News for Thursday, 26 April 2007

According to Mercury Research, Intel strongly increased its market share during the last quarter, pushing AMD back to its position prior 2006 and the introduction of its popular Opteron. Intel controls more than 80% of the computer CPU market; and this increase was not only seen for desktop CPUs but for all type of CPUs. Intel' share raised up by 8% for desktop CPU segment, about 4% for notebook CPU, and 7% for server CPU.
Performance wise, Intel revamped its entire CPU line last year, bringing the successful Core architecture to the market, and AMD is not expected to be able to bring equivalent CPUs for desktop and notebook markets before 6 months of time. AMD is currently aggressively pricing its CPUs to compensate the lower performance level of its offer; however, Intel high end Core 2 Duo CPUs remain expensive due to the lack of competition for this segment.

Within the last month, there has been a huge interest for flash memory-based storage disk, or SSD. While NAND manufacturers announced the future availability of their models, computer companies start adding such SSD as an option for some of their high-end notebook models. Following Sony, Dell will offer a 32GB 1.8" SSD from Samsung in some of its notebooks. Depending on the models, this option will cost from US$3000 to US$420; or US$549 as a standalone product. For sure the price is higher than a 2.5" HD will the largest storage space and the fastest rotation speed, but SSD are reported more reliable and feature faster access time and data transfer speed.
One will probably have to wait for one or two years to get SSD with a better storage capacity/price ratio.

Samsung unveiled new HD dedicated to mobile devices.
First model is the SpinPoint N2 1.8" HD with storage capacities ranging from 30GB to 120GB and spinning at 3600 or 4200 rpm (2 or 8 MB of cache). With such specifications, the HD will not be restricted to mobile digital music or video players, and one could find it in digital camcorder or in compact video standalone HDD video recorders.
Second announcement deals with a 2.5" HDs dedicated to notebook. One will have the choice between the SpinPoint M5 and its 250GB storage space at 5400 rpm (8MB cache) or the SpinPoint MP100 featuring 200GB space at 7200rpm (8 or 16MB cache).