.0 to SATA bridge solutions.
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SO FAR THERE has only been a single USB 3.0 host controller in the market, but this is about to change once the Fresco Logic FL1000 arrives. The new host controller is already being implemented on an upcoming motherboard from ASRock and we’ve got the first exclusive pictures of this new board and controller.
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THE MERGER BETWEEN NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology culminated today with the start of Renesas Electronics, which is the name of the new company. Renesas Technology was a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer, while NEC Electronics was a separate division of NEC that focused on semiconductor products. The new company is Japan’s largest and the world’s third largest semiconductor manufacturer.
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IT’S PRETTY INTERESTING what you can find out at the various events you attend as a tech journalist and today we found out about another reason why we’re not seeing USB 3.0 support built into chipsets. From our understanding it has nothing to do with cost or technology problems, as it all comes down to one thing – Intel isn’t ready to move away from the draft USB 3.0 xHCI specification.
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YOU MIGHT HAVE noticed a little USB logo on most, if not all of your USB devices that tells you what kind it is, be it bog standard USB, Hi-Speed or now SuperSpeed USB. During today’s USB-IF developer’s conference we put forward the question to the USB-IF, which is the organization behind these logos that certify that your device is USB compliant, with regards to performance testing and what the requirements are.
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IF THERE’S ONE inherent problem the USB interface suffers from, including the latest 3.0 iteration, it’s the lack of power. At 5V and 500mA or 900mA, you can barely run an external hard drive off a USB port. But from what we were told today, the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF) is looking at changing this in the future and has just started a research group that will look at how to drive more power over the USB interface.
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