News for Tuesday, 24 April 2007

During the last IDF, Intel unveiled part of the specification of the Serial ATA III. Data transfer speed will be doubled to reach the theoretical barrier of 600MB/s. it will also expend the recently announced new connector formats aiming to enhance the use of SATA format in storage array or mobile optical swap bay (especially the slimline and micro-SATA connector for 1.8" drives).
SATAIII should allow users to add several SATAIII devices on the same SATA line. This function will be either implemented at the motherboard level, or via port multiplicators expansion cards.
Completion of SATAIII specifications is expected for H2 2007, roughly at the same time than the first SSDs should hit the shelves. If 3.5" HDs will never reach theoretical barriers of SATAII or SATA III, flash memory-based storage units will strongly benefit of SATAIII, especially concerning diversity of connectors.

NAND memory manufacturers have decided to invade the mass storage market currently controlled by HD manufacturers; while mostly concentrating on 1.8" and 2.5" SSD. The company SimpleTech announced its last offer known as Zeus-IOPS and available as 3.5" SSD.
The storage capacity will be either 256 or 512GB, while performance will be outstanding: 200MB/s reading mode and 100MB/s writing mode; without mentioning the access time: less than a millisecond.
Those 3.5" SSD should arrive by the end of the year, and if the price remains unknown it will for sure be very high, targeting this product to a niche of users requiring high reliability and extreme data transfer speed.

Sony announced its wish to strengthen its blue diode production and business to be able to face exploding requests. The goal is to ramp up production from current 1.7 million monthly units to 5 million blue laser diodes (BD playback-only equivalent).
Behind this announcement, one should not forget that there are 2 types of blue laser diode: those for BD playback and those for BD recorder, much more expensive (4-5 folds) and technologically more demanding. The main difference being their power, 20mW for BD player vs. 170mW for current BD recorder; while 240mW units should arrive by the end of the year for powering 6-8x BD-DVD burners.

In a press release, Samsung announced to have developed a new technology named "through silicon via" (TSV) providing an innovative way to stack DRAM chips one over the other. With the TSV, Samsung can double the amount of RAM on a module without increasing the overall package size or the chips transistor density. Samsung claims that such modules can operate faster and use less power.
While it gives the possibility to offer 4GB DDR2 RAM module with the package size of the current 2GB module, it also gives a new way to increase the amount of RAM in devices where available space is the key and critical factor (handheld, etc...). In addition, such technology is cheaper than increasing the density of transistor in RAM chips, as the latter involves reducing the size of circuitry.

Periscope is a new webcam software for Mac, giving you the possibility to control built-in or external iSight, or a supported 3rd-party USB or FireWire camera in Mac OS X 10.4.
In addition to the traditional webcam controller functions, it adds some interesting and useful features such as video monitoring, detecting activity, editing capture, sound recording, etc.
All information can be easily shared or automatically sent via .Mac, Flickr, E-mail, FTP or iPhoto.

This new application cost US$29.95 and a trial version is available.

Following AMD moves to cut prices of its CPU, Intel was quickly following the same strategy and massively reduced the cost of its core 2 Duo CPUs. However, it only concerns desktop Core 2 Duo, a CPU model currently not used by Apple. In addition, Intel announced that it plan to aggressively cut prices on its complete lineup in Q3’2007 for the released of new Core 2 Quad Q6700 and Q6800, the latter running on a 1333MHz FSB vs. 1066MHz today.
Both AMD and Intel are concentrating their strength around desktop CPU, as AMD does not have currently a CPU able to compete with the Core 2 Duo mobile CPU from Intel, aka Merom currently found in MB, MB Pro and iMac.
However, with such price cuts, Apple should maybe consider in the future switching from Intel server CPUs (Xeon) to desktop CPU (Core 2 Duo Quad), or using Core 2 Duo in iMac... but then the iMac could become an extremely powerful unit competing with Mac Pro sales...

As you might know, AMD shaked the semiconductor world couple of months ago by announcing its wish to open its processor platform to third-party hardware developers thanks to a technology entitled Torrenza. Via this direct access to hardware, one will be able to install accelerators designed to speed up some specific tasks/functions/process.
Last week, during the last IDF in Beijing, Intel announced the "Geneseo" project aiming to provide an answer to AMD initiative. While AMD technology will open both Opteron socket and PCI-Express to third-parties, Intel Geneseo will only focused to the PCI-Express, becoming an additional extension of the PCIe bus. Here one can immediately spot the difference performance wise, between an accelerator connected via the Opteron socket, getting access to high-speed system bus, as well as low access time devices and low latency memory bus; and an accelerator plugged to the PCIe bus. Of course, accelerator aiming to take advantage of AMD technology will require a much deeper integration and will of course be more expensive to develop than accelerator installed via the Intel PCIe-only solution.
So in 2009, one will be able to evaluate if the strategy of high-cost/high performance accelerator was more suited than the cheap/universal PCIe way.