News for Friday, 8 August 2008

According to Techcrunch, Foxcon, who manufacturers the iPhone for Apple, will have pushed its production to 800,000 units a week. It is very near to maximum capacity. To go any further will require converting other production lines, which is quite complex.
If this speed is maintained, they will surpass 40 million unites per year.
But production could be boosted in another manner, rumour is that Apple will offer an iPhone nano for the end of the year holidays.

Toshiba announced having developed a 32 GB flash memory chip. To arrive at this result, they have stacked 8 "layers" of 4 GB chips interconnected by microscopic wires.
With these components, if only their price is acceptable, Apple could easily offer a 64 GB iPod Touch :)

A new free application, Mathusalem, offers to help you with your backups. Wishing to compliment Time Machine, it offers automatic backups of specific important folders both locally as well as on distant servers (iDisk, WebDAV, AFP, FTP, SFTP, or Amazon S3).
It can be configured via the command line or via a System Preference pane.
To learn more: http://code.google.com/p/mathusalem/

Micron announced a new range of SSD hard drives which obtain the speed of 250 MB/s in reading and writing. In the 2.5" format and destined for enterprise applications, they utilise multiple NAND SLC memory chips in parallel to obtain its speed. Its capacity will be from 16 to 128 GB.
For general consumers, the manufacturer offers disks based on MLC chips which also obtain 250 MB/s in reading, but only 100 MB/s in writing.
They will be offered in 2.5" up to 256 GB and in 1.8" up to 128 GB.

Elpida announced a new 16 GB FB-DIMM stick. The production will start at a as of yet unannounced price, but it will certainly be very high.
With these sticks, one would be able to upgrade an Xserver to 128 GB of RAM versus the 64 currently!

Hitachi annouced that it has succeeded at producing hard disk platers with a density of 610 Gbits per square inch. This is a good omen for the future of hard drives, which will attain a capacity of multiple terabytes, in the face of SSDs which still have a long way to go before catching up.

IEEE has officially approved the Firewire 1600 and 3200 standards which theoretically provide 204 and 408 MB/s respectively. These new standards remain compatible with Firewire 400 and 800, most likely retaining the connector of the later.
The path is now finally open for manufacturers to be able to offer products compatible with these new standards.
The specifications will be officially released in October, thus before USB 3.0 which will not be out until the end of the year.
So the new Firewire will for a short while be the fastest on paper, as USB 3.0 should obtain 4.8 Gbit/s (615 MB/s)