News for Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Based on three 3.5" 160GB disks, Samsung has developed its own 500GB HD, as key HD manufacturers did it before. While being not so much publicly known, Samsung HDs are advertised as being quiet HD while operating.
In addition Samsung has also introduced the FlashON, a hybrid HD featuring 2GB of NAND flash memory, allowing faster boot times, faster resume from sleep mode, power saving and reliability; features quite similar to Intel Robson technology.

The website Uneasysilence has decided to look closer to the HD-DVD player sold as an extension option to the Xbox360.
After disassembling it, they have tried to plug it to a Mac.

Quite amazingly, the player is natively recognized by the Mac. It goes even beyond, once a DVD media inserted, DVD player is automatically launched and the movie displayed.
Of course, due to the lack of compatibility, it remains impossible to play BD or HD-DVD contents on a Mac. Come on Apple, it is time to do something about it; we might have to wait till January and the introduction of iTV.

nVidia, getting advantages of its lead, has announced that notebook-dedicated GPU based on its recently released GeForce 8xxx architecture have been manufactured and sent to its main customers for testing. This GPU would be integrated in the future Intel Centrino platform, aka "Santa-Clara", supposed to be introduced mid 2007.
Following the recent acquisition of ATI by AMD, Intel and nVidia have never been working so closely. And we would not be surprise to see the future MacBook Pro revision based on GeForce 8xxx Go, replacing the current ATI Radeon Mobility X1600. Of course, one should also not forget that the main factor for notebook remains the ratio performance/power consumption.