News for Wednesday, 1 October 2008

The SCSI Trade Association which manages the standard SAS (Serial Atached SCSI) used in environments where performance is crucial, announced a new variation of the standard. It pushes the maximum data flow from 3 to 6 Gbits/s, and takes again the lead from the little expensive SATA II.
Even though SAS is not used by the general public, it remains accessible to the owners of the Mac Pro, who can use such disks by installing a RAID card. In addition to higher capacities, SAS has other advantages, like consuming less processor resources and proposing hard disks that are (more expensive) faster and more robust, which is not a bad thing seeing the lifespan of certain SATA disks.

As a proof that Apple hates being publicly criticized, the company quickly reacted to the complain emitted by many iPhone developers and released the following press released::

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

If beta versions of iPhone software remain under NDA, one can consider that Apple decided to move into the right direction for a mutual benefit.

Net Application published the figures for the last month of its "barometer" aiming to define the market share of computer and OS based on the analysis of specifications of computers connected to the web. As identified in previous months, the market share for Mac hardware/OS keeps increasing. It moved from 7.76% in July, to 7.86% in August to reach 8.23% in September. The growth is proportionally higher than the one measured for Vista that only increased by 0.48% with 18.33%.

As we mentioned it yesterday, there is a new announcement in the SSD fields almost every day. Today, SuperTalent unveiled a new series of entry-level SSD, with aggressive prices: 64 GB storage space for 170 USD and 128 GB for 299 USD.
Of course for reaching such a low cost, performance are affected, not the reading speed with 100 MB/s, but writing speed limited to 40 MB/s, a value lower than the one recorded for most high performance 2.5 " HDs (spinning at 5400 or 7200 rpm with 8 to 16 MB of cache).

While several manufacturers have already announced the future release of their BD drive supporting 8x burning speed, Pioneer simply unveiled a prototype able to reach the same performance level, however its availability is not expected before end of 2008.
It is quite amazing to see this company considered as the leader for the first 3 years of the DVD burning history to lose ground so easily on the BD drive market. However, Pioneer announced a prototype of a "slim" BD drive dedicated to notebooks and able to burn BR-R at 4x and BD-RE at 2x. If Pioneer can release early enough it could capture the entire market, as computer manufacturers are desperately waiting for such a drive for being integrated into ever thinner notebooks.

Hereafter is a report from Joël:

Couple of months ago, we talked about the investment made by Garmin to bring its geo-targeting and tracking software suite to the Mac platform, and over months, all applications have been moving forward and released to the public and since first launch in February bug fixes as well as updates have been made available:
- Project: Bobcat (application for planning and defining tracks or journey) is now in release version under the name RoadTrip.
- City Navigator Europe NT 2008 released in March 2008, is now available for Mac, simply plug your GPS and all cards will automatically be updated.
- Other software have also evolved
All Garmin software suite for Mac is available on www.garmin.com/mac and includes:
* RoadTrip 2.0.1
* MapInstall 2.1.0
* MapManager 2.1.0
* POILoader 2.0.1
* WebUpdater 2.0.2
So, Mac users have now the same tools for Garmin GPS as Windows users.

While founders had troubles to move to 45 nm engraving, the race to ever thinner process seems to be much faster and easier now. While Intel already plans to switch to 32 nm engraving next year, TSMC, one of the two on-demand founders announced its ability to offer 28nm process as early as 2010. Chips designer will even have options such as high-k metal gate (HKMG) and silicon oxynitride (SiON) depending on expected performance (low power consumption and/or high-frequency compatibility).
The first clients will most likely be graphic card manufacturers, especially NVidia; ATI being now part of AMD it can have access to internal technology and manufacturing lines.
At the end, the goal is always the same: produce the fastest and the most powerful chips, with eventually low power consumption, but on a smaller die size to reduce manufacturing cost (more chips per wafer).